Chrono Odyssey's next beta will be "significantly more satisfying", founder vouches

Playing Chrono Odyssey's recent playtest in June 2025, I was convinced it's not ready for a 2025 release. Turns out, though, I would have to dial back the clock six months for that pronouncement. The June playtest build was apparently a Focus Group Test (FGT) build of the game from last year. The current "internal development build" is far better, says Bonggun Bae, Chrono Studio Founder and NPIXEL CEO.

Earlier this week, he thanked all beta participants in an X post. In the same post, he revealed a lot of details, including why the game felt so undercooked and overridden with jank:

To cement his faith in the progress the Chrono Studio has made over the last six months, Bonggun promised a "significantly more satisfying experience" in the next beta:

"I truly believe the next test build will be significantly more satisfying than the current one. Our development team feels real progress with each quarterly build, and that momentum is only getting stronger. Please stay tuned — we promise it’ll be worth the wait!"

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Why did Chrono Odyssey use an older game build for its playtest?

The boss-man explains the reason (Image via Kakao Games)

The Chrono Odyssey playtest last week was extremely rough around the edges. Between the borderline broken global illumination and lighting, the horrendous state of optimization and forced TSR, the game was in a barely playable state.

While it functions perfectly fine as a proof of concept, its glaring issues are on the surface even if you discount the graphics. The crux of the experience in an action MMO is its combat, which was marred by desynced animations, dead monster AI, and undertuned player hitboxes. The only part that wowed me was a relatively modular facet of the game: the character creation.

The point of this first-ever Closed Beta Test (discounting press previews) was to "validate the core gameplay and conduct server stress testing", says Bonggun Bae.

While the NPIXEL CEO claims that the latest internal build being worked on by the studio is significantly better, it's too bug-prone to stress-test on a live server. For the purposes of server stress-testing, NPIXEL deemed the FGT build from last year more suitable:

"For this closed beta, we had to prioritize server stability and minimize critical bugs, which meant we couldn’t use the most recent build — and that’s the honest truth. Any developer would understand the trade-offs involved in such a decision."

Like most of the playerbase, I previously assumed that this playtest is representive of Chrono Studio's progress with this ambitious MMO. From that standpoint, Chrono Odyssey felt far behind the curve.

This new information gives us a more balanced perspective on the game state. It does not provide much more than a token assurance from a studio executive, but it also explains a lot of blank spaces, from blurry textures to the complete absence of the magic class.

It's not a good idea to handwave all criticism on the altar of the game build being a "worse" iteration of what's available. While knowledge of this FGT re-run may make some sceptics cautiously optimisitc, Chrono Odyssey may have fallen afoul of some community members in a different light, as players discovered out-of-bounds structures eerily similar to New World.

It's not known when the next Chrono Odyssey closed beta will take place, but if NPIXEL fails to make good on its CEO's promises, its player goodwill may well run out.

Edited by Sambit Pal