Netease, China’s 2nd largest online gaming company has revealed its latest title, translated as Martial Soul Online, which looks like one of Blizzard’s upcoming game. Martial Soul Online is said to be in development for the past 3 years though, so perhaps there is some coincidence in terms of game design…
Martial Soul Online features 6 different clans, but so far only 2 has been revealed: Butterfly Valley and Mystic Ice. Players from Butterfly Valley will be the main healing and supporting class of the game, with summoning spells as well.
Followers of Mystic Ice are basically assassins imbued with powers of the ice, killing targets silently and quickly. As you can see below, there are 4 clans yet to be released.
For character skills, each character will come with its own set of clan skills of course, but there will be a 2nd set called “Martial Skills”. There is not much info on this yet, but the developer promised that players within the same clan will have many different skill builds.
There is also an apparent stance system in the works, with players able to choose between 6 stances (defensive, berserk, strength, recover etc) during battles to suit their needs and counter opponents.
As a 2.5D online title, Martial Soul Online has the advantage of creating powerful and colorful special effects for all character skills without needing a powerful system to run the game.
What’s more, there is actual dodging, rolling, blocking and other physical effects. With a system called the “Physical Simulation”, different effects like knockbacks will trigger different physical reactions.
There are also over 30 different graphical effects which can trigger on targets after casting dealing fatal spells, including freeze (players can smash the frozen target into bits), burn, poison (turns in bones) with more effects being developed.
Various structures in the environments are highly destructible as well (walls, crates, pillars etc), giving players more options of killing mobs.
Martial Soul Online also boasts over 300 different weapon designs, 400 different skill effects and also a mounted combat system. For PvP modes, there will be a unique 24 vs 24 vs 24 arena (3 groups), 40 man chaos PK arena and various other modes with lesser players.
Instanced dungeons are of course in the game, with several casual mini-games including Tower Defense, Labyrinth Race and more to allow players to gain EXP in a lighter way.
