When I first saw Thang, I have to admit, it was quite a long time ago. Being busy with other things, I didn’t have time for another MMORPG, so eventually I forgot about it. In my recent fooling around with Oz World, I rediscovered the official Thang website and this time I wasted no time and downloaded it.
Thang Online could be your standard MMORPG if it weren’t for a number of things that set it apart from other games of the genre.
This is the first MMORPG that I’ve played that offers two types of currency to the players, and I don’t mean the gold, silver, copper subdivision. The regular currency is the Dien, which you gain by killing monsters or selling things to vendors. The special currency is the Lune, which is purchased via PayPal or other payment methods. Lune is used to buy special equipment and items in the game world.
The game point system is also worth noticing, since it’s an interesting concept. Game points are earned visiting the site (I was awarded 1000 points for being the 200th visitor to the official site on a given day), posting on the forums and attending events. You can use these points for purchasing equipment on the site’s Item Mall. You can also purchase game points with Lune.
Gameplay can be summed up into three little words: hack and slash. As you level, you gain points that you can distribute among your attributes. Make sure you read the website section about the different characters and their abilities (Introduction/Avatars menu), because your attributes will make a big difference according to the weapons you are using.
You can equip up to three weapons simultaneously (that I know of), and to each you can allocate a specific skill, which you have to buy. For example, Ririsha’s Tar-Na weapon is stronger according to her intelligence and strength, while a Xena will have a higher attack power with a Dagger if her Sense is high. These skills level up with use, making them more powerful, so it’s best for you to concentrate on a single attack skill to get the most of it.
One of the attributes is particularly important. Ki energy is a little extra bonus that affects your battle performance. It is divided into attack, defense and spirit, and you will see it as a little meter on the bottom right of the interface. Consider this your buffs: defense for HP, attack for STR and spirit for MP. You can manage the three bars as you wish and when you’re happy with it, click “Apply”. Sometimes the Ki bars will change by themselves (but not applying the modifications) which is basically a suggestion on how you should apply them.
As you level up, you will unlock new abilities and chat commands. At level 5, you will finally be able to sit to rest and set up a shop. At level 10 you are able to use the /shout command. At level 20 you gain an extra inventory page (woo hoo! I was wondering what all those other inactive pages were for!) and the ability to challenge others for a duel -PvP fans rejoice!
Something I really enjoyed was the shared bank and the fact that empty player shops will be closed! Now why didn’t Rose Online apply that during their Beta?
Although there are many positive aspects in Thang, there are also a few things that I’m not very fond of. I didn’t really like how the beginning zones are populated by monsters that go up to level 30. When I first started playing my Ririsha (the mage class) I can honestly say I had no freaking idea what I was doing. I didn’t know if the colors on the monsters’ names meant something (like a “con” system) and I had no clue what I was supposed to kill. So I decided to go by trial and error, died a bunch of times, but I got the hang of it. Then finally I decided to explore the website and there was a small listing of monsters for each area. Thank you, confusing navigation! Things got much better from there on.
Still, you are killing some lower level things when a level 30 witch (that’s what they look like) sneaks by and casts some massive spell that kills you instantly. I am now level 31 and I still can’t kill one of those by myself. Even if I did manage to kill it, I’d be in trouble. Which brings me to the second of my “not-so-fond-of” things.
When you kill a monster, it will sometimes morph into something else. You know this is about to happen when you take his HP down, you get the experience message and the monster is still moving around but running from you. Very, very slowly running away from you. If it morphs into a cocoon, stay away; they usually explode and hurt you. Sometimes they will hatch into something else. Other times they will just transform into little wind spirits that will recover some of your HP when you kill them.
In the case of the level 30 witches (Mushacha or some other weird name like it) they will morph into a tornado that hits for quite a bit.
If you happen to start in the forest, watch out for the snakes; their morphing process is a multiplication one. If you leave the post-morphing form alone, they will eventually disappear.
Watch out for players too, who just love to loot your stuff when you’re too busy trying to hold off the horde of snakes. Happened to me quite a few times, but I guess you can’t just get around the stupid people factor in an MMO nowadays.
I was also a bit disappointed with the camera controls, since you can only rotate it 180 degrees, and the lag when there’s a high number of players and/or monsters in the screen.
Aside from my nitpicking, it is also a shame that you are limited to select from three pre-made characters: female Ririsha, female Xena and male Aerican (respectively the mage, amazon and warrior types, for lack of better description).
However, for a free game, it looks quite nice and it’s entertaining. I particularly enjoy the music in it and the refining system that tells you exactly what ingredients you will need to upgrade something (the problem is that you need backup armor to switch with everytime you want to refine the one you actually wear, but here I go nitpicking again).
If you’re into fantasy MMO’s, Thang is something you should consider playing. There’s really no reason not to: it’s free, it uses less than 300MB of your HD space, and overall it’s a good game.
System Requirements:
- Pentium III 800Mhz
- 256MB RAM
- Geforce 2 or equivalent video card
- 230MB of HD space
- Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows XP
- DirextX 9