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Posts Tagged Game Review
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: 
(8.5)
EverQuest II Review
EverQuest II
State: Final
Website: http://everquest2.station.sony.com/
Developer/Publisher: Sony Online Entertainment
The Pitch: EverQuest® II is the next generation of massively multiplayer gaming, a huge online world where friends have come together for adventure and community. Featuring breathtaking graphics and a vast, beautiful and dangerous game world to explore, EverQuest II sets the standard for graphical realism as players are immersed in the game’s exciting locales and mysterious lands.
EverQuest II (EQ2) was a game I nearly didn’t try. Not because the pitch didn’t draw me in; the pitch is pretty bland but I can ignore that. For whatever reason, I had low expectations of it and didn’t figure it would come close to today’s ‘AAA’ MMOs like Warcraft or Warhammer.. or anything with ‘War’ in the title, I suppose. But I figured if I was going to try 25 MMOs, I should try 26. After all EverQuest was the so-called grandaddy of current MMOs, so what did I have to lose other than my social life? I think a wee bit of me was terrified of the ‘EverCrack’ label that was applied to the original game after players found themselves addicted. But I tried it anyway.
Unique to EverQuest II
Races. The most obvious thing when creating your character is that you’ve got 19 Races to choose from right off. 19!! Runes of Magic has… um, 1. That is 19x the amount of races! Hot diggety! Even cooler than that, the races are broken up into 3 main categories; Good, Evil and Neutral. This classification will determine the type of Class you can choose. For instance, Ratongas (rat people) are evil, so they can only choose evil-based Classes. In addition, it affects your starting zone/city. What this offers the game is a competely different starting set of quests and areas to explore if you have alt-itis, like me. Lots of fun to be had with this. Especially when you can choose from Frogs, Lizard-people, Cat-people, Ogres, Trolls, Dwarves, Faeries… It’s fantastically diverse.
Classes. As for Classes, there are 24 in the game. Twenty-freaking-FOUR! This sounds like an MMOers wet dream. And it is. But to simplify things, the classes all fall within the 4 aforementioned archetypes: Scout, Mage, Priest and Fighter. They are further subdivided within each archetype into 3 sub-types. And then within those, they are split into good and evil mirrors. So of the 24 available, 8 are Good, 8 are Evil, and 8 are Neutral. No matter which alignment your character is, you have 16 Classes available to you at the beginning of the game. Still very impressive; it’s impossible to not find a class where you’ll enjoy the play style if you try a few.
Voice Acting. I had no idea this had been implemented, so I was in awe after starting my first character – a High Elf Wizard. Pretty much ALL text in the game is voice-acted. It’s absolutely incredible. Not only that, the vast majority of it is well done. I loved the Goblins’ Quests (Grexx etc) in the Queen’s colony. Superbly animated and well voice-acted. It really drew me into the game. If this can be done, why isn’t it, by other MMOs? This is one feature that make the game feel more real and alive than any other MMO out there, to me. Yeah, the characters still all stand around in one spot for hours on end… but the fact that they talk to you makes it feel more like I’m in Oblivion or something. And that’s a good thing.
Overlooked – Auditorium
So this is a start of a series here at tGn. Overlooked will point out things that might be – as should be obvious – overlooked, either by mainstream media, or just in general. Hopefully we’ll bring your attention to a game or a piece of software or a gadget that might interest you.
Auditorium
So, what’s Auditorium? It’s a Flash-based browser game that combines music, physics, light and color in one neat little addictive package. It looks great, it sounds great, it plays great. So what’s not to love?
Gameplay
Auditorium is unique. It doesn’t have a character you control, and it’s not a puzzle game, at least not like most you might be accustomed to. Basically, in Auditorium, You control streams of light, called ‘the Flow’ - and subsequently, sound – using things called Directionals and Controls. What they do is apply a certain type of physics to the Flow, causing it to react based on the Control’s strength or placement. Think of it like placing a bunch of rocks in a stream to divert it; they work much like that. The interesting bit is that as the Flow touches Containers, it begins to create music. Quietly, when the Flow is low, but as you are able to increase the Flow into a container, the music grows in intensity. The graphics are beautiful with the colors and swirling forms becoming more and more complex with each successive Act.
Objective
Quite simply, you need to direct the flow in each particular level into all of the Containers using Directionals and Controls. There are 15 Acts in total, with up to 6 parts in each Act. Some of these get mind-bendingly difficult as you try to figure out how to direct the Flow in ways you just can’t imagine is possible.
The Music
Ahhh, the music. It is really rather remarkable. Consisting of snippets of violin, cello and piano, the musical soundscape deftly walks the line between catchy and soothing. It is by far, the most intriguing and memorable use of music as a gameplay element I’ve yet encountered in a game. It’s simply that good. It’s so good, you long to get to the next Act just to see what elements they might add to the existing musical repertoire.
The Catch
The first Act is free to play. The remaining 14 Acts will cost you $10.99 to experience. Considering this could give you up to 20 hours of play (and that’s if you’re good), that’s an amazing value. Many breakfasts cost more than that.
Summary
Auditorium is a wonderful, addictive music-oriented game. I can’t recommend it higher. Go on, get out of here and play it now.
Rating:
The Newb guide to MMORPGs
Introduction
You must think I’m nuts. I downloaded 67 GIGABYTES worth of MMOGs to test. 26 of the suckers, 10 of which I’m focussing on here. As for the other 16? Well, they’re listed at the bottom of the article. If and when I get around to discussing them, they’ll be linked here as well. Let’s just say they weren’t worth my time to review, for one reason or another. Not necessarily because they were bad (although some were beyond bad)… just that I had to choose a sample that would be the games that I’d be most interested in trying out. Besides, it’s not as if one MMO isn’t enough already for most people that actually want a social life. Like you know, a social life that doesn’t involve hitting / or ENTER first. And I had to pick and choose. So these are the ones I chose:
Dungeon Runners (overview forthcoming)
Guild Wars (overview forthcoming)
Pirates of the Caribbean Online
World of Warcraft (overview forthcoming)
Happily, I can say that I managed thus far (knock on wood) to avoid severe addiction to any of them. Well, mostly.
The Scope
Before I even get started, I should mention something: I’m a PvEer. I don’t play PvP and it’s not my focus, nor interest. So I didn’t test out any PvP while playing these games. If that’s your thing, these articles may still be of interest to you, but they are talking only in terms of the PvE component of these games. Just thought I’d mention that up front.
I’m not going to be writing hard-core, in-depth reviews of each of these games. If you want reviews of them, the vast majority of these games (perhaps excepting a lot of the free to play ones) have been reviewed ad nauseum elsewhere on the web. What I’m going to do is tell you which ones I think are worth the time downloading and testing. I’ll tell you what I liked, what annoyed me, and what I thought stood out – both in a good and bad way. If you are a newbie, this might be a good place to start before you get your download on.
Just FYI, I don’t really get into that whole ‘role-playing’ business very much. I play these games to get sweet loot. I play to kill monsters.. of some sort or another. I suppose leveling and assign skills or stats has become synonymous with role-playing, which I don’t entirely buy, or take part in. But whatever, that’s for another article.
The Lord of the Rings Online Review
The Lord of the Rings Online
State: Final
Website: http://www.lotro.com
Developer/Publisher: Turbine
The Pitch: You need a pitch? It’s the Lord of the freaking Rings! You know.. ‘my preciousss’ and ‘one ring to rule them all’ and ‘second breakfastses’. If you seriously expected a pitch, then you should just move on to another game.
Performance
The Lord of the Rings ran much better than I expected. Why? Because this game is freaking gorgeous. I fully expected it to run like a bag of crap. But it didn’t. I maxed out the settings, turned on AA and it runs smooth like silk. No hiccups or stalls. Just hawt Middle-Earthy vistas. Speaking of Vista.. I’m running this in XP. Although it apparently looks in better in DirectX 10, (of course only available in Vista), I’d rather shave my head than install that POS on my computer. Here’s hoping Windows 7 is better. (listens closely to hear the distant sound of MS shareholders cheering)
Unique to The Lord of the Rings Online
Middle Earth. What can I say about this that hasn’t been said already? They’ve reproduced it perfectly. Well, maybe not as perfectly as an anal-retentive Lord of the Rings nerd might want, but that’s not me. I liked the books and the movies.. and as far as I can tell, this is exactly what I figured it would feel like to kill wolves and boars in Middle Earth. And the occasional goblin as well.
City of Heroes / Villains Review
City of Heroes / Villains
State: Final
Website: http://www.cityofheroes.com
Developer/Publisher: Cryptic/NCSoft
The Pitch: City of Heroes® brings the world of comic books alive in this massively multiplayer 3D online universe.
Performance
City of Heroes ran pretty much exactly how you’d expect a 4 year old MMO to run on current hardware; very well. I was able to run it with everything maxed out and with Antialiasing on. It was smooth and responsive, with no noticeable framerate dips.
Unique to City of Heroes/Villains
Theme.This is pretty obvious. Currently, it is the only MMO available that puts you in the cape and cowl of a superhero or villain. Not only that, it makes you feel heroic or villainous.
Character customization. Still the leader in the market in offering you the ability to tweak and customize your character in a near-limitless way. Seriously, I think I spent nearly as much time creating characters as I did playing them. It offers a truly stunning array of options, enough to guarantee that you will never see a clone of yourself running around the world – if you spend some time working at it and if you don’t choose from one of the presets.
Ryzom Review
Ryzom (formerly the Saga of Ryzom)
State: Final (x3… it is the third publisher and re-release for this game)
Website: http://www.ryzom.com
Developer/Publisher: Spiderweb
The Pitch: Ryzom is a wholly original MMORPG fusing science fiction and fantasy. Ryzom Ring (R²), Ryzom’s first and free expansion, evolves the Saga introducing the first ever MMO scenario editor!
Okay, that is pretty cool. I’m way too lazy to bother with editing scenarios, but it’s still cool that some players might do that. I’d probably have to read forums for a week to figure out how to actually enter a player’s scenario though.
The Caveat
Pay to play outside of the trial zone. Similar to how The Chronicles of Spellborn works, you can download and play the game for free, but only in the trial zone. Which is a reasonably large island, floating in the sky. The ups and downs for this game have been many; it is currently with it’s third publisher, having been shut down and resurrected twice before in the past. The game has been (completely) free for the last little while, as the most recent publisher gets their billing arrangements and such in order. Just a few days ago, the new cost structure was announced on the official forums. Thankfully, it’s nowhere near as complex as TCoS, with the cost being $11 USD, with lowered costs for a longer contract.
Performance
Ryzom ran great. All settings were at their max. However, I should note that I bought this game at launch.. or shortly thereafter. How could I not? I found it in a bargain bin for $2. A bad omen, to be sure. This was back in 2005 or so. Since that time, I oft tried to hop back into the game. The trouble was, I often couldn’t get it to play. It would load up and that stall on the last bar of the loading screen. Apparently, this was a common issue, but for whatever reason was neverly properly addressed. It continued to dog me – and Ryzom – for several years. You can search for posts by user ‘oliverh72′ on those boards to see what I went through to get the game to run properly. Eventually I gave up completely. Nonetheless, being the obstinate person I am, I tried it again when writing these articles. Somehow in the process, be it my hardware or theirs, the game ran without a hiccup. Not once did I have a problem logging in. I can only hope that your experience is as good.
One other thing. You’ll notice in my screenshots that the camera is much farther away from my character than it allows in game. I found the in-game camera to be claustrophic and constricting. Yuck. So, I learned how to adjust it. FYI, this is against the company’s ToE, I assume for PVP reasons. Whatever. The fix is simple:
- close all instances of Ryzom-related programs
- locate ../Ryzom/client.cfg
- open with your favorite text editor
- append the following line to the bottom of the text file (must have ten trailing zeros!): CameraDistMax = 10.0000000000;
- save the text file and load Ryzom, enjoy!
Hope that helps.
(4.00 out of 5)