Explore the Earth during the Age of Discovery - Uncharted Waters Online (Review)

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Have you ever wanted to be an Explorer during the Age of Discovery? Come and take a look at Uncharted Waters Online!

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Source: PapayaPlay

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Ahoy, Captain!

Uncharted Waters Online (UWO) is a MMORPG set in the Age of Discovery (around the 15th-16th century).

Your character is a Ship Captain from one of the seven maritime powers from the Age of Exploration: Portugal, Venice, England, Netherlands, France, Spain, and the Ottomans.

When you start your career, you just have a small Barca that can barely fit a dozen sailors and just a few trade goods at once. As you progress on the game, you'll be unlocking larger, powerful ships, that can fit several cannons, hundreds of experienced sailors, and thousands of trade goods!

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Source: Steam

The game is based on three different branches of activities, each with its own level and skills:

  • Maritime: the "soldier" path; you can fight thousands of enemies in the game, both on the sea and on land. Who you'll be fighting? Well, that's up to you: you can battle against pirate NPCs, merchant NPCs (that can be sailing under the protection of a nation), or even other players in the PvP!

  • Merchant: there are hundreds of different goods (from Fish and Pigs to Gold and Fine Furnitures) that can be sold or bought in ports all across the world. The further you're from the place that makes that good, the more expensive it'll be. Bringing some Pepper from India to Europe? Top Bucks! Bringing some Fish from Portugal to Spain? Probably not so much.

  • Adventurer: there are literally dozens of thousands of quests in the game that allows you to find "Discoveries". Those discoveries can be literally anything: an island, a desert, a lost religious relic, an exotic animal, a fossil. After discovering something, you can also report the discovery to a noble in order to earn even more fame and rewards!

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Source: UWO

For example, this is the Trade skill tree. There are more than 30 skills in this tree, including crafting skills (like Casting, Handicraft and Alchemy), trading skills (that allow the purchase of more trade goods: Jewelry, Art, etc.) and even utility skills that helps you in your merchant career (like haggling better prices, or escaping from enemy ships!).
The Storage skill, for example, reduces your losses if you shipwreck or get looted by a pirate.

The most hardcore players end up doing all these activities at once; but the majority of the players just chose one main "career" to follow.

If you like the PvP and PvE aspect of the game, shooting stuff and plundering treasuries, you'll probably become a Maritime. You'll need powerful ships with hundreds of sailors and several slots for weaponry and armour!

If you like making HUGE PILES OF MONEY via trading, purchasing specialties from the world and selling them back in Europe, you'll obviously be a Merchant, travelling with ships with huge cargos and with plenty of space for transporting your goods!

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Source: Nyxie's

And if you want to travel across the world in a lightning-fast ship to discover forgotten relics and secrets, you'll want to be an Adventurer! Find out about the world's history and its buried treasures!

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Why play UWO?

  • One of the things that I like the most about UWO is that it's an Open Sandbox game. The world is open and you're free to do whatever you want. You're a new player but want to travel to a very dangerous zone? Well, try your luck: if you can get out of there alive, you'll probably make a bank. Want to sell anything you got for whatever price you want? Just open a market stall in a city and see if another player wants to buy it from you.

UWO, in my opinion, is a light version of EVE Online: both have open sandbox worlds in which Transportation/Logistics is the focus of the game.

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Source: PapayaPlay

  • Learn about the World's History. If you're familiar with the Uncharted Waters franchise, you probably know that they're very popular in Japan and Korea and one of their selling points is teaching about history and geography. Through the thousands of quests, you can learn A LOT of things, from the decline of Venice as a superpower when Portugal discovered the spice trade sea route; to the name of a very rare animal that lives in Australia or where "Newfoundland" is located on a map.

Inside the game, there are also hundreds of NPCs representing famous people from the history books. You can interact with Duke Braganza of Portugal, Leonardo Da Vinci, Nostradamus or even Shakespeare!

It's very fun to walk through the world and find about the history of the places, the local legends and tales, the ruins of old civilizations and other informations about them.

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Source: GameOgre

  • It's a very chill, calm game. If you're wanting a game to relax after a hard day of work, UWO is great, especially if you're into trading or adventuring. You can hop into your ship and travel around the seas while hearing the great soundtrack of the game, without feeling the pressure of more stressfull games like a MOBA or a FPS.

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Why NOT play UWO?

  • Dated Engine: UWO launched in 2005, so it's already a 16 years old game. Even after all updates, some graphics can feel ugly and some mechanics can feel clunky when compared to new releases. UWO has that classic "arcade" feeling; if you're not into that, you'll probably dislike the game after a while.

  • Slow Game: UWO is a MMORPG developed by Koei Tecmo, a Japanese company. As the majority of the asian MMOs, it's a very slow game that demands some grinding in order to achieve the end-game. Skills can take a long time to level up, the most profitable trade routes can take several hours to actually complete, etc.

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There are dozens of tips and tricks to grind skills in the game, as they're very important for the development of your character, but can also take several months if you're not doing it in an optimized way. Many players find this grind tiresome and boring.

  • Lack of In-Game Explanations: I'll be bluntly honest with this point... not only the game lacks in-game tutorials and explanations about the majority of the mechanics, but the translation to English is also VERY bad, making it even harder to understand the nuances of the mechanics.

Asian MMOs usually doesn't have in-depth explanations as they assume that the community will create websites to help the players. That's true in the Japanese/Korea/Chinese versions of the game: they have huge fansites with all the information you need to play the game. Unfortunately, the worldwide version of UWO has a very small community, and there's a lack of updated guides in the English language.

Your best bet to understand the game is reading Ivyro and UWO-HQ, the two largest websites in English. You can also find some content in Youtube.

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For example, there's a trading mechanic specific to the East Asia regions of the game (China, Korea, Japan and Taiwan) called "Nanban Trading". It's meant to simulate the barter of goods without the usage of money/coins, as actually happened in the history. It's a VERY CONVOLUTED system with several rules that's literally impossible to understand by yourself: you have to read guides and watch videos to start to understand; and even then you'll probably mess up several times until you actually learn how to do the Nanban Trading.

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CONCLUSION

The truth is that I love Uncharted Waters Online. It's one of those MMOs that I stop playing for a while, then come back again. I like the theme, I like the trading and feeling like a merchant, I like the discoveries, I like reading about history.

I also like that it has a small community: everyone knows each other, and people on the World Chat is always willing to help new players with anything they need.

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Source: PapayaPlay

But it's undeniably an old game with lots of problems (slow progress, lots of grinding, bad translation), so it's expected that the game will not attract many players today in 2021.

Anyway, it is a very unique game that stands out in the crowd. If you're wanting to try a new MMO, I highly recommend you joining for a few days to see if it's your cup of tea.

My username in the game is "Luizeba", and I'm a spice trader on the Portuguese Empire. Currently I'm focusing on leveling up my maritime alt, because I want to explore some parts of the game that I'm not able to with my fragile trader character :D

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Thanks for reading this post, and until next time!

If you enjoyed the post, feel free to follow me as I'm routinely writing about Gaming, Investment, Fitness and Writing, and other random fun subjects like Travel and Metal Detecting!

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Unless stated otherwise, all images are created and owned by me, or from the game depicted on this post. Also, believe it or not, I'm not actually a squirrel! This handsome rodent in my profile picture is a character from 'Conker: Live & Reloaded'. Here's Real Life me!



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6 comments
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I love everything related to pirates. But this game I had never heard of it

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It's, unfortunately, a very unknown game. Even when it released back in the 2010's it was already a small game. There's a number of reasons: the game has a very unique thematic (renaissance exploration), back in the days there were hundreds of new MMOs every day being released, etc.

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PIZZA!
@luizeba! The Hive.Pizza team manually curated this post.
PIZZA Holders sent $PIZZA tips in this post's comments:

Please vote for pizza.witness!

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Thanks for the support, Pizza Team <3 You guys rules, and I'm very glad of being part of the community :D

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