Is Elyon Worth Playing in 2021?

Alright, I know what you guys are thinking. “Elyon is just another cheap, Korean pay to win piece of trash.”
And in all honesty, to some people it very well might be. This is an MMO that targets a very specific demographic of players. The same group that enjoyed games like Black Desert, Bless and even Astellia Online. Which, granted, were all Korean MMOs. So I guess it stands to reason.

Now welcome back to another episode of “Is it worth playing” – where we sift through every MMORPG available right now in an attempt to find the best MMORPG in 2021. Today, we’re taking a look at the newest free to play MMORPG. It’s so new, in fact, that it just launched yesterday.
We spent the 3 days prior participating in the headstart, however, so we got much further through the game than players that opted out of purchasing the game to get in early.

Elyon has quite the troubled history. It originally went under the moniker “Ascent: Infinite Realm” and was developed as an aerial MMO, allowing navigation through the skies with full aerial combat, aerial mounts and exploration taking place between a large number of different archipelagos floating atop the world.
After years in development hell, they rebranded and overhauled their game from a tab-target aerial MMO to a traditional action title set on the ground. This upset some players as it lost its unique aesthetic that drew players to it initially.
Nevertheless, after changing direction, after changing from a free MMO to a premium MMO then back to a free MMO, Elyon finally launched.

First and foremost, Elyon is built using Unreal Engine 3. Not Unreal Engine 4 or 5, but 3. After playing this game for over 40 hours total including the Beta tests, I can say with 100% certainty that maintaining an FPS where the game feels and plays smoothly is nigh-impossible.
Don’t get me wrong – it isn’t unoptimized to a point where you can’t enjoy yourself. Quite the contrary: It’s optimized pretty well. But you can’t go more than a couple minutes without seeing a spike in FPS, which is very noticeable.
Even though Elyon is built using Unreal Engine 3, the game itself is beautiful. Sure, it might lack the graphical fidelity of something like Black Desert, but this look and feels like an updated amalgamation of both TERA and ArcheAge, 2 games that were – in their prime – some of the most fun I, and a lot of other players ever had.
There’s a lot in the way of customization options. You can create some stunning looking characters. The character models look fantastic, the character animations look decent and special abilities all look great.
Sure, zooming in will reveal some horrid looking textures, but that’s the case for a lot of games.

And while the graphics are important to a lot of players, what’s even more important is the gameplay. Yes, if combat is poor, and combat is what you’ll be spending the majority of your time doing, then you won’t have any incentive – any motivation to play.
Thankfully, combat is where Elyon really shines. Elyon utilizes an action combat system. I’ve noticed that on specific melee classes, like the Slayer in specific, the combat felt very slow, very clunky and very unintuitive, but on classes like the Elementalist, which you guys should know I’d choose, I couldn’t be having more fun.
Abilities are large, they’re powerful, they’re impactful. They provide beneficial crowd control effects like slows, stuns and at times entire immobilization. At least as the Frost Elementalist.
I specced into an AoE ice build as I’m lazy, didn’t want to research another build, and ultimately feel like the CC with ice was beneficial to my team in open-world PvP as it provided my team opportunities to efficiently engage enemies and prevent their escape.
There are builds in the game, which allows for deeper customization of your character and class. As noted, I went ice but there are fire builds that have a substantially higher damage output than the build I’m using but this provides players a lot of opportunity to craft their class how they want.
This type of depth is something I feel is missing from a lot of MMOs. Sure, cookie cutter builds will always be the go-to, but it doesn’t have to be the case.

Speaking of PvP, yes there is PvP present within the game. I’ve covered this before, but after having put as much time as I have into the game, I can say with utmost certainty… that PvP can be dumb. Both open-world PvP and instanced.
I was tabbed out of the game while showing people something on stream when someone attacked me out in the open world. Thankfully a friend of ours who was running to meet me there saw me getting attacked and began to attack the assailant.
I tabbed back in to see what was going on, and started attacking them back. They immediately began to run away. Yup. Turned tail and ran away. As soon as they saw this wasn’t a 100% guaranteed win, they ran away like the childish coward they were.
These are the types of players that gank and camp lowbies. An example of the types of players you’ll no doubt encounter. Not all of them, granted, but of all the open-world PvP I participated in, over 70% of the encounters resulted in the enemy running away as soon as they saw they couldn’t win.
Which isn’t an issue – you run if you don’t want to die, that’s understandable. But not if you begin the altercation with the thought that you’ll be able to secure an easy kill. If you start it, don’t wuss out and run away. Finish it. I always did, even if I were 1v3ing.
Now I did encounter some players that stood there and fought, but it was just so uncommon and disappointing to see.
The instanced 3v3 we participated in was equally as bad. We ran several different matches. In one match, we began and instantly the match was over as all 3 players had given up and left.
In another match, 2 of the enemies had given up and left, leaving a single player to engage us 3v1.
And then in another absurd match, we were paired, at level 36, against a level 46 player that 1-shot all 3 of us. This goes to show me there is absolutely no balancing for instanced PvP at present. Any player, of any level, can simply queue for 3v3 and absolutely destroy you and your entire team.
At least from what I’d experienced. Which left a very sour taste in our mouths.

Elyon provides a traditional PvE experience. You have instanced PvE content to run either by yourself or with a group of players.
But there is a lot of grind present within this game. An unnatural amount of grind. Which is why I said if you enjoyed Black Desert, you’d probably enjoy this.
Leveling involves moving from quest NPC to quest NPC, running out to kill a few monsters, then running a few blue daily quests that consist of killing 50, maybe 100 of the same monster to get the required XP to level.
The grind becomes tedious very fast. I don’t mind killing monsters. But I don’t want to have to kill the same group of monsters hundreds of times just so I can continue with the story and level.
I spent enough of my life grinding Eureka in Final Fantasy XIV. If I wanted to relive that, I would’ve just pulled out my relic weapon. That is more than enough PTSD.

Finally, the cash shop.. seemed a little concerning from what I saw. I did a dedicated video on the cash shop though that I urge you to go and check if you’re interested in seeing what it actually has for sale.
But suffice it to say, while there are plenty of great cosmetic items.. the Luminus look alarmingly pay to win.

✔️ Elyon is a beautiful MMORPG with some great looking open-world environments.

✔️ The combat is very fast, very flashy and depending on your class, a lot of fun to play.

✔️ There’s a lot of open-world content to do that promotes playing with other players.

✔️ It’s entirely free to play, which means you lose nothing other than some time by trying it.

❎ Yet as it’s a free title it will likely become pay to win very fast.

❎ The combat, while great for some classes like Elementalist, also feels atrocius for certain others.

❎ The open-world PvP is a massive zerg and gank-fest, with trolls around every corner.

❎ Instanced PvP was overwhelmingly unbalanced.

❎ The narrative was underwhelming and too short.

❎ The game itself is far too grindy, often having players repeatedly farm the same monster hundreds of times.

❎ I hate RNG when upgrading. Especially when it destroys your gear upon failure.

❎ The cash shop, and more specifically the Luminus system is concerning. I covered this in a dedicated video uploaded earlier this week if you’re interested in that.

❎ The game is free to play, which means it lacks the polish of a premium title.

But that was pretty much my experience in Elyon. There’s a narrative, although it’s pretty short.
You level by moving from hub to hub, killing a plethora of different monsters to progress through the game. It’s very grindy, but thankfully – at least depending on the class you choose, the gameplay can be a lot of fun.
You spend a lot of the game looking over your shoulder to see if someone will gank you. Grouping monsters together to cut through as many as you can to get the grind over with as fast as possible.
I haven’t hit endgame, and likely won’t as the leveling gets progressively slower as you continue to obtain higher levels, but honestly? I’ve been having fun.
Sure, this game has its faults. It does. But you know what? It’s free, and there are going to be hundreds of thousands of players playing this in its first month.
Yeah, it might end up pay to win. It might end up absolute garbage. But guess what? It doesn’t cost anything to jump into and play. To enjoy what little the game might offer you while waiting for Endwalker next month. And Lost Ark next year.