The 10/10 project: Wurm Online (Day 7)

Game number 7 for the 10/10 Project was Wurm Online. Even though the game officially released on December 12, 2012, this is not a new game at all. According to its wiki article, development began back in 2003 and people could start playing it in 2006. Notch, the maker of Minecraft, was also one of the developers of Wurm Online.

I had tried out the game at some point last year, but that hardly counts as I had to quit after maybe 5 minutes or so due to simulation sickness caused by the game being in first person view. In the meantime, I have learned that I can deal with it better if I make sure that there’s enough light in front of the PC, but the biggest help is to put mouse sensitivity as low as possible. In Wurm Online, it’s not just a slider in the options, though. You need to open the console (via the F1 key) and then enter “sensitivity 2″. Well, you can use any number between 0 (nothing happens when you try to move the camera with your mouse, though) and 10. 1 was too slow for me, but 2 worked perfectly. With that done, playing was no issue at all.

Installing the game, on the other hand, was a bit of an issue. It somehow got uninstalled after installing it the first time. I have no idea what I did (and I usually do know that, even if I may come across as clueless sometimes ^^), but the installation folder was empty. Gone. So I reinstalled, but the game couldn’t be launched. Then I deleted the folder and used a different one to install the game again. That finally worked.

Was the game worth all the hassle and the risk of feeling sick again? Yes, yes it was! Wurm Online did not feel like a game, but more like an adventure and I loved every minute of it.

You start the game with a few basic items like a pickaxe and then you’re thrown into a foreign world – okay, not that fast. You start with a tutorial that teaches you the basics. Seeing how this game is a bit more complicated than your average MMO, the tutorial was rather long with lots of text to read. Most of the items in the game are crafted. The buildings are all built by players. You get basics like clay, cotton, water, but the rest is up to you and the rest of the players. You cannot just go somewhere and buy a pottery flask to carry water with you. First, you need to find clay, then you make a clay flask, then you need to find a stove, oven or campfire (which were made by other players or made by you) and turn the clay flask into a pottery flask. On top of that, you need to be careful where you go as there are hostile mobs around. The Wurm Online Wiki will be your best friend, especially in the very beginning.

But let’s get right into my adventure. Here I was, just freshly finished with the tutorial. I decided to join a non-PvP server. Hey, I have trouble understanding the basics of the game, the last thing I need is having to deal with hostile players on top of that! Independence it was, then. It sounded like a nice enough name for a server. Apparently, you can travel to other servers and play on there, but I haven’t tried that out.

Guides for starting out in Wurm Online said that I should try to find an empty space where I could settle. Let me spoiler you already: I did not find anything. ;) Independence was built on by other players as far as I could see. So I tried to just find a corner where I could start crafting or do something. Food and water aren’t needed to survive per se as you won’t die without them, but it’ll still give you serious disadvantages if you’re starving or getting really thirsty. Food wasn’t the problem, since you can always forage or botanize grass. This resulted in several kinds of berries that I could eat. I decided to stay close to the water to drink whenever I got thirsty. Since a pottery flask allows you to store water, I tried to make one. The first step, as mentioned above, is to find clay, which I did, lucky me! ;) Then I needed wood for a campfire or find an oven I could use, but the trees all belonged to other players and I wasn’t allowed to use any of the ovens I saw. If something belongs to you, you can choose whether others can use it or not and it seemed like nobody allowed strangers to use their stuff.

For the most part, there were no mobs around. So I felt safe – until I ran right into some wolves. I kept on running, hoping to get away from them which I eventually did – only to run right into an old angry troll. The result was a few wounds, nothing big. I tried to figure out how to heal myself, though. While doing that, I also remembered that the tutorial said something about water and that most animals/enemies won’t follow you into the water. I guess I should have tried that instead of running from the wolves right into the troll. After asking for advice on Google+, I was told that I should try to treat the wounds as they would get worse over time if they’re bad enough. I had been told about that in the tutorial as well, but of course, I had forgotten about that. After checking, I could confirm that one of my wounds was a lot worse than it was in the beginning and had turned into a severe one. At that point, I only tried to find a cure as I knew it wouldn’t heal and it kept taking away life from me. Again, the Wiki is your best friend in a situation like this and it told me what I needed for some healing covers. I finally found some items I needed by foraging grass. Unfortunately, the first try failed. I managed to use healing covers on one wound when I tried again, but as I wrote, the second one had gotten severe already. The others were at medium, one light wound had healed. I decided that staying in the open hostile world was too dangerous and I had read somewhere that there are usually resources near the starting area where you spawn after the tutorial. I figured this would be the safest place for now. Besides, healing covers are nice, but the ones I had weren’t strong enough to heal the wound and it meant that without treatment, I would die soon.

Finding your way around in Wurm Online isn’t too easy either. There are no maps in this game! I had a compass which didn’t help me much as I hadn’t been paying attention to it earlier. I looked for online maps and found one. The maps you find online are all maintained by players, by the way. I knew the general direction I had to walk to then to get back to the starter area, so off I went. I did not run into the first pack of wolves anymore, but instead, I found another one. Hurrah. With less life thanks to the wounds, I did not want to risk running into them. I remembered that water was probably safe and decided to swim around them. You can swim, but only for a limited amount of time. The longer you swim, the lower your stamina (which equals your “life”) gets. If your stamina is at 0 and you’re still in the water, you will drown. Unfortunately, the more wounds you have, the lower your stamina. I misjudged the amount of stamina it would take to swim by and the result was that I chose death by drowning over death by wolves – and over death by my severe wound. It was a slow, rather embarrassing end. Luckily, I was revived at the starting area. Unfortunately, I had lost quite a few of my starting items (including the compass) that are or were still in my body. I tried to find the location of my body on the online map, but the place that I had memorized was not mentioned there. I only know vaguely where I died. Oh well, c’est la vie. ;) That’s when I decided to ignore it and start fresh.

My second attempt had me going the other way trying to find some resources and I avoided all wolves and trolls this time. There was a starter village or whatever it is, which is player-made as well, I assume, but at least, there was a public mine and there was even an oven that you’re allowed to use. A lot more welcoming! Sadly, I did not have the clay with me anymore and I couldn’t find any. Ironic, isn’t it? And there was still the issue of not being able to find an empty space to call my own and settle. That’s when I decided to end my trip to Wurm Online.

All in all, I haven’t been able to build anything in the game apart from a clay flask and healing covers. I did manage to raise a few of my skills like botanizing and foraging, but nothing else. And yet, I’ve had a lot of fun! I don’t know what the game is like when you’re playing for a longer time, but the hours that I did spend in the game were great and I enjoyed it. I always felt terribly lost, the Wurm Online Wiki was open all the time and used heavily. Still, it was a welcome change to the usual MMOs and I actually like digging into something like that. Not being able to just buy everything at vendors but having to rely on the player economy and crafting is something that I really love and I always hope that the “more mainstream” MMOs adopt this feature as well.

The 10/10 project: Age of Wushu (Day 6)

The 6th game for the 10/10 project was Age of Wushu. This game released on April 10, 2013, with its US publisher Snail Games. It’s been released in China last year. European publish gPotato will probably follow later this year, in case you are waiting for a German or French version – or for a lower ping. The game is called Age of Wulin in the European version.

The gold spam was quite annoying…

Just like Dark of Age Camelot, Age of Wushu also gave me a bit of trouble when it came to my mouse. It simply refused to accept the mouse clicks for the camera view/rotation. I could move while  using the arrow keys to let me change the camera view to look left and right (and move left and right), but that was still too inconvenient, especially as my right hand is on WASD and can’t switch to the arrow keys easily. ;) After having problems with my mouse before, I came prepared this time and had a symmetric mouse ready. This setup worked perfectly.

The customization options for my character were disappointing. I am not talking about how all the settings always make your character look Asian, no matter what you do. This game is set in China, so what do you expect? I did see people complain about that, though, so I thought I should mention that this is not the case here. But there were just very few hair styles, no body options, etc. If you’re into heavy customization and if you really want to look different from the other characters, be prepared that Age of Wushu does not give you this possibility. At least not in the character creation menu. It may be possible by adding costumes.

Age of Wushu is an open pvp game. This means that you can attack and kill every other player in the game. Before you set foot into the game world, you are warned about that fact and need to click on OK to enter the game. So no complaining afterwards, you were warned! I personally do not like open world PvP at all, but I still wanted to have a look at the game. For the whole time I’ve been in the game (a few hours on three different days), I haven’t been attacked once. The system they set up seems to be a good one that discourages mindlessly ganking others… or maybe attacking others just wasn’t possible in the extreme newbie area.

What I absolutely loved about the game were the graphics. The scenery around you is very pretty. I started out in a town (I’m not sure if every character starts in the same place, as you choose a background story in the beginning and this may change where you start). For the first few hours in the game, I have only killed 4 animals to get food for a quest. Other than that, it was combat practice (this is a martial arts game and you start as a beginner) and getting the game explained.

You can gain experience while being offline.

When you go offline, lots of things can happen. As is usual for games nowadays, there is a wiki about the game and it explains what happens when you go offline. This includes your character working as an NPC and when you log on again, you receive the money the character has earned in the meantime. There are also disadvantages: For example, your character that appears as an NPC when you’re offline can be kidnapped by other players. Anything you would have earned normally while being offline gets lost for you. No money for jobs your character did, for example. This is both exciting and annoying for me. While it certainly makes the world feel more alive and immersive (possibly with the exception of characters with horrible names), I also don’t like having something taken away from me without me being able to do anything against it, apart from being online 24/7 which probably wouldn’t work too well either. ;)

What I liked was when I walked into an NPC, they turned around and told me off for being rude. That’s a nice little touch there.

Joining the Wudang

The combat system is something I have not been able to look at too closely in the time I spent in the game. Most of my time was spent reading, looking around, trying to figure out where I am and what I’m doing. You start with your character that doesn’t have a certain class. There are eight schools in the game and it doesn’t take long until the tutorial asks you to join one. I joined Wudang. I chose this school because in the description, it said something about defensive skills and the ability to survive. What I wondered was whether that means that all Wudang characters are basically more “tanky” characters than those of other schools and if that meant that I basically choose a “class” by choosing a school. At this point, the game and its tutorial don’t do a good job in explaining it.

Your character does not have a level per se. Instead, you level up your skills by cultivating and here, team practice is apparently the best way to go. You do that with other players. I haven’t done it myself, so I don’t know what it’s like, but I watched a friend and it didn’t seem difficult to do. Just seemed a bit boring while he was waiting for everybody to be ready and start. Using internal cultivation is only good for as long as you are logged in as it gets paused when you log off, unless you are VIP by buying a monthly sub in which case internal cultivation continues after logging off. Internal cultivation starts out fast, but it goes up to several hours for each skill pretty fast. If it only works while you’re logged in, it’s just not too efficient.

I did get to fight a bit in the tutorial quests as there were teachers that showed me certain moves. The game features active blocking, for example. Another fun thing is that you get flying skills. The combat felt alright. But again, I was a bit confused about where and how to choose which skills I want to have/use.

Being “confused” is probably the feeling I’ve had for most of my playtime. Age of Wushu is not a horrible game at all. On the contrary! There are some really good features. If you like the kidnapping system or not, it’s at least something that you don’t see in every other game out there. But I could tell pretty fast that this game is not for me. I play games to relax and have fun. Being constantly vigilant because another player could be out there to attack me is not what I call fun. I knew about that before I gave it a try, so I’m not complaining here. By trying out the game, I simply confirmed that I still do not like open pvp like that. ;) On top of that, I have the feeling that I would have to invest too much time into the game. Time that I would rather spend on several other games instead.

I did, however, tell bookahnerk’s cousin about the game who has 9 accounts by now, so he can see everything, try out all the crafting professions, and so on. The game only allows you to have one character (per server, I think?). His cousin digged into the game, read all he could find about it and he’s been telling us about the game and how great it is. He loves open pvp and for him, this game is perfect. Oddly enough, what he loves isn’t even that it has open pvp (he still loves that fact, of course), but everything around the game. The features like farming in the game, that your character needs to eat and drink and that the food is made by players exclusively, the combat system and so on.

The 10/10 project: Champions of Regnum (Day 5)

My fifth day of the 10/10 project brought me to “Champions of Regnum“. This is a free to play MMORPG with a focus on RvR (open world PvP, so to say) with three factions. It was originally released in 2007 according to the Wikipedia entry. I noticed it some time after it was released on Steam on February 27, 2013. It features open world PvP in specific (open) areas of the map with three different factions. This, of course, reminded me of Warhammer Online. I know that Dark Age of Camelot was earlier with 3-faction PvP and Champions of Regnum is actually older than WAR, but WAR is the only one of those three that I ever really played. And I loved the idea and lots of their concepts (not the execution, though). So I was excited to try out Champions of Regnum.

Let me tell you that I have not tried the PvP in CoR yet. So if you’re looking for information about that, you need to go elsewhere. A few hours were not enough to dip my toes into PvP. One thing that I think isn’t as good as WAR which let you enter PvP as soon as you were done creating your character. But maybe it’s the same in CoR and I just didn’t get to do it because I had no idea it works. ;) The region that I was in at the beginning, however, was a safe zone. But let’s start at the beginning…

The installation was fast and smooth, just as most game installations are that go through Steam. I created an account and noticed the little “Gamigo” icon on the game’s launcher. I don’t know if I could have logged on with a regular Gamigo account, I didn’t try that. After registering a new account, I logged on and saw that there was exactly one server, Valhalla, with “(Germany)” at the end. Some Googling followed and I learned that apparently, the game is IP-locking you to a certain region. Since I’m in Germany, I only saw Gamigo’s German server. They also have a French one. Without changing anything in the game’s client settings, I could not change my server. There is some information about how to do that in this thread on Steam’s forum. Anyway, I played on the German server. It was nice to see people greet each other in the chat – or rather, greet the faction. It seemed cozy.

As I mentioned, there are three factions. One, Alsius, had a bonus of 25% extra XP and extra gold earned. Ignis gave a 10% bonus to XP gain. Syrtis has no bonus. I assume that’s because Syrtis has the highest population, but it wasn’t explained anywhere. I would have liked to get more information than that. I would also have loved to be able to change the resolution before continuing. The graphics settings can only be changed after entering the game. Also, if you do change the graphic settings and it’s something that requires a restart, my client tried to restart but crashed. Those were the only crashed I encountered, though.

Back to the factions: I googled once more and found this forum post. Alsius has dwarfs, so I really wanted to play those! The wiki entry also mentioned that Syrtis start in a forest area. I did not want to play Syrtis, though, because it looked like they already were the biggest faction and even for just trying out the game, I did not want to do that. Also, elves. No, thank you. Alsius start in a snowy area, but since it was still freezing here in real life last weekend, I really did not want to see any more snow, even if just in a game. So, Ignis with their desert region was my choice. All three factions’ race choices can be previewed, by the way. Only when you have created a character, you are locked to this faction unless you delete all your characters which then makes you able to choose a different faction (at least, I assume you can re-choose your faction then). All three factions have the “Lamai” race (which can be seen in the screenshots below). They reminded me a bit of asura from Guild Wars 2, so I chose one of them.

One weird thing I noticed in quest hubs was some “clicking” noise that appeared irregularly. It was definitely annoying especially when you can’t figure out where it’s coming from and how to stop it. I realized what it was after a while: It can be heard whenever the NPCs have a bunny-ears-helmet appear. Yes, a bunny-ears-helmet. It disappeared again after a few seconds with no noise. This is, of course, not relevant to the gameplay, but it was very strange and distracted me from the game quite a bit. ;)

The game does a good-enough job at introducing you to the movement controls, how to accept, do and finish a quest, what the NPCs are for, etc. What I did not see was an explanation about the discipline points, etc. that you get for earning a level. Maybe I missed it, though. It was at my warrior trainer (I chose a warrior which shouldn’t really surprise my regular readers as some kind of heavy melee fighter is usually my first choice) and I remember that I did have a quest that introduced me to the warrior trainer.

If you want to know more, there is a “how to play the game” section in the options which gives you information about several topics including PvP. I only got to level 6 or so and up till then, there was no mentioning of PvP in the basic tutorial quests. It’s nice that there is the option, though, and that you can read about aspects of the game whenever you need this information.

The controls were explained quite well, but there wasn’t that much to explain anyway. W and S for moving forwards and backwards. You can also click on the ground to move. A and D are for strafing left and right which was nice, because I always re-bind my keys to do exactly that. I’m a mouse- and not a key-turner. You can jump in this game unless you are on a mount. Also, when you are on a mount and get any kind of damage (like falling damage), you are dismounted immediately. I assume this was done with a focus on PvP balance. Mounts make you faster, but they limit the terrain you can move on by now allowing you to jump and if you’re hit, you’re without a mount immediately.

The user interface doesn’t give you a lot of choices. I want my character portrait at the lower part of the screen and close to the centre. Especially in PvP, I look at my character most of the time and I appreciate not having to move my eyes away from my character to spot how much life I have left. But as far as I know, I was not able to move any of the windows to any other positions.

The gameplay itself was standard questing. If you’ve played World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings Online or any other MMO that features quests, you know the deal. As I said in the beginning, I have not tried any of the PvP. Since this game is mostly about PvP, I guess this “first impression piece” is missing an essential part. ;) But as the project says, devote a few hours to the game and report about it. Now it’s time to move on to the next MMO.

I can say, however, that taken everything together, the game did not impress me. The graphics aren’t good or up-to-date (the game is from 2007, after all), but I liked the reflections in the water and all in all, it set a good desert-y atmosphere. The movement and controls seemed a little off at times. The UI is a bit too restricted when it comes to letting you move windows. The quests aren’t anything special either. And yet… I can’t bring myself to say it’s a bad or even a boring game. There was something about the game that drew me in. I can’t even say what it was. Maybe it is because I haven’t had the chance yet to test any of the RvR or PvP. This is what made me interested in the game in the first place and this is what I still haven’t seen. The map and the conversations in the faction chat made me curious, though. I’m certain this wasn’t the last time I logged in.

I’ll end this blog post with a few screenshots I took which give a pretty good picture of the region I played in. And I tried to find some good videos about the game on YouTube, but I wasn’t able to find many.

Here’s a video that was uploaded by the developers. It shows a mage (I think? I didn’t play that class) in RvR. Ignore the bad music choice. I have no idea why they added this song, as in my opinion, it just doesn’t fit to RvR combat action. Also, the animations/movements of the character “freeze” during combat. I didn’t experience that when I played, but maybe it’s different when there are more characters on the screen.

Here’s another YouTube video, this time not by the developers. I only watched the beginning, so I have no idea what they’re saying later on. But I liked the beginning (cute laughs there).

Part of the “How to play” section that explains the RvR

UI: Buy/sell window, inventory and character panel

Achievements tab

Discipline and power points to specialize your character.

Ignis. One of the three factions in the game.

Cute and a bit like asura.

World map… I think?

The 10/10 project: Dark Age of Camelot (Day 4)

I chose Dark Age of Camelot which was released in 2001 to be the 4th game I would play for the 10/10 project. I played Warhammer Online for a full year when it got released and I’d heard so many good things about Dark Age of Camelot from WAR players. I guess just as much as current Guild Wars 2 players hear about Guild Wars. Warhammer was thought to be DAoC’s successor, at least in spirit. But WAR only has 2 realms whereas DAoC has three. Well, there are many differences between those two games, but the debate of 3 factions vs. 2 factions was and still is pretty popular. I think it’s better with three factions, but unfortunately, a lot of game designers prefer two factions. But well, this isn’t about the question how many factions a game should have, after all. This is about DAoC and that game has three.

Even though it’s a very old game, DAoC still has a sub. You can sign up for the 14 day trial which I did to try out the game. I knew from the beginning that no matter how good the game is, I would not sub to it in the end. There are so many other good games out there where I don’t need to pay every month if I don’t want to, so it’d be a waste of my money.

The installation process was fast and smooth. There were no issues at all. After launching the game, the first thing I did was rejoice that it lets me play in windowed mode. I use two monitors and alt-tabbing out and in is annoying. I like to use the second monitor for chatting with friends who don’t happen to be playing the same games (or any games) at the same time. Unfortunately, I soon realized that the window was tiiiiny. And no matter what I tried, I couldn’t resize the window to the size of my screen. I’m going to go ahead a bit and tell you that this is only a problem for the very beginning until you’re finished with character creation. Once you log in with your character, the window changes and had the size of my screen. If I had known that before, it would have saved me 10 minutes of playing around and googling. ;)

The character creation is nice. The graphics show the age of the game, of course. There are lots of races (who belong to three different realms: Albion, Hibernia and Midgard) and classes to choose from. As the game has female dwarves, that’s what I tried out. I just can’t resist. ;)

Within less than 10 minutes of playing, I had encountered a few bugs and problems and that’s when I decided to quit playing. The tutorial is good enough to get you started, but something about the controls and movement was weird. I am not a key-turner and prefer turning with the mouse. Unfortunately, when I tried to do so, I kept looking at one direction and moving to another. At one point, my character got stuck and I couldn’t move at all, no matter what I did. I don’t remember how it got fixed… I think I relogged, but I’m not sure.It was weird, though, as it just happened without me doing anything or moving somewhere and it’s never good if that happens to a player within the first few minutes after starting the game.

I also wanted to move the different parts of the UI around on my screen and ended up with every single window at the same place – right next to my character at the center of the screen (see the screenshot on the left for an early stage with lots of windows stuck there while I tried to figure out what’s wrong). It took me quite a while and I even installed the game on bookahnerk’s PC to test what’s wrong. We finally figured out the source of the problems. I am a left-hander and I have the Razer DeathAdder left-hand edition. This is an ergonomic mouse for left-hander which, unfortunately, comes with the left and right mouse buttons switched. While I do need to use the mouse with my left hand (trying to use it with my right hand results in very slow movements and a headache plus concentration problems), I do not want to have the buttons switched. I grab a mouse, move it from the right side of the keyboard to the left and use it with my left hand. But that’s about the only thing I change when I’m using the PC of a right-hander.

Now in order to do that with the DeathAdder, I have to use the Windows controls to switch the left and right buttons back. Confusing? Yeah. ;) Most of the games do not have any issues with that. League of Legends is one that blatantly ignores the Windows settings which means that my mouse buttons stay switched. I think Torchlight 2 does that as well. Games like Warhammer Online, Guild Wars 2, Lord of the Rings Online don’t do it and just go along with the settings I chose in Windows. That means that the mouse is in my left hand. I use the physical left button with my middle finger to left-click and the physical right button to right-click with my index finger.

DAoC is special. Most of the controls, movements, etc. listen to the Windows settings (like right-clicking an NPC to talk to them), some ignore it (like moving the camera view with the mouse) and… the UI windows apparently listen to both. I left-click and I can kind of move the window but instead of… moving it, it gets repositioned at the center of the screen as the second command it listens to is “hide the cursor in the middle of the screen and look around with the camera”. – That’s probably a very bad explanation. Bookahnerk explained it a lot better to me once he had realized what went wrong. The bottom line, however, is that whenever I accidentally click on a window, it gets repositioned to the center of the screen and the only way to reliably get it away from there again is to go to the Windows controls, switch the mouse buttons, move the window away again, switch the mouse buttons back and continue playing.

That’s a very long-winded and, as I said, probably confusing explanation for: No, thank you. ;)

The good news about this game is that the starter zone wasn’t empty at all. So it seems that there are still people playing the game (you never know with such old games). But the monthly fee as well as the issues with my mouse mean that I am not interested in this game.

The 10/10 project: Pirate101 (Day 3)

I have played (well, tried out, rather) Wizard101 before and expected Pirate101 to be more or less the same just in a pirate setting instead of the wizarding school. I was mostly right, it seems. The graphics reminded me a bit of Torchlight 2 – and of Wizard101, of course.

My first impression of the game was: “Awww, that’s cute!” It does give you the impression of being a game that’s primarily aimed at young gamers, though, especially with the security settings. You cannot create a character and give it any name you like. You get three parts and a wheel of choices for each part. My character’s name is “Practical Sonia W…something”. I forgot the last part. And that’s the bad thing about a naming system like that: I just chose anything because what I would have loved to create was a “Paeroka”, but that wasn’t possible. So there’s very little attachment to the name on my side. On the other hand, it also means that you won’t see any ridiculous or offensive names.

No free naming and the option to disallow chat are two things that I’ve seen in Pirate101 which probably only exist to make it a kid-friendly game. I’ve seen both in Wizard101 as well. When the chat option is active, you cannot chat and you cannot see anybody else chatting. You can use preset text like “Thanks”, etc. Others see a chat bubble that’s striked through next to your character’s name, so they know you can’t converse with them. As I’ve told bookahnerk, I could see myself play this game with a young sibling, my kid, etc. – if I had any. ;)

In general, I like the pirate setting. It’s definitely different from the usual fantasy stuff, but not that different in the end. You can only play as a human, but the game world has lots of races like froggies, foxes, and so on. So there’s definitely fantasy in there. The story was interesting enough, nothing too special or ground-breaking, but solid I’d say. At least, I did actually read what it’s all about. They mentioned “when you get your own ship” a few times. I haven’t gotten one yet, but I assume sooner or later, that would be the case. And the shop clearly shows items for your ship. Yes, it’s a free to play game with an item shop and the possibility to pay for a monthly sub. There are also weapons, etc. in the shop, but I’ve no idea if it’s “pay to win” or just “pay to avoid the item-grind”. What the shop website shows you is the there are regions/extra content you can unlock (a bit like they do it in Lord of the Rings Online, I guess, where you buy regions with their quests) or you can buy a membership starting at $9.95 a month. The good news is that after playing the game for the limited time that I have, I did not see one single advertisement for or nudging towards the shop. Yes, the shop icon is there and I did click on it to see what they have. But I did not notice any tooltip informing me of something like “this is restricted for free players, please subscribe or buy X unlock to use this”.

Speaking of the story, a nice little feature I saw was that after logging back into the game, I got a short recap of the quest chain’s story so far. That was neat. All in all, the tutorial (I assume it’s still part of the tutorial) has a nice flow. You’re told everything you need to know to get around in the game as it comes and you slowly get in touch with all the game’s features. I don’t like games that overwhelm you with information within the first few minutes on the game and that doesn’t happen here. On the other hand, it also doesn’t feel too slow. You’re playing the game, you’re advancing in your story and little by little, you get more information on how everything works.

The combat in the game is not your usual combat. You freeze in place and the camera moves until a game board appears with you and your companions on them as well as any other players and their companions who may walk into the combat area. Then you choose which field you move onto or, if you’re close enough, which foe to attack. The fighting scenes are animated, but you have no control over what happens. It makes it quite strategic. You also have a special ability (only one in the beginning, but it looks like there’ll be more when you level up higher) that you can use once during such a fight. Your companions also have special abilities and you can also tell them to use them once in a fight. Each fighting round, there’s a timer counting down. You need to decide for your moves while the timer counts down. If you haven’t done so in the end, the combat moves into the next round and you’re just not doing anything at all. That happened once when I got distracted and forgot that there’s a timer. The foes, however, still attack you in that round. ;)

You can level up your own character as well as your companions. You can decide for those special combat abilities as well as choose them for your companions (I think). And then you need to choose which of your companions is “first mate” which means that this companion is the one you see walking by your side through the game world. This companion will also be the one who fights by your side in every combat. Sometimes, you get more than one companion, though. I’ve only had two so far, so I don’t know how many you can have by your side. In my case, it was obviously a maximum of two. ;)

When you’ve lost hit points during a fight, you do not just regenerate health afterwards. There are flying red thingies (are they supposed to be fruit?) that you walk into and they regenerate a bit of your health. They’re around everywhere but they’re not so common that you can just mindlessly walk anywhere without a worry. And during a combat, you don’t regenerate health. But the fox companion has a heal that you can use once during a fight. That’s saved me before. ;)

The game’s refreshingly different, but a tad too kid-like for my taste. That is just my first impression, though, and a lot of things hint at the game being more complex. I’ve enjoyed my time in the game, but at the same time, I’m not too sad to move on. Maybe I’ll have a look at it again later on, maybe not. If I did, I probably wouldn’t bother with the membership fee and just play the game for free.

This was the third game for this project. The fourth is already installed and calling for me: Dark Age of Camelot! :)

Edit: Syp has written about Pirate101 as well now. Hop over there if you want to read about his experiences in the game.