Shadow Arena - Closed Beta preview of the Pearl Abyss title

From the hands of Pearl Abyss, authors of the very successful MMORPG Black Desert, a new creation is in the pipeline. Let's talk about Shadow Sand, a title ready to be released in the generic 2020, which managed to take many features from the previous work of the software house to reinvent it. The MMORPG mechanics are in fact dragged into a very large map, with many players and with the possibility of winning only if you reach the first place; in short, the basic regulation of the Battle Royale genre, but capable of breaking out of the classic schemes that we have found in shooters.

We've already talked about the exotic gameplay of this dangerous and unexpected arena in our very first Shadow Arena preview, but we've been given the chance to get our hands on the title again in the last few days. Considering perhaps i technical problems and the doubts that arose in the players who tried the game at the start, Pearl Abyss has in fact decided to propose a new Closed Beta, however, providing the community with many more codes to access. In this month, will the software house be able to solve all the problems that afflict the battle royale and to file its most angular parts? Let's find out in the next lines!

Back in the Shadow Arena

With more splendor and style than ever, the innovative MMORPG battle royale formula has managed to show itself again, offering its exotic gameplay, which takes a lot from the most dynamic hack and slash, amalgamating it perfectly with statistics and classes. Communication with the players is still extremely immature, since several games are again needed to understand the first details, and in-game explanations are almost absent. Let no one stop to think about some details though! Because the enemies could be a few meters away hidden between one monster and another.

The Shadow Arena system is innovative and functional, albeit unclear for the first few hours of play

It is the latter that allow you to level up with a compulsive - and rapid - grinding, which opens the dances of each game to the actual, and then leaves more space to the events that populate the map and to the fight with the other players (again extremely difficult to master due to the various possibilities offered). In this area some improvements managed to get noticed, given that small contents have been added and enriched a formula that, given the need for grinding, would soon become monotonous if not supported at best.

We can reconfirm that the idea is successful and undoubtedly innovative, but explanations for the player - which go beyond the commands shown in the lobby - are somehow necessary. To overcome the problem, the team has added some additional matchmaking queues, such as the unranked and simple training fields, which are useful for gaining greater mastery of your character that you use. However, the real doubt that left us perplexed in the first phase concerns the technical side of Shadow Arena.

A few more revisions

Technically Shadow Arena has been properly improved, although some technical problems are still evident

The impact with the arena has been decidedly more controversial here, as many users have encountered problems to enter due to the game client, which is mandatory despite being based on the Steam platform. The progress of the previous Beta has all been thwarted, given that probably the software house wants to maintain a more neutral climate during the release, with a further reset practically confirmed by the aforementioned detail. On the technical side, given the wavering of the frames previously found, we can say we are quite satisfied. Shadow Arena has managed to juggle excellently both on high-performance hardware and on computers just below the minimum requirements proposed, guaranteeing with some particular attention an experience more than usable at 30 frames per second. However, the graphics sector remained extremely satisfying to the eye, as well as inspired and extremely similar to what is proposed in Black Desert.

The lack of clarity of the gameplay is undoubtedly also linked to the system of commands proposed by deafult, which for the majority of users could prove to be an even bigger defect. In a standard mouse and keyboard mapping that is not very “European”, the movement keys are placed on the classic wasd, but alas, with the skills placed exactly around the movement keys. This implies that to use a skill one must necessarily "abandon" one of the keys we use to move, which is definitely not recommended in an action, which should be much more dynamic. This problem could easily be remedied for more experienced players with the controller support. This is still absent, and where luckily you can connect the pad, there is no sensible mapping (in the sense that the skills are not present on any key) and it is not even possible to remap the keys.

The bugs, on their side, have been reduced to the bone: we can confirm that, in the several hours spent inside the battle royale, we have not witnessed any of these. There remains the small desire ofaddition of the Spanish language, absent from the list of those available, even if it is quite likely that it will not be integrated even once the release is finalized.

Now we just have to wait for the official release to test Shadow Arena and its mechanics on a decidedly more open field, and to obtain more precise data on the balancing management of upgrades outside matches. Appointment in the review then, we hope that the software house will soon provide us with clearer data on the still too generic launch window.