Since Raven2 launched a few weeks back, I’ve been logging in here and there to play in small sessions when time allows. The animations and graphics are right up my alley, and I was impressed with a lot of the responses I got back from the Doo-Hyun Cho, Netmarble’s head of development for Raven2 in our interview. The game may be very much designed for the Korean market, but I wouldn’t say that means the developers aren’t trying to make the game more suitable for a western playerbase as well. They even built the Gunslinger class for the global launch, which released last week.
Raven2 is available for both PC (in the Epic Games Store as a free title) and mobile, but it seems very evident that it’s really intended to be a mobile game first, though I’m sure it looks a lot better on a my new PC than it does on my phone. And while it has a whole host of features, I can’t imagine actually playing it primarily on PC, which you’ll come to understand shortly. There’s a lot to tap on in the game, but it kind of takes takes the term autobattler a bit too far.
I’ll start with some praise for the game’s setting because really it’s awesome. It’s a brutal and grimdark fantasy world. While players will find a lot of the typical fantasy aesthetics, it also gives me some real gloomy Lovecraftian vibes. I probably only connect them in my mind because I was recently playing Raven2 while watching the anime series Lord of Mysteries, but they were such a nice pairing for one another.
Raven2 is firmly planted in the fantasy genre, though the Gunslinger does move the needle back towards the steampunk occult. The heroes are basically your core fantasy classes; you’re choosing between knights, mages, necros, and the like.
And jiggle physics aside, the character designs and animations look really great too. It’s absolutely over the top with the outfits, and I couldn’t help but bust out laughing with my wife when I showed her the class selection screen. When you’re selecting the big burly knight class, the camera pans around him while he flashes his weapons and does some fun poses. But when selecting one of the female classes… oh boy. Gratuitous is an understatement for how much jiggle and body-panning we get. It’s certainly too much and offensive to basically everyone. I’ll just roll my eyes and laugh about it.
Fortunately, classes are not gender-locked, so you can take your pick of the one you like the most and fully customize it. I chose the Berserker. A big strong armored warrior has my name all over it. I play to my type. In games like this where I’m not sure whether I’ll be sticking around a long time or not, I like to use the randomize character button until something lands. This hilarious red face couldn’t be left behind.
Monetization is likely the name of the game here. There’s all sorts of boons and cosmetics to buy and unlock. The game has simply too many menus for me to even attempt to explain them all in a column like this. There’s XP boosts, lockboxes, the works. It also looked like some of the cosmetics will provide stat boosts too, so I wouldn’t count out some pay-to-win options here.
The story seems to be that the players are part of a group of people that fight off demonic forces that are burninating the countryside. The tutorial is pretty thematic as a town is under siege by a horde of zombies with a battle ultimately culminating in the church against a real nasty baddie. You’ll see some really well-done cutscenes of cultists summoning hellspawn and other thematic videos to try to build up the game world. Yet after stripping away all the pretty animations and graphics, Raven2 turns out to be three kids in a trenchcoat – basically all show but no substance.
Quests are the absolute most basic fair of MMO questing charcuterie. Just think of the most bland types of quests you can, and then you’ll likely be describing the quests here. If you were to poll gamers who don’t care for MMOs to explain why they don’t like MMOs, you’d end up with Raven2’s quests. Simply put, you talk to the NPC, get a few lore or story bits, kill ten rats, then turn it in at the same or another NPC. Rinse and repeat. It’s real dull.
Of course, after you’ve moved through these quests, you’ll end up with a boss fight or something similar. It doesn’t take much to kill the first handful of bosses, either. You’ll just stand there and autoattack until it’s dead, then watch some more story cutscenes and proceed.
Now, during the tutorial, I thought the combat felt a bit stiff. You move between monsters fine, but it feels as if your character is really rooted to the ground when locked onto a target. It may somehow be related to the mobile version of the game – I don’t know – but I doubt it. And I’ll tell you why: The autobattle mode is the game. Raven2 takes autobattle to a whole new level. Something I didn’t ever think was really possible for an MMO.
It truly blew my mind that the game could really be played like this. After I earned my first activated skill and equipped it, I realized that it can also be put into an autoattack mode. And Raven2 has a lot of really detailed options for setting up the autoattack. You can have the character trigger it as soon as it comes off cooldown, or you can tell it to wait a certain period of time before it is activated again. You also have the option of letting skills be auto-activated or not while explicitly in PvP. So there’s a lot of fine tuning that you can do to build up your autoattacks.
But where Raven2 really jumped the shark for me was the pathing and auto-questing. You can just tap on the quest in your quest log that hovers on the right side of the screen and let the character autorun to the next NPC or location, whatever is next, and then it’ll even proceed to initiate the NPC and continue to the quest location and kill the ten rats!
I was able to tap to start the quest, while having my skills all setup for autobattling, and simply watch as my character ran to the NPC, chatted them up, moved through and killed all the targets for the quest, and then went back to turn in the quest. It was wild! The only time I had to interact with the game was to collect the rewards – and for all I know maybe I didn’t even need to do that! There’s probably a setting buried in there that would take care of it for me. At least, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were!
I tried to put myself in the mindframe of the gamer that Raven2 is made for because they do exists! They have to! But they aren’t me, and I think it’s because while Raven2 is certainly an MMO, it’s not a traditional western themepark or sandbox MMO. It’s made to be mobile. It’s made to be something where I can set up my character and initiate some quests while I’m out traveling and then let the game move me along. Then I can check on my progress, collect some loot, see what I’ve earned to gain strength, and proceed along.
I might be deadly allergic to the constant need to tap a new window open, tap on the claim all button, over and over and over again, but there are gamers who like it. Raven2 began to remind me of when I played the Age of Empires mobile game. The games themselves are basically just a thin veneer over the constant gratification of tapping open some new rewards. I’m a zero inbox type of person. I want no notifications sitting unread. And these games just barrage me with a constant stream of new notifications.
I do want to note that the option to enable the autobattler is just that: an option. I could’ve turned all those settings off and played it more traditionally. But it was kind of cool enabling all of them and setting the phone down next to me while I watched TV, then during the breaks collecting my loot and seeing how much I’ve unlocked.
So I don’t want to say that Raven2 is a bad MMO, but I don’t think it’s really a good MMO either. It’s just something else. And I think if you went into it with the right expectations, you might just enjoy what it’s offering you.
