Today(via InformationWeek) China’s Ministries have declared gold farming in virual games then selling it for real currency illegal, stating

“It isn’t far that noobies can just buy gold from gold farmers and then buy all the best gear while I have to grind my ass off for it”

they further added

“Bunny hopping in FPSers is also not fair, I can’t do it and they move too fast for me to hit”.

This marks the first time a country’s goverment has made it illegal for people to game a video game.  China’s Ministries are meeting next week to discuss the possible illegalization of the medic, marine, seige tank strategy in Starcraft.

This is a typical night in WarHammer. The only issue is finding a warband to join. The main ingredient is other players. You need those to fight against and those to fight with. If you are on a low pop server which has no action, transfer or reroll to a better server. Sorry there are no other options, you need a good balanced to almost balanced population to enjoy this game. I have come up with a formula to maximize my playtime. I will share this epiphany with you.

1-Queue up for all scenarios.
This is the first thing I do every time. If RVR is slow going I can hopefully pop in a scenario for some instant PVP. If RVR is active you can always leave the queue. Sometimes you need to partake in a sc to lock a zone. Either way queue up.

2-Look for Open Warbands.
Use the option on your UI to look for an open WB in your zone. If there is an open WB click on the RVR button to join.

3-Guild
Use your guild. Check your guild roster and see if anyone in your Tier is in an open warband. This is depicted by a red banner near their name. Right click on the banner and select join open warband.

4- The Mighty Map
Open the map; check the zones by the racial pairings. This will present a representation of the tiers by zones. You can see if there are any battles in any zones on the map. If there are battles in a different zone fly there and proceed to step 2.

5-Jump tiers
Don’t be afraid to roll an alt. Sometimes your tier might be having a slow night. Roll an alt and join the battle at that level.

This is my daily formula for WarHammer. I always have something to do. Regardless of Zone or Tier I can always expect to join a battle somewhere. Over all WAR is a good game, it’s full of fun and excitement. Sometimes we just have to go and find it. Good luck and enjoy your WAAAGGHHH!!

The secret ingredient to the formula is people. People that fight with you and against you. Your adversary is not some mindless automaton; it’s a living breathing human being. They provide a challenge, excitement and essentially fun. My server has been pretty active in the evenings; I usually end up fighting along the same people night after night. This interaction builds a sense of camaraderie that helps define a game.

WOW is still a great game, the numbers speak for themselves. Sometimes it’s nice to take a break from PVE and try something a little different, more exciting. Changing games is a good way to avoid burnout. It is a game after all, and intended for fun. WOW is currently testing patch 3.2 which will bring many changes to the game. Many class balances, nerfs and quality of life fixes (Patch notes ). I will go back to the game when the patch goes live. Until then I will be participating in some WAAAGGGHHHHHH!!!

Review: Aion Beta Weekend

After my last entry about some of the upcoming MMOs, luck would have it that I was able to get a chance to play Aion during one of their recent beta preview weekend type events.  Today I am going to try to give you my impressions from playing during the recent weekend event that had a level limit of 10, but did allow players to make characters from both of the game’s factions.  While I will be the first to admit that 10 levels is hardly enough to review much of anything, but I think I got a chance to sample the game and take a look at various aspects that were present.

Just to recap quickly here before I get started, I went into this with a few preconceptions about the game in terms of graphics, polish, and whether or not the game would be bringing anything new to table.  I have seen some pretty remarkable screenshots of the game, so graphically I set the bar pretty high.  The game has also been out in a foreign market for a while, so I expected a fair amount of polish.  In terms of innovations I approached Aion with fairly low expectations.  As soon as the log-in screen popped up as seen above, I felt somewhat reaffirmed that graphically I would not be disappointed. So with all that being said, let’s get started!

Character Creation

Before we can do anything, we have to create a character.  The game is based around 2 main factions that are to be pitted against each other akin to what we have seen in Warhammer and World of Warcraft.  One of the main differences with Aion is that the game only features 2 races to chose from, the Elyos (Angels) and the Asmodian (Demons).  If your used to some of the other RvR MMOs out there where each team has several races to chose from, this might concern you as it did me.

As soon as I saw the actual character creator, my concerns about character customization for my appearance pretty much vanished.  I have to say in all honesty that Aion sports one of the most customizable character creators I have seen. Aion gives you infinitely more options than many of its competitors, and rivals and possibly exceeds Age of Conan.  For starters, the creator has a color palettes that enable you to make almost any part of your character into any color you can imagine.  This opens the door for some very creative and also very silly looking toons.  Hair, skin, and lip color can be anything from standard colors to wild shades of green and purple.

Sliders and more sliders.  This creator has sliders for everything you mind can think of, as well as stuff probably wouldn’t have considered.  When you make your character, the 2 main aspects are designing your face and your body.  The body creator has 12 sliders alone, one of which includes a height slider that can make your character as small as a child or a tall as an ogre.  As if that wasn’t quite enough, the face customizer has another 25 sliders!  It’s very easy to lose yourself at this point, and if it wasn’t a beta, I might have been there for quite some time trying to sculpt my guys face.  In conclusion here, there are enough options to make your character look unique despite the fact there are only 2 races to chose from.

The other decision you have to make is what archetype do you want your character to be, as well as the gender of your character (this is actually done before the customizing step).  This probably where my first beef comes into play.  I am the type of person who would rather pick a class right out of the gate, rather than an archetype.  My concern with this route is that you do not actually get to play the class you want until you have put in 9 levels into your guy.  While this is not really a large time investment by any means (took me 90 minutes my first time), I’d like to find out sooner rather than later if the class I am going to be is to my liking without having to invest the time to find out.  I don’t want to put in the time and finally get to my class only to find out it’s not a good fit for me, then have to reroll and repeat the early content again just to try again.

User Interface

The Aion User Interface is pretty much the cookie-cutter UI we have seen from most of the traditional style MMOs in recent memory.  If you spent any time at all playing WoW, EQ2, AoC, or WAR, you will pretty much feel right at home instantly.

You will find most of the standard UI elements here along with the ability to customize it a bit.  Aion gives you 3 rows of hotbars to be stacked on top of one another, but they remain completely invisible if there are no abilities dropped into them.  Aion also uses the same exact keyboard buttons assigned to some of the basic functions from previous MMOs as well.  Again if you have played a recent traditional MMO, you will find yourself open your inventory, character window, map, etc. without even having to look up the predefined assigned key.

The character window itself is broken into several different tabs of information.  The main screen features the standard equipment paperdoll which is accompanied by all of your characters primary stats, defensive skills, and resistances.  Below that you will find your backpack contents and gold totals.  One confusing things for me was the fact that instead of using the term backpack, Aion calls it the “Cube”.  The cube initially only has a limited number of slots, but there is an NPC who will expand your cube for a fee.

Another interesting aspect is that much like Warhammer Online, Aion also features an unlockable title system. It seems that by completing certain quest or quest chains you can unlock new titles to be displayed next to your name.  What makes this system a bit different than WAR’s title system is that the Aion titles actually have different bonuses associated to them.  I was able to unlock Tree-Hugger by completing one of the early quest chains that gave me an accuracy boost.  The list seems to have 50 hidden titles in total, so most likely there will be certain titles that end up being favored by certain classes in the game because of the bonuses they give.

Combat

Aion’s combat style follows the traditional MMO style combat from games like WoW, EQ2, and WAR.  The game features the standard tab targeting system, and activated abilities that are on various different cooldowns.  The game’s mini-map color codes aggressive monsters as red, and when you target them you even see their aggro radius as if it were a tiny radar.

The combat sounds and animations struck me as being pretty well done. While the combat seems to be in many ways the same recycled form of combat we have seen in the last few MMOs, it does feel responsive and look well.  The game’s combat does feature positional attacks and a combo type system for chaining weapon attacks together.

They really seem to go out of their way to make the skill chains easy to learn compared to some other MMOs.  As an example, the character I picked was under scout archetype.  One of my stun attacks can only be performed directly after my character evades an incoming enemy attack.  In some previous games, it would be up to the player to watch the combat very closely for the evade message or animation. In Aion, when my character evades I get a visual flashing effect on the ability that pretty much screams “press me!”, that get accompanied by another visual in plain view near the center of my screen.  This makes it fairly user-friendly for even new and inexperienced players to know when to seize the opportunity to use a situational skill.

One final quick note here.  This game also seems to feature items that can be socketed with other stat boosting items to give very specific effects much like the Warhammer talisman system.  The stones can be popped into both weapons and armor and seem to drop fairly regularly off of mobs I fought.  They effects I saw ranged from adding HP and MP, all the way to boosting crit chances and evade percentages.  This gives a little bit of room for the player to mess around with various set ups, and the stones can be removed from a special NPC in case you want to try a different stone.

Quests

Questing in Aion is pretty lame to be honest, there just isn’t really any other way to say it.  You can tell as soon as you talk to your first NPC that your questing career in Aion will pretty much consist of the same drab recycled kill and collection quests that we have seen in WoW, EQ2, AoC, WAR etc. Quest NPCs can be spotted by the usual floating icons over their heads to indicate quest offerings or turn-ins.

This is yet another game where the work of a hero is to collect flowers, kill animals, collect dingleberries, and do some part time work for Fed-Ex.  I won’t harp on this too long as I have already ranted on this countless times in the past, but there really isn’t much anyone can write at this point in a quest box to make collecting sacks of grain into something heroic.  I didn’t really care for it in Warhammer, but at least Warhammer mixed things up with their public quest system, there just isn’t anything along those lines here to help break up what will be a long chain of tedium.

The one thing Aion seems to do a little different in the quest department is their campaign quest system.  The quest journal is divided into normal quests and the campaign quests.  Each of Aion’s major zones seems to feature a campaign series of quests.  These are pretty much a long series of quests that chain together that help walk you through the area and give you a little story at the same time.  The initial level 1-10 noobie area campaign seems to revolve around the fact that you have lost your memory and need to try to recall it.  The bad news is these quests pretty much are the same exact kill and collection quests you will find in the other part of your journal.  When the campaign starts, you will see all of the quests listed with the recommended character level for it, although at the start you can’t see the specifics of the quests.  As you start to progress through the campaign, you will unlock the ability to see quests further down the list as well as their reward.

The one saving grace about the campaign system is that they do seem to go a little out of their way to help drive home the story element that comes along with some of them.  A lot of these quests will reward you with cutscenes at various stages to help give you an idea of what is going on.  Not all cutscenes seem to be created equally though.  In the quest to recover your lost memory, the final stages have some pretty impressive and entertaining ones (as seen above), but at the same time there are some that tell you a farm has been pillaged that seem unnecessary.  I’ll take anything that helps break up the tedium though I guess.

The World

I wanted to devote a section here about some observations I made about the world and some features it has.

The first thing I want to touch on are the graphics and the games performance.  This game probably has the best graphics of all the traditional MMOs on the market with the exception of Age of Conan which I think has a completely different art style.  Performance wise, the game runs great on a wide variety of systems.  I also have to say the sound and music seemed pretty well done as well.  A lot of the musical scores I heard in some of the various areas seemed to be professionally composed and helped add to the immersion factor.

There are a lot of familiar features to Aion that seems to have been copied from other games.  I noticed right out of the gate that they have flight masters for flying you across a zone the same as found in WoW, EQ2, and Warhammer.  The only difference here is that instead of riding a flying animal, your character uses a special pair if wings to fly himself over to wherever he is going.  Aion also seems to have a working mail system and auction house system in place much like its competition.  One good feature that I think is new to this game is a fast way of selling vendor trash type loot at the merchants with a single button.  One thing that I did find somewhat annoying was the fact that binding to a new location costs money.

One of my biggest concerns regarding the world is the layout of it.  The world is divided into 3 parts, one of the Elyos, one for the Asmodians, and the Abyss PvP area in the center.  Each of the race’s section of the world map seem to be divided into 5 main zones and a city.  After leveling from 1-10, I had completely exhausted the first zone, leaving 4 more to be explored.  Given the amount of areas remaining, and the number of levels I have yet to climb, I suspect that the game is extremely linear in terms of how you progress through the content and the map.  In a lot of other games, you are given choices on which zone you want to spend your time adventuring in at any given level.  Since other games have multiple races and multiple areas to go with them, in WoW for example if you tire of the human areas, you can head over to the elves for a change of scenery and content.  I fear that Aion will send you down a very narrow set of rails in order to reach the max level with little room for deviation.  This can be worse if you decide to level up an alt because you will be forced to do all of the exact same content you did the firs time around in all of the same places, including the campaign quests.

This leads to me another concern regarding how someone will experience PvP during the leveling process.  In Warhammer Online, each area you level up is connected to an area controlled by the enemy.  This means that if someone really wants to experience the games PvP at any stage, they only need to wander over towards the local hotspot.  While I haven’t seen this during the preview weekend, I have heard there are portals that can open up randomly that send you to the enemy area for PvP.  Depending on how rare these occur, your exposure to the PvP side of the game could be very limited initially.  I like to have an opportunity to test my character in PvP even at the early stages so I can see how well the class I picked handles itself in a variety of situations.

Flight

No doubt one of the main selling points and innovations of Aion is the flight mechanic.  Initially you can’t fly right out of the gate when you start, but once you reach level 9 and complete the campaign to get your class you will be able to glide and fly after a ceremony.

The flight system seems to work very well and I found the controls very easy to get a handle on.  In the bottom right part of user interface, there is a little flight indicator that tells you if you can fly in a certain area, and how much flight time you have left.  If you are in a flight-enabled area, you simply press the “Page Up” button for your character to sprout their wings and take off.  Once you are in the air, you can press “R” and “F” to fly up and down respectively, or you can hold your right mouse button down to tilt your altitude.  The meter will start to tick down and when its out your wings will vanish sending you plummeting.  You can manually land or turn off your wings by pressing the “Page Down” button. Sometimes I found the fastest way to get back to the ground safely from high up was do turn off my wings to fall, then turn them back on right before I hit the ground (use this method at your own risk).

Having a third dimension to the game is definitely a very interesting feature, and flying was genuinely a fun experience. Having that third dimension made finding some quest locations tougher though, as on several occasions I reach the quest waypoint only to realize my real destination was actually high above me on some floating island.  My only beef is that the PvE areas I explored have certain parts you can fly, and others you can’t, so you will find yourself hitting invisible walls that force you to land when transitioning to a no-fly area.  I would love to see more areas be flight enabled.

PvP

Unfortunately the limitations of the weekend didn’t give me a chance to really be able to check out the PvP.  This is what will inevitably make or break the long term playability of this game.  While I was unable to participate in any PvP, I did notice a few features related to it.

For starters there seems to be a tab on your main character window dedicated to your PvP stats from the Abyss.  The window seems to keep track of your PvP rank, as well as your kills and points earned broken down into various time frames so you can monitor your progress.  Everyone seems to start out as a rank 9 Soldier, and by earning points you can advance through the ranks.  There is also a rank window that breaks down the point totals needed to reach certain ranks, as well as which players on each side are at the top of their game.  Points are earned by killing players in the Abyss, and unlike other MMOs, they are lost when you are killed.  This is one aspect that makes Aion stick out from its competition.  Warhammer and WoW were both notorious for treating people with kid gloves by rewarding them with points even for a loss, while Aion seems to have some sort of consequence for a loss.  This will undoubted stop competitive players from just rushing into fights without any fear of death, which is a good thing in my opinion.

The abyss seems to be the focal point of the Aion endgame and its PvP.  By looking at the map, we can see that it has 3 different layers, and assorted keeps to fight over in it.  I am not really sure how this endgame will stack up against what we saw in WAR, but this is going to be what makes or breaks this game.  The area looks to be a decent size by looking at the maps, and I hope that is the case. If all of the endgame PvP is going to be in this area, it will need to be very large to stop it from getting old.  Despite its flaws, Warhammer had a variety of areas and fronts for people to fight on to add a little variety to the PvP endgame, hopefully this area will offer enough to keep people entertained for a long time.

Conclusion

Aion is a graphically stunning game and has tons of polish.  The game has been out overseas for a little while now, and I think that ultimately that fact will be a large benefit to the North American fans.  Since the game has been out and patched for a while in other markets, NA players will be getting a game that is polished and feels complete.  There are not that many MMOs that have come out in the last few years that players have been able to say that about.  The game has a real focus on endgame PvP, and the patching the game has gone through already has no doubt made class balance less of an issue.  I am glad to see that there is a loss for death in PvP, as bind and zerg rushing seems to plague a lot of other traditional style MMOs that have tried for the same goal.

On the flip side, Aion strikes me as very linear game.  The way the overworld is layed out has me worried that in addition to being constricted, players will be forced to stomach through the same content over and over again every time they level up another character.  Aion also is not a game that is oozing with innovation.  Outside of the flight mechanic, I think a lot of people will legitimately be able to criticize this game for being somewhat of a clone in some aspects of some of the more recent traditional games.  The endgame PvP is going to be the real test of whether or not this game breaks through to people and distinguishes itself from the rest, or if it gets written off as another MMO using an already exhausted formula.  I think despite that, this game will appeal to a lot of people who might be current WoW and WAR subscribers.  The game already has a huge following overseas, so it should be interesting to see how it fairs in a completely different market.

Paragus
Co-Leader of Inquisition
www.inqguild.com ]]> http://www.mmocrunch.com/2009/06/22/review-aion-beta-weekend/feed/ http://www.mmocrunch.com/2009/06/17/why-darkfall-is-made-of-fail-by-someone-who-wanted-to-love-it/ http://www.mmocrunch.com/2009/06/17/why-darkfall-is-made-of-fail-by-someone-who-wanted-to-love-it/#comments Thu, 18 Jun 2009 01:03:52 +0000 Rob http://www.mmocrunch.com/?p=1364 I recently canvassed the opinions of a long-term MMO gamer who quit Darkfall in disgust not long ago. I have taken her thoughts and put them into the following editorial-style narrative rather than a straight Q&A. I hope you enjoy reading this, especially if it saves you from playing this game because I genuinely trust this woman’s opinion and if she says it’s this bad… then it’s bad!

Darkfall represents yet another great concept with bad implementation in the MMO space. It could have really worked had the cheating, hacking, and mass alliances not gotten together and decided it should be a numbers game instead of a skill game. Basically, it’s grindy as hell if you’re not in a massive guild with a massive city where you can macro your skills up to the top in no time flat without actually playing.

If you want to play legit, meanwhile, all your PVP encounters will be against macroers because, hey, the grindiness is just too insane to not take a shortcut around for most people. You will die every time you leave town to harvest, even by your own race (and if you’re Mahirim, ESPECIALLY by your own race). You’ll only be safe near the Ork cities on the other side of the map (because, oddly, the Orks seem to be the most honourable players), but once you leave the NPC cities you’re screwed because Hyperion alliance owns everything and they do roam their territory. Last I checked, Hyperion owned the whole eastern half of the map (they believe in quantity over quality, and while you may have five way more skilled players than any in their 500+ army, you will die instantly when they lag the map your on with their obscenely unskilled army).

And guess what? Those guys promote themselves as being a Human-Mirdain-Dwarf alliance but they have Orks and Mahirim in their ranks too, so even in town you are not safe because they do the whole mass-army, easy-mode, All Race All Class (ARAC) thing that the game totally allows. There’s really no point to there being races or factions in Darkfall at all. You will get killed by your own race — a lot — and their friends who are supposed to be their enemies. How is that meant to be any fun for anyone?

On travelling, while it’s nice to have a huge world to explore, you can spend an hour trying to go from Mahirim towns to Ork towns only to be killed halfway and lose an hour of gameplay. Now, I used to be against insta-travel, and I think boats help a little with getting around (though the world doesn’t wrap around so you will hit an invinsible wall in the ocean), but it’s ridiculous that it takes about an hour of travelling alone to get to an enemy territory (unless you’re in Ork lands, just walk outside town and you’ll have a bunch of humans just waiting to gobble you up as if it’s their land already).

I didn’t mind the grindiness of skills until I hit about 50 points in any one thing (lesser magic, archery, crafting, etc), and it SHARPLY became more difficult to raise the skill. Nobody will buy products from you if you aren’t making skill level 75+ gear, so you’re constantly losing money and spending five hours a day trying to find resources (and trying not to die to the horde of ARAC clans at the same time).

Basically, the game is completely un-fun until your skills are maxed and even with macroing that takes ages. The devs had led us to believe it was so skilled-based, that like in Guild Wars, a lower level player who knew how to use his skills better than a higher level player (there are no levels in DF, just using this as example) that the playing field would be balanced. However, this is not the case at all, a great-magic fire attack only achievable in two months by macroing the skill 24/7, is going to totally kick your mana missile skill, any day of the week. Non-cheaters get the short end of the stick on a regular basis and while the devs were making it easier to report players, many of those players had cheats that allowed them to have names that are unreportable or were able to teleport before anyone could tell they were there cheating. The most skilled players, are ironically, the hackers, and it’s their game now. I would hate to be starting the game as a new player right now becaused you’d be griefed to no end by ARAC clans with hackers that just prey on the goody-two-shoe players.

Darkfall could have been a great game, but never have I seen so much exploiting and cheating in an MMO from day one onwards, not even in most Korean games has it ever been on this scale. If you like cheating, then you’ll love Darkfall, the code is so weak in it that it practically begs for it to be a hacker’s paradise. A shame too, the ideas behind the game were brilliant, but the players have turned it to a pile of crap, really fast.

The game was supposed to have way more depth then that but this is what happens when you put a bunch of people in a game that have never played UO or any other non-easy-mode game. This isn’t UO-esque at all, like it was marketed to be.

The Good
The RVR had been adjusted in the fact that XP and reknown rewards have been increased. I have managed to level the ruggedly handsome dwarf engineer seen above, from T2 to T3 relatively easy and only, yes only in RVR and some scenarios. The action is fast paced, exciting and never gets boring. I find at every log on there is something going on somewhere. Places to see, people to kill, you know the usual. You just have to look. I joined a guild a few days after my glorious return, which has helped me find groups much easier. There is a feature that every other game should steal right now. In the guild roster where the members are listed, on the same line as their name there is a little guild flag icon that shows up if the person is part of a group or warband. This is the great part, just right click on the flag and you have the option to join said warband if there is room. Done, insta-group. Yes done. I said done! The best part, they don’t even have to be in the same zone.

Once you character joins a warband, just head out and partake in RVR. The RVR influence system allows players to gain influence, similar to the Public Quests that can be used to purchase PVP gear. Every racial paring has its own influence. This provides another method to acquire gear without DKP, raiding and the other nonsense other MMO’s make a player do. A player can currently acquire gear through RVR influence, reknown gear in Keeps, or bag drops during Keep sieges. Anyone can get good gear in this game. Everyone has access. Allowing players such accessibility to good gear allows them to focus on the fun aspects of the game, RVR, Keep sieges, Scenarios. Mythic keep up the good work on this one!

The Bad
The PVP in this game is intense and fun there is no denying that. The drawback, the Achilles heel to Mythic’s WarHammer is server balance. If you are on a dead or dying server there is no action, no PVP, no RVR, nothing, nada, sorry your bored. One of the game’s greatest features is also its greatest failure. You need opponents. Without an enemy to fight the game is pointless, there is nothing else to do. This leads me to my next point.

The PVE in this game has broken the laws of quantum mechanics. The reason is because the PVE game sucks and blows at the same time. There are plenty of quests but do not expect WOW quality of quests. Something is missing from the quests. I can quite place my finger on it, but trust me they suck and blow. Don’t join WarHammer for PVE, come for the PVP and join a med to a high server.

The Crashed
This is the final deal breaker for WAR. The game has been out since last fall, and yet it still crashes consistently, and for most of the players. This is completely infuriating to have a game continue to have these issues so far after launch without any kind of acknowledgment from Mythic. Yes they have stated that they have corrected the ctd issue and crashing is down..blah blah blah. Bull! Mythic, your game still crashes. Don’t argue, don’t place a PR spin on it, fix it and fix it now.

The game crashes come in two flavors from what I have experienced, and what my group members and family members have gone through. The first is the common CTD, crash to desktop. This is when You are running or fighting..And then POP! You are looking at your desktop. No biggie, just sign back on, and you are good to go. Ok, again should not be happening but at least you can get back in rather quickly.

The second and worst kind of crash is the driver hammer. This is the worst kind of crash I have ever had. What is the driver hammer? I am glad you asked. This one can happen at any time. Basically WarHammer takes that big Hammer and applies it liberally to your video card drivers. Next your screen goes into a VGA mode notifying you that the drivers have stopped working. Your only solution is to reboot. Thanks driver hammer. Thanks. Luckily these crashes happen but not daily. I have the driver hammer happen once or twice a week, and the CTD about the same. Most people I have spoke to in game, agree that they crash but nowhere near where it was before. So there is some grain of truth to crashes going down. Not enough, not enough by any means.

Final Thoughts.
The game is fun, accessible and highly entertaining. I will gladly put up with the bugs and crashes at their current level for about a month. I cannot in good conscience pay for a game with constant crashes for a longer period of time. This game has a loyal player base, great PVP action and provides nonstop fun when located on a balanced server. I will look forward to trying the game again somewhere down the road. My time will be up in about two weeks, so until then WAAAGGGGGHHHH!

I’m sure over the last week or so you have seen the Evony ads everywhere, I know I have, there’s probably one showing right now.  Well after seeing them a million times or so I decided what the hell, I’m not playing any MMO right now, so I’ll go check it out.

Evony is a free 2 play browser based MMORTS game where you slowly build up your city and try to expand your territory.  The game starts you off with a empty town with only a Town Hall and it’s your job to build it up into a striving city, build an army and conquer additional lands.  Everytime you do anything in the game, build a structure, research a new technology, march your army, a timer shows up showing how long it will take.   So for instance creating a Barracks might take 5 mins, but every additional level will take longer and longer.  Currently my barracks is at lev5 so the next upgrade for me will take 1 hr 29 mins.

City Building

Evony restricts construction to 1 building per city, so even if you have the resources you cannot construct or upgrade more than 1 building at a time.  I’m actually a big fan of this system as it no longer depends on how long you play the game, instead it’s how often you play.   Checking up on the progress  a few times a day gets you much more than someone sitting there for 2 hrs straight.  There is no building queue, so you need to manually select and build or upgrade each structure yourself.

Each territory you own is split into two parts, the town and the city.  The town is made up of all residential, business and military building, such as the Town Hall, Market, Barracks, Academy, etc, and is protected by the castle walls.  The city is outside the protective walls and contains your resource buildings, farms, lumber mills, quarrys and iron mines.

It basically works like any other RTS game you’ve ever played.  You gather resources to construct or upgrade buildings, research technology, and to build an army.

City & Hero Management

Apart from just gathering resources and building/upgrading things, there is also city management.  I doesn’t get too complicated and you can learn everything you need to know in about 5-10 mins.  City Management deals with your tax rate, making sure your population remains loyal and assigning a mayor to your city.

Once you have created an Inn, you can hire a Hero unit who can either lead your army or become a Mayor.  Each Hero unit has 3 stats, politcs, attack and intelligence.  A hero with higher politcs means your cities resource production will be higher where as a higher attack means your army will have a higher attack rating.  Intelligence shortens the time it takes to research a new technology.  So you can see that some hero’s are better suited as a Mayor than as a General.

Once you have a Hero and army, they will start to eat up resources as well.  A hero must be paid a monthly fee and an army will need to eat so you’ll start losing food resources.  If you’re army is outside attacking you will lose food twice as fast, so you always want to make sure to return your troops as fast as possible once they have completed their mission.

As your city grows you will also gain Prestige points which is basically a rating of how well your cities are compared to other players.  You also have a Rank and Title, the higher the rank and title the more cities you can control.

Combat

Once you have created an army you’re ready to attack, however it’s important to scout the area first to find out the strenght of your opponent.  Once you have scouted the area, you’ll find out exactly how many and what type of troops are located there.  If you feel confident, you can then attack.

In the below image, I am attacking a open field to receive a bonus of 7% to my stone production for as long as I hold that field.

As fun as attacking people and NPCs is, the combat system is completely f*cked up and makes zero scense to the point that it almost ruins the entire game.  Allow me to explain.

Yesterday I attacked the same location twice because I was farming for reward medals. Medals are used to reward your hero or for promotion quests, which I’ll get into more later.  Here is the defending armys strenght on both attacks.

Enemy Army
142 Warriors (very weak unit)
32 Archers
48 Pikemen

On my first attack I had:

Attack 1
115 archers

I won the fight, but lost 65 archers.

Attack 2
25 Swordmen
20 Pikemen
115 Archers

The results?  I lost not only 65 archers, but all my swordmen and pikemen.  WTF?!   That makes no sense, how could a smaller army of only archers do better?  After a few more attacks I realized that melee units are 100% useless, they will only increase your casualties and waste your resources so I have been building archer only armies since.

I’ve also read on the Evony forums that there are major balance issues when attacking castle walls.  As far as I’m concerned the combat system is sh*t and needs to be completly redone.

Special Items & Medals

Evony use the microtransaction business model to make money, so there are many items you can buy, for real money, that will help you along in the game.  Items can range from things that subtract from build times, ranging from 15 min to 8 hrs to 30% reduction in build times.   Other items will boost production or combat effectiveness for a certain amount of time.  There are also medals that you gain from conquering land, these medals can be used to either boost your hero stats or to promote yourself via Promotion Quests.

Quests

There are quests in Evony, however they are progress only quests.  For example, your Town Hall reaches lev 5 or you obtained 10,000 prestige points.   I like to think of them as achievments instead of quests.

Conclusion

After a few days of playing I can say I’m enjoying this game a lot more than I thought I was going to.   Working infront of a computer all day, it gives me something enjoyable to do and doesn’t really take much time to play.  I have a dual monitor setup so I have Evony on one screen and can see when the timers run out so I can pick what I’m going to do next.  This is not a time-sink type of game, it’s sort of like checking your e-mail or Facebook a few times a day, 2-3 mins and you’re good to go.  But they do have to  fix the combat system, it’s retarded and can destroy the game if it’s not fixed in a resonable amount of time.

I am currently leveling 2 characters. The handsome dwarf you see above is my engineer. I just dinged 19 and I absolutely love the class. I can do decent damage, and I have many, many tricks to get out of trouble. Make no mistake if I am out of tricks I am as good as dead, but that’s part of the game. I am taking a small break from WOW just for this month to experience a break from PVE (WOW). The earlier levels for my Dwarf were somewhat tough, but the higher level he gets the more gadgets he earns, different types of grenades, and just trained landmines. Landmine is a very fun tool. Drop it near the enemy and it knocks all enemies down for 2 seconds in a 30 yard (feet? Not sure what the measurement is in WAR) range.

There is always action in the game. The server mergers have seen to that. It only takes a few minutes to join a warband for some good old RVR action, or join a scenario. The strength of the game is also its greatest weakness. If the server is dead or a slow night, well you just better log out. Let’s see if I can continue past a month. I will let you guys know.. So for now I am off to battle…Bloody Hell!

The beta server will be available to anyone, but is located in Europe, so that might mean slow connections for users else where in the world.

During the coming Beta Phases, users with a pre-order will be able to participate in the further development of the following features:

- The full Myrland continent
- At least 9 races, male and female
- Blood mix and character customization
- Main features of the skill system
- Full PvP, full loot
- Full melee and ranged combat
- Basic magic combat
- Mounts and mounted combat
- Basic GUI for the crafting system
- Resource gathering
- Basic Guild mechanics
- Basic player housing
- Basic NPC mobs and wildlife
- Hidden/secret features

There will also be 3 types of versions for purchase:

1. Digital Download Only
2. Boxed Version
3. Limited Edition (999 numbered copies)

Mortal Online is aiming for a Q4 2009 release.  The below screenshots were released today and are the newsest beta images of Mortal Online.  For more information checkout the official Mortal Online site.