The Chronicles of Spellborn Review

The Chronicles of Spellborn

State: Final
Website: http://spellborn.acclaim.com/
Developer/Publisher: Acclaim
The Pitch: The Chronicles of Spellborn is an amazing MMORPG where players take the role of heroes in a post-apocalyptic fantasy setting and a vast adventure unfolds in an authentic living world.

I don’t know what post-apocaplyptic fantasy is. Perhaps a nuclear fireball? Maybe the dwarves had WMDs. I dunno. Nonetheless, it still looks like pretty much every fantasy MMO I’ve seen except almost everyone has WAY longer legs.

Please note: As of April 23rd, 2009, there is now a “regular” $15/month (+ discount for multiple months) subscription option available. Also, all new subscribers get two weeks free with no limitations. This makes the game much more attractive IMO, as the ‘coins’ system is far too convoluted for its own good.

The Caveat

The Chronicles of Spellborn is free to download and play, but you can’t level past level 7 unless you pay. I played right up until the ‘ding’ at 7.9. You can continue to play as long as you want, but unless you pay, your character won’t level any further. So how much is it?

Go to their website to learn how the ‘coins’ system works – it gives you the option to pay for the game without a credit card. If you do have a credit card, the cost is your standard fare – $15/month, $14/month if you buy a 3-month subscription.

Performance

Spellborn ran great on my machine; everything was maxed and it was smooth as silk.

Unique to The Chronicles of Spellborn

Combat System. This is really Spellborn’s ace in the hole. Without their unique combat system, it’s more or less like all other MMOs. So for those that don’t know about it, here’s how it works.

Basically, instead of getting your standard skill bars like most other MMOs, you get a skill cylinder. Each side of the cylinder has a skill bar on it, that can hold a various number of skills. The number of skills that you can have is dictated by your level; as you go higher in level, the more skills you can hold per side. When you use a skill, the cylinder rotates, showing a new selection of skills. Managing this rotating skill ‘deck’ is one of the strategic aspects of the game – you try to make it so that your skills combo with the previous skill you used. The tricky bit about this is the cooldowns. Since all skills have different cooldowns, it’s possible to set up your skill deck so that you end up with a skill bar where all your skills are cooling down, thus rendering you useless in battle.

And this is the critical bit: all battle is in real-time. That’s the fighting, the dodging, the spellcasting. On top of that, your opponent’s AI is one step up compared to most MMOs. They’ll try to flank you and even run away if their morale starts to get low. If you think you can stand in one spot, hitting your hotkeys, get prepared to die. A lot.

The massive change that this introduces to the MMO standard playing field puts it into a completely different category than other MMOs and thus, it’s hard to really compare it directly, especially since combat is the cornerstone of all MMOs. The combat is Spellborn is fluid and tense. Not something you see very much in these games – and for this reason alone, it’s definitely worth trying.

Armor and weapons look cool.Yeah, I know they look cool in other games too. But here, they have no stats. Zilch. Nada. What this does is effectively eliminates gear lust. None of the gear you have or can get in the game affects your damage dealt in combat. So it’s all about looking good. The only thing they’ve added to your gear to make it more useful than just for appearances is sigil slots. These are slots, kind of like rune slots in D2 or Runes of Magic. So you can get sigils that will give you a buff to put into your armor or weapons. I really like this system, but seeing as how I’m a bit of a loot-happy MMOer, I kinda missed getting a sword with slightly better +crit or whatever.

The Good

Audio. The soundtrack is phenomenal. That’s not surprising, considering it’s done by world-renowned game soundtrack auteur, Jesper Kyd. Even if you don’t try the game, I urge you strongly to head over to Kyd’s site to listen to the music he created for this game. It’s haunting, beautiful, and at times, hopeful. Simply fantastic.

Environment design. Although it’s similar in visual style to WoW, Spellborn has some downright amazing vistas in it. I very much liked the art style and more importantly, the architecture and world design. It’s downright fantastic – very often I’d find myself just looking up at the shards in the sky and the various structures in the world. Really cool. I’d basically say the game looks like WoW if Tim Burton had a hand in the visual design.

Graphics. I’m adding this section after the review’s gone live, mostly because I went back into the game (after getting 2 weeks for free!) and I’m simply impressed at how gorgeous this game is. The textures are crisp and well-done, without obvious tiling. It’s fantastic-looking and unlike many MMOs, it has an incredibly strong sense of ambience. You feel a sense of awe when you’re meant to; you feel cozy (like in the pubs) when you’re meant to. The design and the graphics go hand-in-hand, and both are stellar.

Equal playing field. If you’re tired of raiding for loot or grinding to level 80 just to get the best gear, this might be the game for you. Because the loot is more or less meaningless, stats-wise, it becomes all about the gameplay. And the gameplay is a lot of fun.

New ideas. Maybe you’re not so keen on this, but I like that Spellborn is shaking up the MMO field, by daring to do something different. Even after 7.9 levels, I’m not entirely sure how keen I am on what they’ve done – with respect to combat – but at least it’s not like any of the other 25 MMOs I played, that’s for sure. So I’ll give them kudos for that. I do like the real-time aspects of it, but I’m not sure it’s necessarily better than the systems in other games. You may disagree.

Fame and PeP. This is a great idea – I’m surprised no one’s thought of it before. Basically, you get two kinds of points in Spellborn when you kill monsters. Fame and PeP (Personal experience Points). First off, you gain Fame when questing and killing all monsters – this is your standard XP like in other MMOs. You only gain PeP when you kill mobs. So what’s the difference? Well, your Fame goes towards levelling up, which then gives you different skills. PeP, on the other hand, increases your PeP level. And it’s not easy to do as you need lots of it to level. When you do get enough, an increase in your PeP level gives you bonuses. All characters, on top of having Health, have 3 attributes – Physique, Morale, and Concentration. When you’re at level 1 PeP, these are all increased, effectively giving you bonuses to movement, damage dealt, and the speed that your skill deck rotates and your attack speed (respectively). Further levels of PeP continues to increase these. That’s all well and good, but so what??? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Here’s the cool part – if you die, you lose one PeP level. No fame, no XP to make up, no damage to your armor. You lose your bonuses. And trust me, this hurts. So your incentive to stay alive – especially with highly leveled PeP – is huge.

The Bad

No quest tracker? Not only is there no quest tracker, there’s NO assistance whatsoever, outside of the quest descriptions. So you’ll likely find yourself bringing your quest log up a lot as you’re trying to find a person/mob for a quest.

UI inflexibility. This really needs some work. Overall, it’s decent, and reasonably polished-looking. However, a big issue for me is that there’s no way to resize fonts – and they don’t scale up as your resolution gets higher. I was playing at 1920 x 1200 and I have reasonably poor eyesight – so I had to lean close to the monitor every time I had to read dialog/quest text. Pretty annoying. This will likely be patched, mind you. In addition, this issue makes the minimap pretty much useless as it shrinks down to the size of a quarter.

Summary

The Chronicles of Spellborn is a unique and interesting MMO. It boasts real-time combat and non-gear oriented gameplay. It’s a lot of fun, once you get the hang of the combat system. It is reasonably polished and is currently in open beta now final. It’s free, so what have you got to lose? Go download it!

Download value: [rating:8.5] (8.5)