Kabod Online – Let me save you some time
Update: Kabod Online is no longer, well… online. I’m sure it had its fans, but I stand by my statements that it was mediocre on its best days.
I play a pretty good amount of free to play MMORPGs and I have a pretty good idea of what I like and what I think works. Kabod Online has got to be one of the most hilariously bad examples of the genre I have ever come across. Perhaps hilarious isn’t the right word. Disturbing may be closer to accurate. Kabod manages to hit the very lowest point of gaming and then gets out a shovel to see how much farther down it can go. I do not, in any way, suggest that you spend time on this game. I have done enough of that for you. Even the game’s designers know that it’s not fun and have made appropriate arrangements. Have an uncomfortable laugh at my experience and consider the matter good and done.
Okay, so what is it?
Kabod Online is a F2P MMORPG that comes to us from Korea and is apparently meant to be an “adult” MMO. The game was in beta in 2010 and has had plenty of time to find its footing among gamers tired of the mainstream MMORPG scene. However, its antiquated graphics, bad localization, terrible quest stories, and lamentable gameplay have left it festering in the darkest corners of the net where only those seeking out F2P games that they’ve never heard of are likely to find it. The game is so bad that you’re not actually expected to really spend time playing it while you play it, but I’ll get to more on that later. The music (which I muted after a few sessions) sounds like something out of an old SNES fantasy game. It lacks aspects that might be considered fundamental to modern MMORPGs like an auction house or even the ability to change key bindings. It does, however, excel in the field of hiding armor. Unlike SWTOR, which charges for the privilege of hiding helmet graphics, Kabod Online lets you hide all of your armor if you wish to feel that scuzzy. The most redeeming quality of Kabod is that it managed to consistently surprise me with the depths of its awfulness.
Can it really be as bad as all that?
If only they had access to a word processor.
Let’s just put the main selling factor of the game out here right now. The game is designed to showcase virtual T&A as much as possible. All female characters have outrageous breasts that are barely covered and enjoy wearing as little clothing as possible. You had better like the look of the armor since you’ll spend the first 20 levels in palette swapped versions of the same design. Skimpy armor wasn’t nearly enough though. Like any good (read bad) anime girls, your characters fall prey to the game’s armor damage system. After losing about 10% of the durability in your body slot armor, it will start to show wear in the form of a few missing chunks. By the time it’s reduced to 70%, your armor is completely shredded. Level 20 and higher armor on female characters will completely bare their chests at this point. Don’t worry though, enemies also suffer from armor damage and you’ll have plenty of large-breasted NPC creatures to beat up. For a quick example of just how low the game gets, when you kill a sayakah (think succubus complete with whip), not only do you leave them completely topless on the ground, there’s a good chance that you’ll loot their underwear. Great, now my bag is full of panties from dead succubi. Good thing the merchants pay top coin for used demon panties.
Now that the gratuitous sexual material that makes the game “adult” is out of the way, we can look at the quest system. Let me say that I get that this is a Korean made game and that they may not have had the budget for proper localization. That’s fine, but for the love of all that is holy, can someone please explain why the scroll that makes me run faster is a scroll of scud? Yes, of course the word fits, but that has to be the worst of all possible choices to tell a player that they’ll move along swiftly. Beyond that, I really can’t understand why they don’t have text-wrapping technology. Quest text goes to the end of the box and then starts on the next line and it doesn’t give a crap if it’s in the middle of a word or not. The quests are an eye-bleeding atrocity that needs to be there to help levels move along. Except that after about level 14, quests will not be enough to push you to the next level. So then what?
Schrodinger’s gameplay
You won’t know if your character is alive or dead until you tab back in.
That’s where the mind-numbing bulk of this game comes in – grinding to your next level in order to get more quests. If you haven’t quit to go play something else by this point in the game, you can just go play another game while this one plays with itself. You see what I did there? Kabod actually has built-in botting by way of the auto hunt system. Monsters randomly drop hunting stones that, when used, each provides 10 minutes of auto hunting where your character will automatically target, fight, loot, then repeat. The game is so unreasonably boring that they don’t even expect you to play it while you’re playing it. In fact, if you’re having trouble reading the bloody color-coded map to figure out where you need to go for a quest, you can always click on go to quest. You will automatically walk to the thing you need to fight. You can then auto hunt while you go get a sandwich. When you’re done with the quest, simply use an auto return scroll and make your way back to the reward point. Health and mana potions can be set to be consumed if your health and mana drop below a particular threshold. You barely need to do anything.
Consider yourself warned
Sure, you can argue that this is a fantasy game and people are using it to escape from their normal lives, but I am appalled that people would fantasize about this. At this point, I’m just going to skip over the gambling system which is basically a weird enchant mechanism through which you can easily have your gear destroyed. PVP? Didn’t even touch it. Characters have a whole 5 abilities to choose from by end game. I’m likewise not getting into the pet system which involves finding female humanoid characters and beating them into submission to “tame” them. After that, you dress them in a school girl outfit and can command them to make out with you. Seriously, just stay as far from this game as you can. I have written this entire article while my character has been auto hunting. If you waste your time on this poor excuse for a game, don’t blame me, you have been warned.
Actually I disagree. The game is not bad at all. Delivers what it promises, nothing more, nothing less. Not anything exquisite but decent enough. And for us, not native english speakers, the translation is ok. Most importantly the requirements are pretty low so, all of us with relatively old PCs and not super graphic cards we can really enjoy. The Pet systems is nice, mobs are sexy and the whole system as I said: decent enough. So if you dont want to take 20GB from your HD space, not to overburden your poor computer and just enjoy some good time in a sexy but yet interesting environment, just try it…
The game is pretty much all but dead at this point anyways. Seriously, there hasn’t been any new content added since July of LAST YEAR! It’s fun & all, and doesn’t give you the annoying “quests within quests” crap that are a staple of MMORPGs like W.O.W. & Lord of the Rings Online, but without new content for that long? Yea I’m pretty sure players will log in 1 day & find a notification of the game calling it quits.
Worst p2w system ever!!!! Don t try this * ( to all xp gamers ) … without $ u ll grind ur poor as* for months , can t sell droped items in game , -5% xp lose bcs of bugs , 90′ graphics , no players ( max 30-40 at best ) , * groups/guilds of p2w players with cash shop items , many leechers-low players after xp and items and so on . FK * game!!!!!@@@@
i have play this months ago and everything it was ok but from now i was download the game again,and everything get worse all my caracters can,t kill any monsters,why?
Played a few years ago as a tank.. got to around lvl 45ish so the grind was pretty good for me.. i liked this game so much because it was international and everyone around the world played on one server, which to me is alot better than playing on a server for a specific country, ping was very low and the gameplay was very easy and straightforward.. players were always compensated for unscheduled maintenence and other things such as weekly clan wars and PVP events getting cancelled.. the rewards were GREAT and much taken advantage of
some of the advantages i found were:
– you were allowed to legally bot in the game using hunting stones you find from monsters, they were also bought and sold by players until they made it a cash shop item making the game mostly pay 2 win
– weekly maintenence always gave a really nice compensation to every account in the game, this was highly taken advantage of
– the dungeons were empty, and farming equips in there was very nice
– some monsters would be half naked by the time you kill them due to their armor being destroyed.. hope you like big titties
– their were 3 pets to choose from, and training them to a high level gave very nice passive buffs.. too bad the passive buffs were random.. i myself had 3 pets, my main one being the sakayna or however u spell it.. basically i rolled 3 physical defense buffs in a row bringin my defense up to 6k.. it was so easy to solo grind because all the monsters did 1 damage to me
some of the disadvantages i found were:
– the repair cost for armor was VERY HIGH.. you could auto battle and bot via hunting stone for hours until your armor durability completely reaches 0, the repair cost is insane and you dont make enough profit selling the junk from monsters to upkeep the cost
– the enchant and upgrade system was very confusing but i got the hang of it.. VERY EXPENSIVE as well as very risky its very easy to fail and lose the equipment, but when i mentioned earlier that people took advantage of compensation after every maintenence, i mean EVERY ACCOUNT gets 5 red and blue upgrade stone, i ended up making 20 accounts with level 1 characters and having a bunch of those to fully upgrade my end game gear
– alot of zones werent pvp until they patched in the level 55 stoneiza zone which made several of the best griding spots a pvp zone.. i didnt much like that at all so i had to stop training
– pvp itself wasnt very difficult but the risks were so high that nobody would even attempt it, some would even stash their main equips in the storage and use unupgraded npc equips to fight in.. during clan wars theres a red and blue side and both sides fight for a weekly victory buff
newer players would notice there hasnt been a maintenence in several months now.. this is a sign that in about a year or so the game service will be terminated and the game will be permanently shut down
Good review. So far I learned, that reviewer can’t say “Titts and Ass” and dislikes idea of seeing good looking female bodies. It sure helps to understand, why game is bad.
What the fuck is “Check your Id” when i tried to sign up in Kabod Online???
I’m surprised that the game is still around. I’m even more surprised that it’s still attracting new players.
I’m surprised that this is considered a review – more of a homo sexual bitchfest about a game featuring beautiful women.
The point of the review is more that the game is boring, repetitive, and geared entirely toward getting players to buy the ability to let the game grind for them. The only reason for the “beautiful women” as you put it is to attract sexually frustrated players. They do very little to enhance the actual experience of the game. In fact, if what you’re interested in is ogling women online, there are so many less tedious ways to do that. Just go do a google search for CG anime girls (I’m just presuming that’s your thing if you think the in game models are beautiful) and go fap to that instead of wasting your time with an MMORPG that’s lackluster at best.
Tits and ass in an MMORPG (or any game really) is like the spice to a cooking; it’s nice to have but without the meat (or equivalent thereof for non meat dishes), spices might just ruin the cooking.
Same goes with games; all the fanservice and sexy content is worthless if the gameplay is execrably bad. There is no accounting for taste of course, but let’s have a case study:
There are two MMORPGs that offer skimpy armor designs and made them the main appeal of the game (at least by the marketing team). Both games launch rather close apart, and both went over to the States before shutting down. One however, managed to find so much demand that a private server is now running it as the sole surviving example and is still thriving years after its official closure. The other is so unknown that the amount of people posting gameplay videos of it beyond initial impressions can be counted on one hand, let alone having a private server built for it.
If your mind immediately thought Scarlet Blade and Kabod Online, then you’re correct. Having played Scarlet Blade myself, it’s a rather uninspired, very cookie cutter designed Korean MMO, albeit with a different setting. Go past the fanservice and its lack of uniqueness became apparent, and yet it’s still there is nothing inherently wrong or lazy on it that you’d still be able to enjoy various endgame activities in it, especially with an active and friendly playerbase. Kabod doesn’t even have a semblance of good design in its core, and that’s why it died and is forgotten while Scarlet Blade lives on.
2c from a random MMO player.