ill be moving and posting to my multiply site for now >>>> lunarmyst.multiply.com

Posted by Lunarmyst at 1:43 AM | 0 comments  

You might think that Nostale is like another RO clone but I think its way differrent. Character creation is simple; players chose their gender and one of two hair styles. After a brief cut scene, players find themselves in the beginner town and are guided via NPC dialogue through the tutorial. Experience gain is rapid during the early levels and like several other Korean games, there are two different levels in NosTale. The primary level is called ‘Combat Level’ while the second is called ‘Job Level.’ New players begin the game as the Adventurer class but will soon qualify to transfer to one of the three primary classes: Swordsman, Archer, or Sorcerer. Later, What is different about the game is the specialist cards players where players can transform to a more powerful class for a limited time for example is a swordman can change to crusader or blade for a time being

Combat and movement in NosTale is handled with the mouse while skills, potions and abilities are set to hotkeys on the keyboard. One great feature in NosTale is the ability to catch and train pets. Pets you catch fight along side you and can even be controlled separately. Though you can only have one pet with you at a time, the others you catch can be kept in your ‘mini land’ (more on that later.) Players also have the option of hiring a ‘Nosmate’ which is an NPC that levels up and can even be equipped. NosTale has plenty of quests to keep the grind moving. The main quest line is broken up into 4 Acts, each of which is quite length. Each Act in NosTale has multiple special instanced missions called ‘Time Stones.’ These stones are littered across the game world and clicking on one will take you into the instance. These missions can be completed alone or with a group. These Time Stones are useful and add content but I found their design repetitive.

NosTale may be a simple game on the outside but it does have its share of features. Every player has a special zone called their ‘mini-land’ where their captured pets roam and where they can construct houses and other buildings. Players can open private shops, and form families (guilds.) Surprisingly, NosTale also has a PvP element to it. By drinking a ‘battle potion’ a player leaves himself open to attack from others and there are scheduled PvP events around the clock. Lastly, NosTale has several raid zones which involve 15 person groups. Lastly, families with high level members gain access to special dungeons with level 70+ bosses which drop rare loot. NosTale is easy on the eyes and can be played by both casual and more dedicated gamers. There’s something in here for everyone so be sure to give it a try.

Rating 8.5/10

PROS: Instance Dungeons, Quest, Catch and train pets ,Unique class system involving cards, Players manage homes and land.

CONS: Lack of Customization

Posted by Lunarmyst at 1:06 AM | 0 comments  

What the Dev says about the game: a combo battle system where skills can be chained together; exotic mounts, such as trolls whose shoulders you can ride; open player-versus-player combat; and all the fun - or misery - that comes from grouping with other human beings. My experience was rather different.

It began choosing a race, which was between the warrior Tempskron or the magical Morion. classes are gender restricted. I picked Tempskron and decided on the male Fighter over the female Huntress, mostly because he grunted when we moused over him. Fighters can branch out and become Warriors or Combatants at level 10, before picking Violent, Warlord or Destroyer paths later on. After choosing our class I changed my look in a fairly limited, but nicely varied, character creator.

The first problem I faced upon entering the world was knowing what to do. Clearly there was no new-age 'lead you by the hand' design here. Eventually I stumbled into a quest-giver, got our first task, and felt at home enough with the familiar user interface to set about chopping up some mushroom men. Mission accomplished, I jogged back into the city, got my reward, bagged more quests and headed out again. And again. And so began my arduous night of slaughtering giant bunnies, wolves, armadillos, pixies and hunchbacks, then running back into to town to pick up more quests and do the same thing all over again. Another problem that I encountered is that weapons are overpriced at NPC's you can't even get a decent weapon and armors at your level

I got some new skills along the way, plus some slightly less tattered armour, but once resting between fights was added to the repetitive battles and monotonous slogs back to town, I began to lose hope. And all of this at just level 15 - But I simply couldn't face it. And why should I? Let alone settle for 60 levels of it.

We understand MMOs lead you into the meat of the game slowly in order for abilities and features to be grasped, but this was quite clearly design cast from the mould of old. It was oblivious to recent advancements in the genre, introduced to ease - rather than rely on - the grind to flesh out content.

Much of the high-level content demonstrated in Barcelona offered little more; the zones were barren and vast, with a mish-mash of uninspired monster types ambling aimlessly around as if waiting for someone to pick a fight with them. It could have been the starting area all over again, just with bigger statistics involved. If grouping was the star feature on show, I saw none of the teamwork expected of instances in World of Warcraft, and the player-versus-player combat petered out after the combatants proved too equally matched to make a dent on each other and decided to call it quits. Of all the features displayed, only the spunky combo system provided any real glimpse of differentiation.

Pristontale 2 is only in closed beta, but already the production values of a game with an experienced MMO developer behind it are plain to see. Those prepared to pour the hours in will have plenty to discover. The world lacks the instant personality and depth seen elsewhere in the genre, but Pristontale 2 is certainly a technical stride forward for the free-to-play crowd, and a game only the harshest of criticisms would warrant the curious not trying.

RATING:

I can't see any good points of the game

2/10

ADVICE:
AVOID

Posted by Lunarmyst at 12:51 AM | 0 comments  

well im kinda have a busy real life now so i rally have no time playing mmo's.. anyway I still played a couple of mmo's during the past months so im posting some reviews now

Posted by Lunarmyst at 12:48 AM | 0 comments  

The basic premise is your standard MMO, with a gaining levels, and "owning" up PVP being your goals. Unlike many common MMO's however, Cabal has a max level of 300+ (may be 400 now), and thus it takes a LONG time to beat the games PvE content (Player vs Environment).

An immediate plus you'll notice is the questing system, uncommon in many Korean games, Cabal offers quests at every level, and if you arent super lucky and speed through them(IE, find the super rare you need in the first kill), they generally fill up your entire level. These quests are a little deeper than standard MMOs though, because they follow a VERY WELL planned storyline, give the obvious gold and exp, but also give honor. Honor is gained from quests and killing people in the "war" server(open PVP, with no names on players), and honor is lost when crafting something difficult and failing, or killing random people in a non-war server.

The main focus on the quests of course is to progress through the story and get honor, as you can only start crafting at honor level 1 (about level 50 after doing the quests). The crafting system is quite nice, as EVERY weapon/equipment that drops (there is no shortage of these), can be turned back into the material used to create new weapons. Each of these crafting techniques have multiple levels of excellence, and give multiple bonuses. Such as creating a new helm that gives +3 exp per hit, or 1% life steal, and so on. So I'd have to give it an A+ in crafting, as its truly an addicting and rewarding part of the game.

Not only does every player craft, but there is also NPC alchemists, which add "force cores" to items with slots in them. These force cores give some random effects (some not so random also), and can greatly increase the use of a weapon/armor. Another exciting aspect of the game.

However, its time to get down to the not-so-nice aspects. First and foremost, the game has adjustable stat points(something VERY important to me in an MMO), so as to differentiate your character from the others. Yet, in what seems to be a contradiction, the game also has required stat points to "advance" a rank. (Every 10 ranks for the first 50 levels give you a special bonus, I'll talk about those later) These required stat points are so strict, that essentially everyone of the same class type has the same stats, making the stat point feature quite useless IMO. I did notice that it started to ease up a little at lvl 50+, (50 was the max level of the beta I participated in), but the first 50 levels easily ruined it for me.

A unique feature of this game is the fighting styles. Every class type has hte ability to combo (you recieve it at level 11), and provided you have enough skills, you can combo forever, unless all of your skills are currently delayed. The useful part about combos is that when using skills in combo mode, they have no after cast delay, and thus you can kill things very quickly. Each time you combo, its uses some of your combo points, and thus if you reach 0, you must gain more back. This can be done by hitting enemies normally or with skills. I mentioned before about every 10 levels granting you a new ability, well everytime you fill up your combo bar (up to 5 full bars at one time), you can activate these abilities, and they turn you into a killing machine. The archer for example gets to wield 2 guns and shoot 2 targets at once (quite neat). These modes keep the grinding fnu as you can always switch into "aura" mode and deal out some quick damage when in need.

This is an excellent feature for PvE, and one would consider it brilliant strategy for PVP. But..then comes the potting(using healing items). Not only do healing items heal instantly, they heal for a retarded amount of HP, and thus in PVP, as long as both parties are potting, the battle could go on for hours...until someone runs out of pots. Its not strictly pot's fault, the level of defence towards attacks is quite severe. Critical Hitting a monster may have done around 800 damage for my force archer, but deals a measly 76 on a human in PVP. And with pots healing for 400+ you hardly have to mash them to stay alive. So I'd giving CABAL's PVP rating a 2/10, as its absolutley pointless.

Last but not least comes skill points. These are attained ONLY through using the skills, which take MP, and they can be gained from hitting anything. One of my biggest complaints was the skill training, which is basically jamming your skill key in the keyboard down and hitting a training dummy all night(training dummies take 1 damage and days to kill). Thus when you wake up in the morning you have lots of new skill points to use. And there is no level requirement for using these skills. So you could have a level 30 character with "Grand Master" skills, something I assume was reserved for at least level 100+. To make matters worse, even WITH these grand master skills you still cant kill anyone in PVP.

Overall I'd give CABAL a rating of 5/10, from the brilliant PvE and new combat techniques, paired with a wonderful crafting system. It suffers dramatically from forced stat points, horrid PVP, and skill point abuse.

Rating:
5/10

Posted by Lunarmyst at 10:21 PM | 2 comments  

Hey all,

Its review time for one of this summer's hot games: "Requiem: Bloodymare", published by Gravity Co. and open beta started a few weeks ago. The website is located at: http://www.playrequiem.com/ but there is a caveat; the game will most likely be rated M or R and thus it requires you to be over a certain age to view the content (I believe its at least age 14). It is a P2P game.

So, now that we have the boring details done, what exactly is Requiem? It a MMORPG built on a horror theme, complete with flickering black loading screens, dark colors, blood, gore, and even a nightmare mode. The general premise is the same, be the best possible character in order to dominate in the PVP environment, more about this later. Lets get onto the actual review now:

The visual content of the game is as its name suggests, very gory. With each attack blood is sprayed in all directions and with each death body parts go flying while the corpse slowly falls to the ground and fades away. Not something that many parents, or females, would approve of but it makes combat somewhat exciting. Apart from the gore, the graphics are done in a very "dark" theme, and done well as you seem to get sucked into the moment when playing at night. I even looked behind my back a few times while playing, just in case something was coming to get me. . One note for the male players: Requiem puts a lot of uhh.."attention" on the bums/bosoms of their female sprites, they have gotten many compliments by players in game. Thats all I'll say about that.

The class system works much like the Ragnarok Online class system, with 6 base classes to choose from (two for each race) and then two specialized version of each base class (making a total of 12 specialized classes). If the past is any indication, I'd wager that each specialized class will have another upgraded class to change to in future expansions. I'd rather not list all of the classes, you can check the link for details though there is nothing unexpected, complete with warlocks, warriors, mages, and rogues.

The item and equipment system is done like most common MMOs, complete with randomized stat bonuses, a range of damage, an attack speed, and drop from random monsters. There is also an item enhancement system (much like crafting/upgrading) where one can add abilities, upgrade the damage/armor, or create new items. This works very similar to the crafting/upgrading system seen in other games, not much to talk about here. The only minor difference is that when participating in the large scale PVP battles you can win items/ingredients for use in this process. Overall I'd say the item system is slightly above average because of the wide variety of items, and the randomized nature of them; leading to a very active market place.

The skill system is somewhat unique in that you get skill points for each level, but you must use those skill points to buy a skill; not just select it from your list. This way its something like a cross between a WoW styled "buy this skill" system, and an RO styled "use skill point to upgrade a skill system". I do think this is the best way to do it, as it drains money from the economy, but does force you to think about which skill you want as you cannot get them all (you only have a limited number of skill points). The skill animations are well done and they appear to be balanced (although this can only be proved after a few months), so there isn't anything to criticize here. A bonus is that during the first 10 levels of being a novice character (no specialization chosen yet) the skills you use will be undone when you change jobs, so one does not have to worry about benefit of getting a skill now versus getting a stronger one later (like I did before I found this out).

One would think that since Gravity is involved it should include the key feature of their previous games (RO, ROSE): modifiable stat points. But, I was wrong, the game features no modifiable stat points, the only semblance of modification is in the DNA system (much like LOTRO's character traits system). The DNA system requires items to imbue into your DNA, which essentially makes it another piece of equipment that only affects your character. This was extremely disappointing because the game will, in the end, boil down to who has the best gear and thus who has the most time to play. But I cannot be all doom and gloom, the DNA is at least an improvement as it does offer some customization over your class (due to the wide variety of possibilities).

The "selling" or key features of the game revolve around its dark theme. The game goes through a daily life cycle in each game-day (shorter than normal days), complete with night time and day time. Certain monsters will only spawn in the morning or at night, but more importantly, at a specific hour the game world enters into "Nightmare mode". The screen will flicker black for a brief second, the music will get dark and mysterious, and then for the next while Nightmare monsters will spawn in various areas. These monsters are very very strong and require large parties to handle, but the spoils are quite worth it and thus during this time you'll see bodies of players strewn about the ground as they tried, but failed, to kill the nightmare monsters. The second key feature is the DNA system, in which you align your DNA helix(strand) to your liking, giving your strengths in certain areas, weaknesses in others, as you please. It requires DNA items and some in-game currency, but it can be quite entertaining.

The last key feature also deals with the bloody theme; it is referred to as the beast system, or possession beast system. Once you reach the required level, you can perform a quest that gives you the ability to transform into a nightmarish beast. The beasts strengths/attributes are determined by how it was created when you combined various pieces, or stones, of the beast system. There is a vast variety of possible combinations, and the combinations can fail; it is quite a lot of fun to play around with. Also the stones can be sold by other players, so one does not need to grind to eternity in order to find the neccessary pieces. Once you have the beast you want, whenever the hardcore gauge is full (fills by killing monsters) you can transform into the beast for a specified length of time.

The last topic on Requiem is the PVP system. It has an arena/WoW battlegrounds feel to it, as the modes range from 8 vs 8 to 96 vs 96 (massive). The winning team receives awards that are used in the crafting/upgrading system. It requires immense coordination, especially as you go from 32 vs 32 to 96 vs 96, to be successful. Somewhat related to this is the group/party system, where you and some buddies can enter an instanced group-only quest much like the dungeons in CABAL. I wasn't able to try this, so I cant say much on it.

RATING:
-- no status system
+ meaningful PVP system
++ beast system
+ nightmare system
- has a generic korean grind feel

7/10

ADVICE:
PLAY (if you like WoW or Lineage or those style of games)
AVOID (if you like RO or ROSE or those style of games)

Posted by Lunarmyst at 10:13 PM | 0 comments  

Pros: Smooth graphics. Great interface & map. Plenty of quests. Pets and mounts. Auto-walk feature. Keyboard and mouse movement. Extensive PvP system.
Cons: Sloppy text translations. Confusing quest instructions. Limited customization. Slow grind, must rely on quests.

Posted by Lunarmyst at 9:57 PM | 0 comments