Cav's Place

Was looking through newspapers a couple of days ago and saw an article which said that the open beta phase of Perfect World International had just started. Since I was bored enough, I said I might as well look to see what that’s about.
When I saw that it will be free to play I decided to make an account and actually try it out, even though me and MMOGs don’t get along well since I’m as much a loner in my gaming as I am in “real life”. Of course, free to play means “donation based”, they have to earn a living somehow, and I imagine that the benefits of the things you can buy with real money will be enormous, but you can at least toy around with it without spending anything, which is exactly what I intended to do.

Spent about five and a half hours downloading the 2.31 Gb client and had to open the archive with Windows Explorer since my WinRAR couldn’t handle it properly, but then it installed well enough. The next problem was the updating process, which you are required to go through before connecting, since it seemed that their servers decided to take a break just as it was finishing downloading the required files. I can’t know whether that was a crash or a scheduled reboot, but the timing was a bit annoying. Eventually the patcher decided to crash, so I had to restart it. But that was the only crash so far, so at least the client seems reasonably solid.
The next order of business was going through the graphics settings and making what I thought were pretty nicely balanced choices, considering my weak video card. Also noticed that some of the links on the patcher screen weren’t working. So, in order to be on the safe side, I told it to verify the installation and was greeted by a rather broken translation: “Progress will take longer time. Sure to proceed?” Don’t worry, though such broken English is what you’ve come to expect when it comes to translations from East Asian languages (especially Chinese – Perfect World International being the English version of a Chinese game), things are quite different once you are actually inside the game. Or, at least, I have only spotted a few mistakes so far…
I should also note that so far there are only two servers available, Heaven’s Tear for PvE and Lost City for PvP. The patcher also lists two others, Plume City and Etherblade, but they are greyed out, which probably means they will become available at a later time.

Once all of that was done, I started the game. The first thing to do was, naturally, character creation and customization. There are three available races and six classes, each race having two available classes, which can be summed up as warrior and mage, so your choice of class determines your choice of race. The Humans can be Blademasters or Wizards, the Untamed can be Barbarians or Venomancers, while the Winged Elves can be Archers or Clerics.
As you’d expect from me, I made a Wizard (on Heaven’s Tear, of course). That forced me to be Human, which I really don’t like, but I certainly wasn’t going to make a Cleric, which is the main party-based class, just to be an Elf! On the other hand, the Venomancers look interesting, especially since they are listed as the primary solo class. You could say they’re the game’s “special” class and the description says they are a “Hunter/Mage hybrid”. That sounds like a Warlock in World of Warcraft to me, but then again I don’t know much about that. Also from the description, they can tame animals to be their pets, can summon, use poison and their spells are mainly focused on weakening their enemies. They also have the Untamed ability of shapeshifting. That said, I might also make a Venomancer in the future, if I decide to stick around for a while, to try it out as well.
Next comes the character customization, which can get quite confusing due to the huge amount of options. You can customize pretty much everything. Not quite happy with how Calad’s face turned out, but I didn’t spend too much time on it. As long as his hair is long, white and straight, I’m good. (Why Calad? It’s the randomly-generated name of my Neverwinter Nights character, it came to mind and I thought I might as well use it since I suck at coming up with names.) The default gender for wizards is female (and, as a side note, they look damn nice), but in on-line games I say it’s better to play what you actually are.

The game itself seems to go smoothly enough, but to say that the interface and gameplay have been inspired from World of Warcraft would probably be an understatement. Not that I ever played World of Warcraft, but from all I’ve seen… They do say that the game isn’t just a translated version of the original, but “adapted specifically for North American players”. That’d explain it, they wanted to make it so World of Warcraft players would feel comfortable trying it. The story is completely different, however, being based on Chinese mythology. The appearance and names of the NPCs are also along those same lines.
The controls might take a while to get used to, or at least they did for me. You are told that you can use the W, A, S and D keys to move or just click on where you want to go. Don’t click unless you have a clear path to your destination. There are absolutely no waypoints, if you click on a place then your character will go there in a straight line, slamming right into the first obstacle in its path, if there is any. The help file also only mentions pressing F9 to be able to move the camera. However, a much better way to both move and change camera angles is available, though undocumented. Simply move the mouse while pressing the right button. This moves the camera and also allows you to move your character smoothly by just holding down one of the directional keys while you use the camera to steer. It is, of course, the way camera movement is usually handled in games, so it shouldn’t take a new player long to figure it out on their own.
The hotkey system could also be better. You only have two active action bars, one with eight slots and one with six, the keys for each being set to F1 to F8 and 1 to 6. Yes, overall you can have a lot of action bars and can switch between them with the click of a mouse, therefore changing what each of those 14 keys does, but you are still stuck with only a maximum of 14 actions showing up on the screen at once. They should have made more keys available for the action bars, making each of them have 12 slots, using F1 to F12 and 1 to +. They could also allow you to activate different bars by pressing Shift, Ctrl or Alt instead of clicking with the mouse. You won’t feel this need in the beginning, but it will become a problem as the number of skills grows.

Interesting how I only intended to write a brief note about this and it’s turning into a full review, including suggestions since the beta has just launched and there are plenty of things left to do and many bugs to sort out. Another post will follow, dealing with game mechanics and actual gameplay.