Survive the Dread Arena in Uldor

Uldor is an upcoming fantasy MMORPG being built on Unreal Engine 5 by game developers Max Level Studios. The team consists of people with experience with brands like Marvel, Ubisoft, and Ethereum Foundation.

The three main game modes planned for Uldor are:

• PvP arena which features structure matches between players either 1v1, 3v3, or 5v5;
• Faction Battles for large-scale PvP battles; and
• Open World adventure for single-player and co-op style games.

For the first playtesting phase though, another game mode is released first. It’s called Dread Arena. This game mode was released as a means to get early feedback on the basic mechanics and controls of the game.

The first step into the Dread Arena

We will face endless waves of undead minions in the Dread Arena mode. The longer you stay in the arena, the harder each wave gets. We start with only a short sword and three (3) elixirs. We had no abilities at the start of the game.

After defeating all the enemies to complete the wave,  random rewards can be chosen by us to help in the next wave. It could be Elixirs, Status upgrades, Abilities, or Weapons.

From my playthrough, it seems that there were 3 weapon upgrades in order of Shield> Halberd> Katana. Halberd nor Katana ever appear as a reward if we don’t choose Shield as our first weapon reward. In the future, I would love to see a wider selection of weapons and random weapon upgrades instead.

There were changes to the weather in the arena the longer you stay there. I’ve noticed that at the start it wasn’t dark. But as we completed more waves, the skies get darker and darker. I wasn’t able to survive very long, wasn’t able to determine if we could see the sunrise if we survived long enough.

The combat in the game feels good. There was a lot of rolling around to dodge enemy attacks. It’s very familiar for those that have played the Dark Souls series. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. With the familiar combat controls and a few tries I managed to get to Wave 16 with 105 kills. The death screen reminded me of Dark Souls even more.

Final Thoughts

It seems that the current mode is only to test the combat mechanics. I’m really satisfied with how it is now. However, for this playtest I did not see any new game mechanics that would help make the game stand out from other action RPGs yet. Here’s hoping we would be able to see that in the other game modes in the future.

If you’re interested in trying out the game, sign up for their Dread Arena Alpha Waitlist at uldor.com