Perfect World International – II
I said there will be another post about it, so here it is.
When it comes to game mechanics, it’s pretty simple once you get the hang of it. Move around, get quests, complete quests, kill enemies, learn skills, gather ingredients, craft items, maybe join a guild, the usual drill. It can get pretty hectic in the fields where there are many enemies though, since there can be many battles going on at once, some monsters attacking on their own, others deciding to switch targets, players stepping on each other’s toes… I guess that’s regular fare for MMORPGs… I for one get completely confused in squads, or at least I did the few times I’ve been in one, but that might be just the fact that I’m not cut out for multiplayer.
One very basic thing that should be noted, however, is what will initially appear to be a bug. Not only that you can jump very high, but you can string together two jumps, jumping again while in the air. You can also sometimes stand on thin air when moving off irregular peaks. It’s obvious that this is a feature because one of the first quests you get specifically requires you to make full use of it.
While with each level gained you earn five skill points which you can distribute as you wish among the four main attributes (vitality, strength, magic and dexterity) from the character screen, learning skills requires you to find the respective trainers. Such training costs both money and spirit, which is how one starts to need to make choices as time passes. You receive spirit for almost anything that gives you experience. In the beginning you will be able to learn all skills and still have spirit to spare, but both the number of available skills and the spirit cost for learning each of them will be higher and higher as you level up. Still, this allows for a reasonable degree of freedom in advancing your character. It would be interesting to see if there are ways to optimize your spirit-to-experience ratio, since at first I noticed that the spirit I earned was more than a third of the experience I earned, while now, at level 24, it seems to be about one fifth. Dying can be useful in that aspect, since when you die you lose some experience, but not spirit.
Class skills become available at certain levels and can be upgraded after that, with each rank also becoming available at a certain level. But there is another thing that you need to keep in mind when it comes to skills, namely the spiritual cultivation, as class skills also have such requirements. There are quests, unlocked at certain levels, which you’ll need to complete in order to advance your spiritual cultivation and therefore become able to learn better skills. (Achieving a new spiritual cultivation level also gives you a large amount of spirit, which is very useful since several new class skills are unlocked at that moment.)
Crafting skills, on the other hand, are trained by using them. You can learn and advance all four of them, but spirit costs mean you’ll need to make a choice eventually. For the lower levels, except the first, all you need to do is craft ten items requiring that specific level and then go to an elder to train for the next level. For the higher levels (and also the first one) you’ll need to complete a quest before you are eligible for further training. Items can only be crafted at the respective shops and they require materials. Some materials drop from monsters, others can be gathered from the world and yet others need to be crafted themselves. Gathering materials from the world is simple, all you need to do is have a pickaxe in your inventory and you will be able to gather anything, from plants to metal, but you need to be a certain level before you can gather each type of material.
There are also other skills available, which I guess I’ll find out more about if I’ll keep playing. I know there is a flying skill that becomes available for Humans and Untamed after a quest that they receive at level 30. On the other hand, the Winged Elves can fly from level 1.
Each race starts in a different area, but all will be called to Archosaur, the capital, at level 21. You don’t need to get there right away, of course, but there won’t be much to do around the starting cities past that point. The effect of that city on a new player can be quite overwhelming, being several times larger than the starting cities and looking as if it had been buit with giants in mind. But I guess this is where the real game begins…
It can be interesting overall, though I look at it from a different point of view, that of a mostly single-player game in a multiplayer world. Others won’t do anything without a squad and look for guilds from the first levels…
The best part is that it’s free, unlike all those other games that charge you monthly fees if you want to keep playing. Of course there are many useful “donation” items, plus many others which are just for showing off, but it does seem like you can play reasonably well even if you don’t pay anything.
Of course, it’s just in the beta stage now and there are quite a few bugs left, but it’s amazingly stable. I didn’t have a single crash (except the patcher the first time I ran it) and didn’t find any broken quests so far. I’m expecting everything to be deleted and everyone having to start over once the beta phase will be over, but that should still be months away.
