My initial preview for Chrono Odyssey only gave me four hours with the upcoming action MMORPG. So, over the closed beta period this weekend, I took the time to get properly stuck in. What I uncovered was a messy experience, but one with core gamepla🌊y elements that, with further refinement, could end up being something truly great.

Chrono Odyssey is an upcoming MMORPG from Korean developers Chrono Studio. It’s a high-fantasy 🐻westernized medieval world laced with some Giger elements; corrupted enemies, slime, and mallard ducks,🔥 which you can read all about in my previous preview.

I’ll get some of the simple stuff out of the way first: performance was fine. I ran the beta on my RTX 4090 and only came across a few small issues you’d expect from a trial like this. There was some screen tearing, pop-in, and lag which I associated with servers 🅰rather than hardware. However, other players have reported bad performance even on more powerful 50 series cards, so chances are your mileage♌ will vary depending on the specifics of your setup.

The game is definitely janky though, and it’s not just a performance tღhing. It’s baked right into the engine, movement, lighting, textures, and pretty much everything else. I took my character for a dive over a waterfall to help an NPC find his lost clothes and, for a moment, in the blurry, pixelated mess of water, I thought 🔯I'd been transported into 1996’s Tomb Raider on the PlayStation 1. Some parts of Chrono Odyssey are seriously ugly.

It’s a far cry f꧋rom the snazzy promotional materials we’ve seen over the past several years. The game looks absolutely nothing like its trailers, and while some screenshots have been intentionally disingenuous (lowering the graphics for comparison shots between trailers and game etc.), Chrono Odyssey is still much ug✅lier than Amazon’s New World - a game in the same genre that is now approaching four years old.

Character and NPC movements need serious overhauls. The animations are nowhere near good enough for a game of this scope - it actually rips you out of your immersion when your character starts doing this weird sideways Naruto-run crab-walk type thing. These issues are compounded when you start f𝔍ighting enemies. Facing off against multiple foes at once turns the experience into a total mess. Either their movement is bugging out or your movement is bugging out.

Despite Everything…

This is a huge shame, because combat is otherwise excellent. Even after ten hours, I'm still figuring out new combos with my build - I went Berserker once again because I had so much fun with it last time - and I𝓰 can’t wait to try out the other three classes. If the devs are able to refine character animations before launch, this will be one of the finest combat systems I’ve seen in an 💖MMO.

Beyond combat, I found myself simply wandering through the world and exploring everything it had to offer. There’s a lot to see and do, from gatheꦉring materials, going on bount🌌y hunts, and discovering emergent quests. Chrono Odyssey feels like an old-school MMO in that I wasn’t really rushing, but spent all the time I wanted taking everything in with no microtransactions in sight.

While there’s a lot of dooღm and gloom around Chrono Odyssey right now, I’m cautiously optimistic about its future. If the studio can stay true to its no-pay-to-win mantra, this is likely to be one of the best upcoming MMOs - it’s a rare thing these days to have a game like CO around the corner, so I’m just going to enjoy my anticipation and hype in peace.

I Can’t Shake That New World Feeling

I’ve already discussed how much it’s like New World. In many ways, it might as well be New World. For Chrono Odyssey to be a success, Chrono Studio will need to do significantly more than Amazon Games to keep its game alive. Fr😼equent content updates, a more rewarding endgame experience, and a lot more polish at launch and in the months and years to follow.

The success and eventual failure of Ne🍌w World should 🤪be studied in history books. A brand-new MMO launched with one million concurrent players. Players are desperate for games like it. Something new, something different, something fresh in the MMO space. Chrono Odyssey is well-positioned to have a go at it, but it needs some more time in the oven if it doesn’t want to repeat Amazon’s mistakes.