Revelation Online in 2019: Is it Worth Your Time?

Man it’s been a while since I last dove into Revelation Online. Like, 2 years? 2 and a half years? And.. not much has changed, unfortunately.
MrsStix and I were feeling a little.. nostalgic, see, Revelation was an MMO we both played shortly before getting together. It was an MMO we never got to experience with one another.
Yet we both had fond memories of a beautiful world filled with things to do and places to explore.
With this in mind, we decided it was a great opportunity to download the game and try it out together – see how it plays in 2019, going into 2020.

These are my thoughts and impressions on the way to.. level 40? level 41?

There are 7 classes in total: Occultist, Spirit Shaper, Vanguard, Assassin, Blademaster, Gunslinger, and Swordmage.
I wanted to go Swordmage because they not only look like a badass class to play, but also because I’m a fan of mage classes, so naturally. That’s it.

I ended up begrudgingly opting for Vanguard because I wanted to tank dungeons for the wife and I. I felt like, since she went Occultist, having 2 mages would make for impossible dungeons.
I remember back when Revelation launched I was thoroughly impressed by the character creation.
While I still am – and don’t get me wrong, the character creator is very good, providing a lot of customization over my character, it isn’t nearly to the same degree as I once was.
I just felt that overall, I didn’t have the control over my body or face that I wanted. But nevertheless, I made a pretty damn good looking dude if I do say so myself. Looks just like me.

Then came the tutorial zone.. and the realization that the combat wasn’t action, but instead, a strange hybrid of action and tab-target.
I’d honestly forgotten that was a thing. It’s been so long since I even touched Revelation that I’d completely omitted that from memory.
And man the whole “talk to people using F and then finish the conversation you’re having with space-bar” was real grating.

The tutorial zone was the same as always: Some kid tries to kill you, some pervy kid is into some shapeshifting chick, we all sit around a campfire singing kumbaya.. you know.
Then the island we’re on is attacked, and.. the end. We saved everyone, and depart for a grand adventure.

It was at this point that I began to pay less attention to the story. Mainly because it was gated, along with progression advancement itself, behind level requirements.
I cannot stress how strongly I dislike content being level-gated.
By the time we had hit level 20, we’d finished both the orange and yellow quests, meaning all we could do to level further, was to do dailies that required a party of at least 3 people, or dungeons, which.. yeah.
We tried dungeons just the two of us and we got our asses handed to us on a platter. And the platter looked like it hadn’t been washed in.. a very long time.
Which may or may not be a jab at the population issues the game has currently.
I’m not really fond of dailies, not since Mists of Pandaria in World of Warcraft ruined them for me, but putting a group-size requirement on dailies that are all but a necessity to advance is.. well, it makes it difficult.

But, we continued on – even in the face of adversity. Finally, we found a group running dailies that would help us get past level 25 and at last be capable of progressing.
This group took us to the Seeking Spirits daily – which, even after finishing it I’m still not sure exactly what happened.
We had a permanent auto-follow on the group leader whenever we weren’t engaged in combat and I couldn’t figure out how to disable that, so I just went on my phone and watched Youtube videos whenever I wasn’t in combat.

By the time MrsStix and I had finished all of the available dailies with the help of the aforementioned group, we were level 36. That was a significant boost considering we were level 22? 23? when we started.
We’d figured that we would have plenty to do now since surely the story wouldn’t catch up to us that quickly.. right? Hahaha.. ahh, if only that were true. You’re gated behind being level 40 to continue, so.. yeah.

After a long while we managed to hit level 40 and continue with the story some more, but at level 41 we decided it was time to call it a day.
We hadn’t seen anyone around while leveling, we hadn’t seen anyone around while questing. There was the occasional message in the chat window by someone talking in world chat but otherwise, the chat was silent.
We tried doing dungeons but the two of us together couldn’t tackle the difficulty we wanted, and there was nobody ever available to party and run them with.
We had hit a level capable of doing PvP, but couldn’t find anyone queueing for PvP. There were even mentions in world chat asking for people to queue for PvP so they’d have someone to actually fight.
That right there is a bad sign of a dead game.

Revelation Online is a damn good looking game. The environments are absolutely stunning – I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone that says Revelation actually looks ugly.
The combat was highly disappointing for me, having only a couple actual skills by level 40. The mostly tab-target combat with the illusion of action-themes really confused me, and left me wanting more out of it.
But overall it wasn’t terrible. I’ve experienced much worse.
Level-gating content is a very poor design choice. I know it’s technically done in WoW, Final Fantasy XIV and other large games, but normally if you do the main story and do the odd dungeon here or there you’re typically ahead.
That may or may not be the case here. When the game was packed with players, it may have been much easier to level as you’d have groups forming for content regularly.
However with the current state of the playerbase – which is very likely only a handful of people playing, the new player experience is one of the worst I’ve seen.
Blade & Soul and TERA both have easy progression. And while I believe there should be a challenge involved in progressing through the game, I would take easy over impossible any day.

The game is set in a giant open world.
When opening the map and seeing that there are literally no boundaries stopping you from going anywhere or doing anything, you can’t help but be taken over by a sense of adventure and exploration.
Yet the game-world itself is empty and void of personality. The environments are absolutely stunning, yet there’s nothing to do in them.
Yes, you can pick up the odd sidequest here or there but for the most part.. you can either auto-path directly to your quest objective, or.. fly manually, typically in a straight, linear fashion to your quest objective.
Either way, the game does not in any form promote exploration.
Once I’d obtained my wings I thought to myself “Sweet, now I can just fly out and.. Iunno. Just do whatever I want.” When in reality, what I was left with was.. a linear progression system.

Revelation Online could have been an amazing game. Could have being the keyword here.
Instead, what we got was an auto-pathing MMO-simulator. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not hating on the game, there are parts of this game that are truly outstanding, but the majority of it is very underwhelming.
If someone were to ask me if I could recommend Revelation in 2019 I’d have to say no. The playerbase is all but gone, the combat, the performance issues, the level-gating and lack of content.. are all still very present.
The developers and publishers both continue to every so often release new content but they seem to lack the knowledge on how to fix the fundamental issues that prevent the game from actually being a good MMORPG.
So while I did enjoy playing through this with my wife initially, as we continued our journey it became a convoluted mess of “wait so what are we doing now?” and “okay, let’s just wait and see if anyone wants to group up.”

So is Revelation Online worth playing in 2019?
I don’t believe it is. I’m sorry for those of you that play the game, but getting to endgame is one of the biggest chores I’ve ever seen and I’ve hit endgame in quite a few MMOs over my life of playing in the genre.
If you want to try the game out for yourself though, you’re more than welcome to take a look and see if your opinions mirror my own.
While I would love to continue further into the game so I could see what endgame is like, I don’t think I have the patience to wait for the almost non-existant groups to form for all of the content gated behind level requirements.