This open beta still feels too early in its development | Beta Review - Sword of Mystic Shu
33660001
✨Overview
Sword of Mystic Shu is an upcoming MMORPG game developed by Chengdu Yimoxuan-Zhonglou Studio. The game aims to provide an original and immersive experience for fans of Xianxia, a genre deeply rooted in ancient Chinese culture and mythology. The Open Beta Test (OBT) started last January 31, 2024, offering players an opportunity to explore what the game has to offer, at least in early access form.
⭐️Score: 4/10
📖Story and Premise
The narrative of Sword of Mystic Shu centers around an ordinary mortal's journey to become an immortal hero. Players will level and gear themselves up, progressing through the nine provinces, engaging in battles against demons, and ultimately ascending to the top of the nine heavens. The story starts off a little timid, involving basic interactions with a bunch of NPCs and featuring dialogue that isn’t particularly compelling. Honestly, the narrative isn’t very interesting as of this beta test. I do hope this gets more fleshed out upon release.
🎨Visuals and Art
Developed on Unreal Engine 5, Sword of Mystic Shu features highly detailed character models and textures, creating a visually stunning world — that is if your device can handle it, or if you are playing on PC. The art style integrates ancient Chinese cultural elements, as expected with a Xianxia-type of game.
Sword of Mystic Shu also features modern technologies such as HDR support and Lumen lighting from UE5. I tested the game’s open beta on Android, but judging from the screenshots showing keyboard controls and PC-like high quality visuals, there may be a PC version coming as well. The game is available on both Chinese and English localization, although the option to switch from the default Chinese to English is further in the game, after you’ve created your character.
🎮Gameplay
Sword of Mystic Shu features a typical third-person MMORPG gameplay style, which promises to immerse players in a vast and dynamic open world. Engage in exploration, quests, and various activities as your character journeys through ancient Chinese landscapes.
The gameplay in Sword of Mystic Shu centers around an expansive open-world design. As of this open beta, players have the freedom to explore the map without fog of war or fast travel restrictions, though certain activities are still restricted based on character levels. The game offers a variety of activities, including monster hunting, quests, boss fights, and material gathering, and a lot of systems for progression such as finding powerful talismans, skill tree systems, and character stat attributes.
🚶Characters
The game starts off by allowing you to create your character (up to three), with plenty of customization options ranging from the face, hair, eye features, to gender. From here you could already see that the graphics are of AAA quality, at least in terms of character details. There are numerous "Origin" choices available to add flavor to the character, such as Birthday, Constellation, choice of Flowers, and more. Although I don’t know the extent of how these choices will affect the actual character.
🌍New player experience; Quests, Tutorials, etc
Upon entering the vast open world, players are presented with a variety of basic quests that aims to familiarize players with the game's mechanics. However, there are still a lot of things that weren't covered in the tutorial — in which it was actually fine, if only the gameplay was compelling enough for players to learn on their own.
Most quests are relatively uninteresting, primarily involving back and forth “Talking” with NPCs, talking about generally non-sense and trivial in-lore things. Further on, the main quest introduces a powerful boss to defeat. Unfortunately, the game fails to provide further guidance on mechanics, leaving players to figure out how to defeat this formidable endgame-like opponent by themselves.
⚔️Combat
The overall gameplay experience is marred by clunkiness across various aspects, especially the combat. Combat feels stiff, animations and movement are awkward, and navigating menus is cumbersome. Despite visually appealing effects and skills, the combat lacks inspiration and it fails to translate into a satisfying visceral experience. The combat lacks mobility and most attacks and abilities are done in a stationary position. Mobs lack aggressiveness and just blindlingly walk around like a robot until attacked.
There is also an awkward transition between combat and non-combat that requires a loading screen, only to load you at the exact same spot, but with enemies. When the combat encounter is complete, you are then immediately and unceremoniously greeted with a “leave mission area” button as soon as the last enemy hits zero HP, and the fact that you don’t even see the last enemy dying it breaks the experience.
📊Technical Performance
Using a midrange phone that was once flagship-level two years ago (Snapdragon 888), the game's performance is sluggish even at the lowest settings and with a low render resolution set. Massive lagging, frequent model and texture pop-ups, and elements not loading properly leading to invisible stairs, walls, and floors are all too common. The game is still clearly in the early stages of development and will definitely require significant improvements before it even becomes playable, and even more to become enjoyable.
💵Monetization
The game seems to be adopting a free-to-play MMO approach with microtransactions, although billing is currently disabled in this open beta test. Will this game become a massive pay-to-win endeavor? We're not entirely sure, but I do hope it is free-to-play friendly.
⚖️Conclusion
Sword of Mystic Shu's overall gameplay, from interactions with NPCs to combat mechanics, appears to be in dire need of refinement. Even for seasoned beta testers used to testing the buggy and unfinished states of early access titles, this particular version of Sword of Mystic Shu may still feel remarkably early in its development. If you're seeking to play rather than explicitly test software, I would not recommend this open beta just yet to fully enjoy or even just explore what the game has to offer.
Mentioned games
