World Of Dragon Nest First Impression: It Has Everything You'd Expect From A Mobile MMORPG

The Closed Beta of the upcoming mobile MMORPG World of Dragon Nest just concluded after being open for about a week for players to try out its features. From this, we can have a pretty good idea of what the game has to offer, so let’s have a look:

First of all, the English localization could use some more work. Grammatical errors and illogical sentences are not a rare sight. Translation and localization are no easy tasks, so we can forgive the developer for this. Given more time, the team will probably be able to iron out these issues!

On the other hand, the text does house some hidden gems. For example, if you repeat a quest several times, the related dialogue will change. It’s not much, but we still have to give a nod to the developer for at least putting in the effort.

Ability effects are not too over the top to the point where they completely cover the entire screen or cause lag, even when you chain together several skills at the same time. However, appear quite emotionless in cutscenes. That's not a big deal, though, and it doesn’t affect the gameplay experience too much.

Autoplay is present here, allowing you to have your character automatically travel to a quest site and carry it out. This is either a plus or a minus, depending on your perspective. Some people think this detracts them from actually playing, while others find this feature useful as it lets them grind even when they are busy.

Quests are divided into 3 categories: Story, Daily, and Area. As you can probably tell from their names, story quests follow the main plot, daily quests are those that you can repeat every day, and area quests can be found around the map.

Your primary baseline of progression is a stat called “CP”. It basically reflects how strong you are, and you are recommended to reach a certain level of CP before taking on some challenging content.  You can increase this stat by equipping new items or upgrading existing ones, putting jewels in them, leveling up your mounts, and more.

Lower level dungeons can be cleared without the need for strict party compositions, but we expect this to change later on, where more difficult content becomes available. As mentioned, some levels will have a CP requirement that you must meet before you can access them.  A prime example of this is boss raids, or “Nests”. These are separate dungeons that players enter in parties of four. If you don’t have friends to team up with, you can use the game’s queue system to get matched with others. Nests are your main source of high-level gear.

The PvP area, which allows you to go head to head against another player in a duel, was a bit unstable during the Closed Beta, having noticeable lag spikes.

The game does have premium currencies in the form of diamonds, which can be spent to buy several consumables or to roll for exclusive mounts. Not only do these mounts help you travel the world faster, but they also grant your character some stat bonuses as you level them up. Diamonds can be earned by completing certain missions and reaching certain milestones.

There are also many activities that you can participate in to obtain materials, such as mining, gardening, or fishing. The game features an extensive crafting system, but most of it takes time, which you can reduce by, again, spending diamonds.

So far, World of Dragon Nest looks like it has everything you’d expect from a mobile MMORPG, both the good and the bad. We’ll have to wait until the full release to see how well it handles things, so stay tuned for more update.