The promise of an MMORPG focused on time is intriguing and brilliant. It’s one thing to play a game with your friends, making decisions that affect the entire team and can lead to destruction if you’re not careful. It’s another thing to be given that gameplay loop, a loop of teamwork and camaraderie, and then be presented with the ability to change and manipulate things.
Perhaps one move that you didn’t see coming completely decimated the main healer on your team, and invariably led to the entire team being wiped out. Perhaps the tank got hit by an extremely powerful move that they just couldn’t take, and that led to losing the main damage sponge for the raid. Chrono Odyssey wants to ask the question: what if you could change things? What if you could control time?
It’s an interesting question, but one that’s very dicey. The only footage we've seen from the game is a gameplay reveal from nearly two years ago. Combine that with the fact that the game is currently slated to be released later this year (though it is currently unclear whether or not the game is launching in early access or as a full release), and there’s a decent amount to worry about. Still, the promise of a “dynamic action-based” combat system that revolves almost entirely around using time to your advantage has a lot of potential worth discussing, even if there’s a chance the game doesn’t meet those standards.
A game that recently used time manipulation to its advantage, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, could be seen as an example of the potential of Chrono Odyssey. For those who haven’t played it, TOTK has an ability that allows players to essentially freeze and rewind time - what this allows is for creative puzzle strategies and some extremely interesting combat scenarios. If an enemy shoots at Link with a projectile, it’s possible to rewind time and send that projectile right back at them, which is something I’m very much expecting to be able to do in Chrono Odyssey. I’m also anticipating that by doing this players will be able to break their way through seemingly impossible situations and take down enemies that are much bigger than themselves.
While games have done stuff like this before, none have really attempted to do so on as big a scale as Chrono Odyssey. Multiple people manipulating time at once is going to be really interesting to see, especially seeing how servers hold up when both you and your friends are trying to freeze and rewind time to get around a massive area of effect attack. They could make it so that only one player can do the move at once, but that also feels like a cop-out, taking away from the potential of the game.
It’s also really interesting to consider the sheer size of enemies that were shown off in the initial gameplay reveal. Sure, players will be fighting against enemies closer to the size, archers and soldiers, but it looks like they’ll be way more of a distraction and used as cannon fodder to try and stop players from being prepared for massive siege enemies such as Dragons and huge wolf creatures. First off, fighting massive creatures is always incredibly appealing - there’s a reason why Monster Hunter is such a successful franchise, and there’s a reason why Monster Hunter Wilds has proved to be such an acclaimed release mere days after launch.
Now imagine those Monster Hunter battles again, but this time you can rewind and freeze time. Maybe you’re looking to figure out exactly what to do once the dragon flies out of range, so you rewind time in order to move your ranged fighter just out of the way of the massive fire blast that killed it originally. Now you’ve unlocked a whole host of new options, all of which grew from the seed of your actions - all of which came from the ability to change time in the first place.
Hell, let’s just ignore the combat for a minute. Imagine walking through an utterly decimated battlefield as a player in any other RPG. You’d want to know exactly what happened here to cause this bloodshed. With what Chrono Odyssey promises, you could do that, see the world before everything went wrong, and figure out exactly what happened to this land.
As I’ve already mentioned, we don’t yet have a release date for the game, but I’m extremely hopeful. Time Travel is my favourite type of science-fiction storytelling, because when it’s done well it suddenly becomes incredibly rewarding to be able to follow. That concept but in a video game I can play with my friends? That sounds like a dream.
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