my KurtZpel review, as it is in closed beta

[mirta000]

https://youtu.be/LZqQweft1sw

in written form:

Kurtzpel is a small upcomming MMO that I got to closed beta test in and this is my little closed beta overview and review!

So let's start with character creation! One thing that looks a bit wrong to me is that they called the height slider "maturity", meaning technically by height, the smallest height character should be a very young girl, at most 10-11 years old. However if they really meant maturity and not height, it is rather odd that you can put giant hips and breasts on her. Also the jiggle physics! If you have nothing on your chest, it is so advanced that you can jiggle your ribcage making it go in and out of your chest! Outside of that I think that the art style is pleasing on the eye. During closed beta recreating the character was free, but I don't think that it will be like this in the full game. I've lost the story footage, but from what I gathered, there's these special people called kurtzpel, that are being persecuted. The legend says that they overthrow the current rule and unite the world. Kurtzpel seem to be special with their powers, so they are all working together in an organization called "The Chase". You want to climb the ranks of the organization, because it lets you fight bigger and badder bads, until, presumably, you kill the biggest and the baddest. Some of the lines in the story were untranslated and the subtitles were hard to read sometimes due to being coloured while and on white background.

Next up game's PVE. PVE stands for player versus environment, or in other words, all content that is not player versus player. PVE is very bare bones. You select a mission, most story missions seem to have 3 parts to them, where you fight a harder and harder enemy. These missions seem to be tiny isolated mission stories. You just went on a random mission with random people that you should develop friendships with once you go on more missions with them, I think. There's also some single turn missions for 2 players. You can create a party up to 2 players in the hub, or simply queue for them. There is a gear upgrading system and the missions can reward you items, however stats only matter in PVE and Kurtzpel seems to be a primarily PVP game.

One downfall of such a game though seems to be the fact that you still need to do PVE, to rank up, to get more PvP missions, as after you finish a mission, it falls off your mission list. So you're forced to do a mixture and to repeat some PVE missions over and over again, which does get stale fast.

Now to talk about PvP. Due to a very limited skill set - each player can have two classes equipped, each class can have 3 spells, basic, heavy and special attack, you also have a dodge, the game is very easy to play. Unfortunately classes with bigger AoE abilities are almost guaranteed to win now, because when your player gets hit, they get slightly staggered and seem to be unable to dodge. The only type of PvP that's available is 2 versus 2 players, but there's many modes.

Some extra stuff to mention - even with the best hardware, the main hub lags due to the amount of people standing there. I did not notice any social features, as in, I couldn't join or create a guild, there wasn't even a friends list.

I can't even begin to guess how they will monetize the game. I want to think that that will be done through cosmetics, but with certain aspects of the game mentioning the word DLC, I think buying missions that will give you certain abilities or full on classes is a full on possibility, which may skew the balance against free players. But this part of the game remains to be seen.

Overall I think Kurtzpel can be a pretty little niche PvP game. I feel like forcing players to do PVE will do more harm than good though and I have no idea how max rank end game looks, nor how will they monetize it, nor is this really how the finished game will be. There was some charm to what I've seen today though and I think I'll keep my eye on it.

[Cihmkin Pattey]

I'm actually quite shocked that the majority of the community doesn't like the PVE aspect of the game... While I some of the mechanics aren't exactly all that refined, I genuinely liked some of the challenge it brought at the Very Hard/GrandChase difficulty; it really made you think a bit more about your next moves rather than trying to face-tank every attack that is dealt to you and or your ally.

Learning some of the basic button combinations and learning how to appropriately position yourself against certain enemies was also quite enjoyable. In regards to repeating the playing the same missions over and over again, I agree that it can get a bit monotonous at times but I believe that having missions shift in and out of your world map is actually somewhat of a decent idea! It forces you play against mobs that you may not like going up against, but in turn, you'll gain experience for the next time you fight them or bosses with similar pace(s) (though they could tweak the mechanic a bit better, I don't like having missions taken off the map and then time gated if it appears too early).

I agree with your points about the story. It drops us into this world that has potential in becoming something much more but as of late, the dialogue and context of each mini-story is extremely lacking. Hopefully, it's something that will be more fleshed out on launch.

[mirta000]

Originally posted by Handsoap:

I'm actually quite shocked that the majority of the community doesn't like the PVE aspect of the game... While I some of the mechanics aren't exactly all that refined, I genuinely liked some of the challenge it brought at the Very Hard/GrandChase difficulty; it really made you think a bit more about your next moves rather than trying to face-tank every attack that is dealt to you and or your ally.

Learning some of the basic button combinations and learning how to appropriately position yourself against certain enemies was also quite enjoyable. In regards to repeating the playing the same missions over and over again, I agree that it can get a bit monotonous at times but I believe that having missions shift in and out of your world map is actually somewhat of a decent idea! It forces you play against mobs that you may not like going up against, but in turn, you'll gain experience for the next time you fight them or bosses with similar pace(s) (though they could tweak the mechanic a bit better, I don't like having missions taken off the map and then time gated if it appears too early).

I agree with your points about the story. It drops us into this world that has potential in becoming something much more but as of late, the dialogue and context of each mini-story is extremely lacking. Hopefully, it's something that will be more fleshed out on launch.

I feel like at end game with only 2 players there can't be any real complex raids or anything. And without open world and a linear story it feels like the devs wanted for PVE to take a backseat.

And looking at it as a PvP centric game, I think there should be a way to fully rank up and unlock your action sets without touching PvE, as now the game competes with other PvP only games such as MOBAs.

[Cihmkin Pattey]

Yeah, I understand that the Devs intended this game to be more so PVP focused the PVE and it'sa shame that they're gonna focus less on something they started building in the first place. I agree that we should have more than 2 players for end game PVE missions and while the PVE isn't inherently the most complex system out there, It's pretty darn good. My friend and I have been doing all our missions on Very Hard and Grand Chase(since we steam rolled the other difficulties) and though we've beaten them on Very Hard and Grand Chase, there are still times where we get caught and it's not because the game is being unfair, but because we got to greedy or made some other kind of mistake in the process.

It reminds a bit like Dark Souls III not because of the game play systems per se, but more so because it feels like just about every mistake(excluding some issues with the game systems currently) made was our own faults. Bosses may seem pretty easy at first but once we got to the Very hard and Grand Chase, I found it a genuinely enjoyable challenge to try and learn each bosses patterns and learn where I or my friend made a mistake.

Does the game need PVE to unlock action Sets? I've found the heroes time and time again after PVP matches to help me unlock certain moves and abilities. However, I could be wrong.