I had nearly forgotten I had applied to the Archlord beta by the time I received a reply. I was enticed by it since I saw the first screenshots. Everything looked beautiful, somewhat magical and original.
My application was accepted 5 days before the beta closed. Ok, that really is a short time to play and evaluate an MMO, but since this was the final beta stage, I figured the content would all be in place and I could still grasp the basics of what the game would have to offer to paying customers. But what was waiting in game wasn’t exactly the pretty picture I had imagined.
Let’s begin by what every other MMO starts with: character creation. While the character models at first seem rather good looking and interesting, you will find out that races have specific pre-set classes and sexes, which doesn’t offer a lot of variety. Humans can be Knights, Archers and Mages. Orcs can be Berserkers, Hunters and Sorcerers. Moon Elves are Rangers and Elementalists.
There is a small selection of faces, hair styles and colors, but there is a merchant that works like a beauty salon, offering more faces, hairdos and dyes, for a fee of course. And it’s not cheap.
Once you have your character, you can enter the world of Chantra. I found it really odd that that everyone else in my starting town (Moon Elf lands) was also a female Moon Elf. There’s something creepy about walking around a bunch of clones where the only differences will be the armor, weapons and hair. Worst of all, everyone of the same class at level 1 looks exactly the same (head aside). The only time you can set yourself apart from others is by leveling up and upgrading your armor and weapon. But by then, everyone else has also leveled up and looks exactly the same again. So again, variety was lacking.
The game mechanics are basically a clone of those in World of Warcraft. Not original, but it works. NPCs will have large exclamation or question marks on their heads to indicate a quest start or finish. More quests open up as you level, and many progress as a chain of tasks that ties in with the level of the monsters you are supposed to be killing for experience. So you kill for leveling and for questing simultaneously most of the time. And I say most of the time, because at a certain point you are forced to group with people to be able to kill something whose name is green. Green is usually the weaker “con” in an MMO, right? Well, there was this goblin that insisted on killing me in a couple of hits even after I passed it by three levels. And that was needed for a quest, and by now, you know that I hate when I have to depend on groups in any MMO.
Something that didn’t quite appeal to me was the fact that shortly after stepping out the city gates, I got a message saying I was in a free PVP zone. So basically, anyone can come up and whack you on the back of the head (so to speak) when you’re level 1. How fun is that? Apparently, somewhere in my reading I missed the whole thing about the PVP aspect of the game. Had I known, I probably wouldn’t even had tried it.
Apparently, the whole premise of Archlord is PVPing. There is even a “wanted” board for players with the most kills. PVP is also a big thing at high levels, since that’s where the game title comes in: guilds will fight over possession of a castle and crown one of their members the Archlord. This person will have their character oversized, gets to wear some really spiffy armor, has a dragon to ride on, and gains special powers such as controlling the weather or summoning monsters to fight for him. Sounds cool? It really isn’t. First, this is something for people who are guilded only. It’s a guild effort, a castle raid. Second, the reward is not a guild benefit, it’s a personal benefit. So you can imagine the bickering going on among guild mates fighting to see who becomes the next Archlord. MMOs are normally based on social aspects, so this concept seems pretty anti-social and conflict-inducing to me.
Aside from NPC quests, there are elemental spirit quests that you get when you reach certain levels. Leveling up grants you points that you use to purchase skills for your character at your class trainer.
The quest menu is easy to understand, but it wasn’t fully operational. A lot of menu text was represented by a series of squares and symbols, making you wonder what the hell the quest was until you opened the tab and read it.
The trade skill system seemed complex and interesting, though I didn’t explore any of it aside from starting a skinning profession. Yes, just like WoW once again.
An interesting feature of the game is the Chantra Shop. This shop doesn’t use in-game currency but a different payment system. Upon signing up, I was given a number of credits to spend in this particular place. What you find there is a series of boosters and other useful items that have limited use. Most of it wasn’t even translated into English though, and this was on the eve on the game’s launch, so I had no idea what a lot of the things were for. But for the ones that were not in Korean characters, I could purchase a strength booster that lasted a day, something to give me more experience for the next 3 days or an item that resurrected me right away if I died. I found that I could activate only one of these boosters at any given time, but it was still a pretty neat feature. Every month, players receive a certain number of credits that basically is a result of their subscription fee payment, but credits are also rewards of in-game events.
I liked how the monsters were original: flying eyeballs, deer, jelly cubes, some sort of naga women with 6 arms, there’s some pretty weird stuff to kill in this game. I also enjoyed the colorful and rich environments, but running across them was a pain. There were spots where my character would just get stuck in a loop over and over running the same piece of land, and other times where I’d be stuck in a small rock or a thin tree trunk. It’s like there were invisible walls in what seemed to be very open spaces.
But a handful of cool features doesn’t make the game stand out. On the eve of the game’s release (beginning of October) I wondered how could they be bringing the game out in this condition. And this was only by what I had witnessed in five days, at the end of beta stage phase 4. Phase 4 and this many issues? Not for a monthly fee of $14.99, that’s for sure.
Archlord offers little new and original content, aside from strange monsters and the Archlord title for high-end players. I was initially taken in by the screenshots, and this experience just proved that looks really don’t mean a thing. There are plenty of much better games out there to spend your $14.99 on.