Dragon Oath is the English translation of the popular Chinese MMO Tiān Lóng Bā Bù, meaning Demi-Gods and Simi-Devils, which is based off the 1963 novel of the same name. Set in ancient China, Dragon Oath promises a deep gameplay experience full of magic and martial arts. Does Dragon Oath live up to these promises, or is it just blowing smoke?

For such a light weight in system requirements, Dragon Oath offers a lot of eye candy in magic effects and world environment. Spells are accompanied by bight flashes of color, and dazzling effects and the world looks sharp and detailed for the its system demands. After playing it for awhile, I simply forgot what a light game it is system requirement wise. After seeing your first magic effect, you will be in a state of awe every time thereafter.

Sound I am a less pleased with overall. The music does a great job of drawing you in. It makes you feel as if you’re really in ancient China. However, it is on far too short of loop, with each song only a minute or two long and each area only having a single song. While the environmental sound effects are great, they are repeated far too quickly breaking any immersion that they give. Hearing the exact same dog bark every ten seconds while reading a quest, I am convinced is some sort of check to make sure you really are human.

Speaking of which, this is one thing that I found incredibly annoying about the game is that it makes frequent anti-automation checks. For example, randomly it will have a CAPTCHA pop up on screen wanting you to solve it to carry on. While solving it does give you some money, it is still an annoyance when it pop up. Failure to do so could result in you getting knocked off the server at a very inopportune time.

Character creation deserves a special bit of attention. In truth, your character is not fully complete until you have reached level ten, which at that point you finally get to choose your class. While this is an interesting way to take things, up until that point every character will play exactly the same. This can make making a new character rather boring, as you must go through the exact same series of quests each time.

Knowing that the game is still in its pre-beta state I did not expect a lot of the game to be complete. It comes to no surprise to find much of the higher end content still blocked off from testing. Also there are a few places I found some odd English translation, or the game has yet to be translated at all. While this is usually a minor annoyance, the level ten in game message that I received was still in full Chinese leaving me a bit puzzled at what to do next. Luckily I was able to figure it out, but this is something that should have been fixed before inviting players into the game. Knowing that this game is a translation of a Chinese MMO which is based on a novel lead me to expect that there would be a deep storyline from the get go. I was sorely disappointed, there was no hint of a real story at all. Quests are very crude, with little more than a rough description at what to do. Perhaps this will be ironed out later, or that the storyline is exclusively in the higher end areas which are still blocked off.

Gameplay itself is very simple, with auto-pathing to most quest objectives making it a very simple game to play. The auto-pathing does an adequate job of getting from place to place, but sometimes it will hang up on a rock, or ledge. It is times like this that you would love to have access to keyboard movement controls, but the game is completely mouse driven in laying down new routes for the auto-pathing to take. Which at times causes far more trouble than it really should. As I leveled, I found there were times I would hit a drought of quests to complete, leaving me with the choice of killing things to level or go back to complete quests which were far under my level. This may be just a level pacing issue that has yet to be resolved, or more quests are still in the translation phase. If not, then I fear that the game may turn into a bit of a grind fest should you miss too many quests. With the rampant use of auto-pathing for most quests, you could expect that gameplay would offer little challenge. However, there is promise in the deep trade skills system, and relationship systems to offer much more than most MMOs generally give. The one fault in this, is that you cannot take part in these until a much later level. Something that did surprise me is just how many special events can happen in a single day. With bandit attacks, mini games, and pvp battles, to name just a few, there will always be something going on that you can take part in should you find yourself with nothing to do.

The biggest problem I have had with the game is that of network lag, and a overloaded server. Partway through my testing, a wave of pre-beta invites was released which bogged the single server down to a nearly unplayable level, when I was able to connect to it at all. While this is most likely a temporary problem, I do find it frustrating that there current is no news of another server to spread the load on to. Instead, the single server is always in the red, overflowing with players. This shows a lack of planing by the developer, which could simply be an oversight or a sign of how the game will be handled.

The payment system has not yet announced as of this writing, however there are already some indication of what it will be. The main log in page has a link to charge your account. Clicking on the link only leads to the main site. This leads me to believe that there will be an item mall on the web site with the link taking you to it.

For being in the Pre-beta phases the game is remarkably strong. If you have have a love for ancient China you may want to give this game a whirl. The Chinese version of Dragon Oath, Tiān Lóng Bā Bù, currently serves 800,000 players and with the proper polish, I could see the English version doing just as well.

The Good: Fills a niche market very well. Music is very fitting for the environment. Lots of random events to shake up gameplay.

The Bad: Sound repeats far too often. You will quickly get tired of completing anti-cheating tests. Desperately needs another server.