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It took me about an hour and a half to download, three frustrated installation attempts that only originated in errors, and a patcher crashing every 5% to finally be able to try out R.O.S.E. Online.
When I finally managed to launch the game, I sighed in relief.
Creating a character is a few clicks away, but there is no indication anywhere of what the Birthstone and Start Point really do. So far, I only found that the Start Point changes your placement on Birth Island when you first enter the game, but other than that I have no idea if it influences anything else. I’m also clueless about the Birthstone, and don’t see any help to be found.
The game is very simple to play, just point and click or click and drag. Click somewhere to walk to that spot on the map. Click on a monster to attack it. Click on an NPC to talk to him/her. Click on an item to pick it up. Click and drag the map (while stopped) to view the rest of the map surrounding you.
It is not so simple to understand though. The English translation (or should I say Engrish?) is horrible, and sometimes doing a quest gets so confusing that I have no idea what the NPC just told me. When “I” is confused with “you” and “taken” confused with “lost”, these two alone are enough to make your head spin when figuring out what to do next.
Some of the sentences are so ridiculously written that I couldn’t help but laugh, others were only half a sentence and left me wondering.
And others just drove me insane, trying to find monsters that didn’t exist. “Kill Folky” says the NPC, but there’s no Folky in the game, and it took me a while to figure out they wanted Porky instead, and that was after associating letters to see if anything made sense as Folky. I finally figured it out while killing a Libertine Porky, because it dropped a Folky pet-summoning capsule. And then there’s the Racky, which is actually a Leki (racoon-like creature). And the spell scrolls for Jant, although the city is actually named Zant. Confusing? You bet!
This was also present in the registration form (“Filling Form”) at the official site, and when creating an account. While creating my username I got the following message: “The first letter has to be an alphabet, and the following have to be a combination of alphabets and numbers.”
Maybe they consider this a beta translation? I studied about 2 years of translation and I’m not a professional, but nowhere in the world a game translation (usually made by professionals) for an international version turns out to be this bad of a job. We can only hope that once the game is fully released, this will be corrected.
Everyone starts the game as a Visitor, and it’s only after reaching level 10 that players can begin the quest for their first “job” (class). There are four jobs available: Muse, a combination of healer and caster; Soldier, a warrior-type character based on close-ranged combat; Hawker, your ranger with a martial arts twist; and Dealer, which is a sort of crafter and merchant. These jobs also have a second level of advancement (with the choice of two specialization classes), and their quests begin at level 70.
Leveling up is not too hard, but it’s not too easy either. Getting to level 20 is a breeze, and you can pretty much solo for the entire game if you know the limitations of your class. Personally, I like not having to depend on groups to gain levels.
R.O.S.E. Online is not a bed of roses. Aside from the aforementioned language barrier, there are many problems that even for a beta release should have already been dealt with.
One of them is the inexistence of a naming filter. You constantly run across people with a bunch of numbers as their names or sporting colorful phrases above their heads such as IntactHymen, Nippleflipper and much worse, which definitely goes against an RPG’s principles. I have even found some clan called Running Dildos… is it just me, or no one else has found this wrong so far?
There is no language filter either, and everyone can swear as much as they feel like it, that it will all clearly show up on the chat screen. I’ve witnessed some very “colorful” name-calling and racist chat sessions online.
The experience system needs improvement. Anyone can hit the same monster as you and get experience for it, even though you get the kill. Usually by the time I start to attack something, there’s already three people running for it regardless. You only know you got the kill because you can pick up the item it dropped and the message on the chat window that says “You have succeeded in hunting (mob name here)”.
This becomes especially frustrating when we’re trying to kill certain monsters needed for a quest. I’ve gotten my Muse up to level 46 by soloing simply because I can’t stand being around people like that. My two grouping exceptions were my husband and one of his good friends.
The Market skill that allows us to create our own little shop is cool, but there is no defined space for them to be. The only rule is that you have to be a certain distance away from the NPC vendors, so anywhere you can walk on there can be a shop. In towns, it gets so crowded and laggy that moving around slows the frame rate to nearly a halt. There is no way to search for an item either (something like the Bazaar in EQ would be perfect), so the only way to find something you might need is to look through each and every shop, and that can take hours.
Monsters can also attack players in market-mode, which results in a lot of people dying while AFK selling their goods. Monster agro should be removed while in this state.
The market also needs a function so a message or a separate log window shows what people have bought and for how much. If you sit and watch when someone buys something from you, you’ll just see the item disappear, and unless you’re keeping track of the money you have, you won’t know what just happened.
A useful thing to add would be the “kicking” market stalls that are empty, or have a timer for inactivity on them. There are too many as it is, and the empty ones are just AFK users contributing to the crowding of the servers.
Oh, and did I mention that there are only three servers to play in? That’s right. Most of the time they’re full, but you can still enter the game at your own risk – you just might get booted later. During the weekends it’s nearly impossible to play, since the servers are usually “Exceeded” all night long. Korean players can already enjoy their seven servers, for a fee though, but the game is already finished there, while the international version is not.
This makes me wonder… If any of your characters can go in to any of the three channels, what happens when the actual servers go live? Will all the characters still be able to load into any server? Will all be bound to one server only? Will we be able to split them between servers? And doesn’t the current situation mean that since the characters aren’t really stored in a server, it’s an easy hacker target?
But on with some of the other features and faults present in the game.
Another function that is lacking is a way to report a situation or send any kind of feedback from within the game. There is no option for doing this while playing, when the most important thing in a beta is feedback from the players. You have to go to the website and use a form to feedback something, and pray they understand your proper English upon reading the message, and that the form is sent. I kept trying to submit my suggestions and it always ended up in a broken link.
Aside from the kill-get experience-level up routine, further gameplay includes forming clans or joining unions. The problem is these things cost money: if you want to create a clan, you pay one million zully and the amount of members you can have is limited; if you want to join a union, you pay 30k.
Ok, maybe I’ve focused too much on what doesn’t work so well in the game, but after playing so many other MMO’s, I can’t help it. So here is a list of things that are actually cool in R.O.S.E.:
- the way your characters sit to rest, and mindlessly swing their feet, just “chilling”;
- the animations for casting and attacking, either from the player’s characters or from the monsters;
- the concept of the seven planets, all with different environments, and an epic quest that carries on throughout all of them;
- the warehouse, a deposit box (for items only) that’s shared by all the characters in your account;
- a PVP option;
- Union wars;
- no corpse retrieval upon dying, you just reappear at your spawn point or in the area you died at the cost of a small experience penalty;
- transportation methods such as carts, castle gear (a sort of mechs), airships and teleportation (scrolls or NPC’s that act as travel agents);
- dance scrolls, that not only make you act cool, but also contribute to increasing the stamina of those around you.
Just recently, the IROSE team decided to reset the game a week after introducing the third planet, Eldeon (you need to be at least level 90 to get there). In their “Engrish” message, they announced that everyone would be left with no items, skills, money or job advancements. Shortly before this happened, there were hardly any players online. The few that remained complained about the time wasted leveling up, and many claimed they wouldn’t bother coming back after the reset.
The reset turned out to be a complete wipe, not even the characters or their names were saved. In a way, this reset is a good thing. I hope those people who were constantly AFK in merchant mode, crowding the server will quit, since their purpose seemed to be only to make money, and others just to scam inexperienced users.
This time around, everyone started at the same time. The same zones are now crowded with people around the same level and trying to get quest mobs (it was already a pain to do them) is now nearly impossible with the amount of people KS’ing from one another. With everyone in the same zones on the three servers at the same time, lag becomes a nuisance as well.
A good improvement was the translation; finally we’re able to read proper English. But this made them change a bunch of names for items, mobs and places, which makes things a bit confusing until players get used to them. But for someone just starting, they’ll adjust better now.
The bad thing is the recovery bug, that even if you sit and recover to 100%, you get up and lose HP and MP. In my case, being a Muse, every time I get up I lose about 150MP, which is a huge set back. The IROSE team said they are aware of this and that the bug will be fixed through patches… in June! You’d figure this would be a priority.
R.O.S.E. Online is a fantasy MMORPG that is currently in open beta stage (and will be for at least another couple of months), with three of seven planets active. But right now, R.O.S.E. is just another MMORPG amongst many, trying to bring us a different world and original surroundings.
It’s a simple game that will certainly appeal to younger gamers for its colorful anime look. As for the rest of us not-so-young gamers with MMO experience, I’d recommend waiting until this comes out as a polished, finished version. And even then, I’m not sure if it will be worth the monthly fee.