CABAL Online: A Post Look

Hey everyone,

Got some time between classes, so here we go.

As always, incase you havent noticed a pattern, I try to start every review with some info on the game for thos who arent yet aware. CABAL Online (English site) can be located at www.cabalonline.com, and has just recently debuted in North America. It is already released in Europe and has been in Korea for quite some time.

The basic premise is your standard MMO, with a gaining levels, and "owning" up PVP being your goals. Unlike many common MMO's however, Cabal has a max level of 300+ (may be 400 now), and thus it takes a LONG time to beat the games PvE content (Player vs Environment).

An immediate plus you'll notice is the questing system, uncommon in many Korean games, Cabal offers quests at every level, and if you arent super lucky and speed through them(IE, find the super rare you need in the first kill), they generally fill up your entire level. These quests are a little deeper than standard MMOs though, because they follow a VERY WELL planned storyline, give the obvious gold and exp, but also give honor. Honor is gained from quests and killing people in the "war" server(open PVP, with no names on players), and honor is lost when crafting something difficult and failing, or killing random people in a non-war server.

The main focus on the quests of course is to progress through the story and get honor, as you can only start crafting at honor level 1 (about level 50 after doing the quests). The crafting system is quite nice, as EVERY weapon/equipment that drops (there is no shortage of these), can be turned back into the material used to create new weapons. Each of these crafting techniques have multiple levels of excellence, and give multiple bonuses. Such as creating a new helm that gives +3 exp per hit, or 1% life steal, and so on. So I'd have to give it an A+ in crafting, as its truly an addicting and rewarding part of the game.

Not only does every player craft, but there is also NPC alchemists, which add "force cores" to items with slots in them. These force cores give some random effects (some not so random also), and can greatly increase the use of a weapon/armor. Another exciting aspect of the game.

However, its time to get down to the not-so-nice aspects. First and foremost, the game has adjustable stat points(something VERY important to me in an MMO), so as to differentiate your character from the others. Yet, in what seems to be a contradiction, the game also has required stat points to "advance" a rank. (Every 10 ranks for the first 50 levels give you a special bonus, I'll talk about those later) These required stat points are so strict, that essentially everyone of the same class type has the same stats, making the stat point feature quite useless IMO. I did notice that it started to ease up a little at lvl 50+, (50 was the max level of the beta I participated in), but the first 50 levels easily ruined it for me.

A unique feature of this game is the fighting styles. Every class type has hte ability to combo (you recieve it at level 11), and provided you have enough skills, you can combo forever, unless all of your skills are currently delayed. The useful part about combos is that when using skills in combo mode, they have no after cast delay, and thus you can kill things very quickly. Each time you combo, its uses some of your combo points, and thus if you reach 0, you must gain more back. This can be done by hitting enemies normally or with skills. I mentioned before about every 10 levels granting you a new ability, well everytime you fill up your combo bar (up to 5 full bars at one time), you can activate these abilities, and they turn you into a killing machine. The archer for example gets to wield 2 guns and shoot 2 targets at once (quite neat). These modes keep the grinding fnu as you can always switch into "aura" mode and deal out some quick damage when in need.

This is an excellent feature for PvE, and one would consider it brilliant strategy for PVP. But..then comes the potting(using healing items). Not only do healing items heal instantly, they heal for a retarded amount of HP, and thus in PVP, as long as both parties are potting, the battle could go on for hours...until someone runs out of pots. Its not strictly pot's fault, the level of defence towards attacks is quite severe. Critical Hitting a monster may have done around 800 damage for my force archer, but deals a measly 76 on a human in PVP. And with pots healing for 400+ you hardly have to mash them to stay alive. So I'd giving CABAL's PVP rating a 2/10, as its absolutley pointless.

Last but not least comes skill points. These are attained ONLY through using the skills, which take MP, and they can be gained from hitting anything. One of my biggest complaints was the skill training, which is basically jamming your skill key in the keyboard down and hitting a training dummy all night(training dummies take 1 damage and days to kill). Thus when you wake up in the morning you have lots of new skill points to use. And there is no level requirement for using these skills. So you could have a level 30 character with "Grand Master" skills, something I assume was reserved for at least level 100+. To make matters worse, even WITH these grand master skills you still cant kill anyone in PVP.

Overall I'd give CABAL a rating of 5/10, from the brilliant PvE and new combat techniques, paired with a wonderful crafting system. It suffers dramatically from forced stat points, horrid PVP, and skill point abuse.

Rating:
5/10

Advice:
AVOID