Sword of the New World

[Gabriel]

Is anyone else trying this MMORPG out? I downloaded the client and have been taking advantage of the freebie play.

 

On the plus side, this game is very pleasing to the eye. Everything has a wonderful design to it. This is almost exactly how I've wanted games like this to look.

 

On the bad side... I get hit by lag with alarming regularity. There's not much customization of your various character appearances. You just pick an outfit and that's it. The game doesn't help you find where you need to go (as I got used to in Lineage II and City of Heroes). Finally, combat seems to be completely on autopilot. Just move your characters to the general area you want to fight at and they do the rest all on their own.

[Gabriel]

Apparrently no one is interested in this other than me.

 

I liked the game enough to subscribe for a couple of months. This is mainly due to the graphics.

 

The gameplay only gets grindier. I've gotten some of my characters up to level 28, and beyond level 20 the game started feeling a bit more interactive. I actually have to use my special moves and commands now, whereas before I could just walk into a big pile of enemies and walk away from the keyboard as my characters hacked and slashed. Still, most of the time the game plays in such a way that you feel you're a botter. It's like the designers replaced the typical MMORPG downtime with animations of characters whacking monsters.

 

It has some nice addictive elements. In addition to the typical pursuit of leveling your character up, each character has "stances" which determine their special abilities. There are tons of stances and each one has to be leveled up to access it's set of actions. There are also UPCs, which are characters you must quest to find and can then create for your own party, ala Pokemon-Gotta Catch Em All.

 

The world itself feels more like a console RPG than a traditional MMORPG. In Lineage II, City of Heroes, Everquest, and EVE Online, the world consists of gigantic free roaming areas, or big open boxes of zones. The areas in Sword of the New World feel more like the zones in games like the latest Final Fantasies or Grandia II.

 

The Engrish is really bad. The first town is well translated, but then you get to the second city and the NPCs are unintelligible.

 

It's $9 a month. It's low enough to make it tempting to me.

[2600Lives]

Recently I've been addicted to 2Moons. It's a hybrid of Diablo and Everquest style gameplay. It's still in open beta, and there's a LOT that needs to be fixed and refined, but for the most part, I've been enjoying it. I don't care for the PvP aspect of it, as anyone can kill you outside of the towns (there are some pretty stiff penalties for it, but most don't care), and it can get annoying when all you want to do is finish a quest, but there's currently no penalty for dying, so the only real invconvenience is having to run back to where you were. Enemies spawn VERY rapidly, and you have to plan around this or you'll get overwhelmed in seconds. Overall, it's a fun little diversion.

[Gabriel]

Recently I've been addicted to 2Moons. It's a hybrid of Diablo and Everquest style gameplay. It's still in open beta, and there's a LOT that needs to be fixed and refined, but for the most part, I've been enjoying it. I don't care for the PvP aspect of it, as anyone can kill you outside of the towns (there are some pretty stiff penalties for it, but most don't care), and it can get annoying when all you want to do is finish a quest, but there's currently no penalty for dying, so the only real invconvenience is having to run back to where you were. Enemies spawn VERY rapidly, and you have to plan around this or you'll get overwhelmed in seconds. Overall, it's a fun little diversion.

 

PvP seems to be developer's favorite thing while it's players' least favorite. It also seems to generally be added as an excuse not to add real content.

 

I play City of Heroes off and on. The developers made a really big deal about upcoming PvP features. The playerbase almost unanimously kept saying "we don't care." Still, Cryptic Studios pushed forward with PvP arenas and even full zones. And they're more or less empty. The apathy is palpable.

 

One good thing about City of Heroes PvP, it's consensual. You can only get into PvP if you go into a PvP zone or sign up for a battle in the arena. Missions in PvP zones are wholly optional. This is in complete opposition to Sword of the New World which more or less tricked players into signing up for the PvP servers by a lack of documentation, and the PvP is not consensual after a certain point.