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| Sword of the New World: Granado Espada: Leveling in Lace |
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I stepped into Sword of the New World with few expectations. The game looks gorgeous, as any screenshot will contend to. Beautiful people run through beautiful European towns and villages. And as for gameplay, there's the promise of playing with 3 characters at once. Would this be a new experience on the MMORPG scene? I didn't know, but man I knew it was going to be pretty.
Sword of the New World is inspired by the European explorations of America, "The New World" as it were. History buffs, you can stop right there before you get excited though. The historical inspiration is simply an excuse to dress everyone in frilly dresses and handsome cravats. Which, by the way, would be a silly way to set off for exploration, but it's all part of the fun of this game. No, this game won't help you write any school papers, but the mix of different period styles with modern adjustments creates something unique among RPGs to say the least. |
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Sword of the New World's characters are good looking, and overall, it's a great looking game. The graphical requirements are practically ancient, so most players should have no trouble turning them all the way up. The camera movement could be smoothed out for my preference, but hopefully we'll see some improvements to that as the patches come in. One thing that most people will be grumbling about is the lack of character customization. You get to choose from many different elaborate costumes, but you can't change your face or hair. You can't choose to be a well-tanned Musketeer, or a raven-haired Scout, even if you want to. Each class has a specific male and female body type and that's it. A first step would at least be to offer all the body types to every class, but hopefully more customization will come. At least all the NPCs look unique and individual. Now all they need to do is move around a bit.
Music is a strange mix of styles as well. You're greeted by a lovely piano piece during the log-on screen, followed by the character select screen which has an elegant bit of chamber music. When you step off the ship and reach the settlement, you're greeted with an operatic style piece. Just when you begin to think the entire game will have this historical sound to it, you're hit with some techno style tracks. All the music is very well done, but since it jumps around genres so much, you'll probably end up having a track or two that you wish you could skip. Luckily there is a Jukebox option in-game which allows you to pause, stop, and skip tracks. I'm glad to see this option, and hopefully it will be customizable with personal music.
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If you have played any number of other Korean MMOs, such as Ragnarok Online or R.O.S.E. Online, this game will feel very familiar. Hopefully, the familiar frustrations will be ironed out for the American audience in Sword of the New World. Right now, the translation is being reworked, but it could really use a professional writer to make it feel cohesive and give it character. The lag is a particularly nasty problem right now as well. It also would be good to have a tutorial that is much more "guided" instead of scattered about the city for you to find. Of course, there is plenty of time for tweaking, and for now, a few other annoyances appear to have already been addressed. Selling your items to other players is not a big ordeal; you start off with the ability to do so. Death is also an affair that is not quite as devastating as I have seen before. There's a simple "timeout" penalty and no loss of XP. Hopefully it remains this way, but there are rumors of percentage-based XP loss at higher levels, and it wouldn't be surprising given the tradition in similar MMOs. There are some features of Sword of the New World that are fairly new and convenient. One of these features are cards that give experience. This means you could give a few of these to a character who has sat on the sidelines for a while to give them a quick boost of XP. One fun feature of Sword of the New World is Replay. If you've recorded your own gameplay using a third party recording program before, you'll probably love this feature. You can set your game to automatically record gameplay footage. The cool thing about it is you can control the camera and play director as you play the recording back. Now the bad thing about it is that it records in a proprietary format that can only be used in-game, so you may end up needing that third party app after all.
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Sword of the New World does have one feature that feels like a case of convenience gone extreme, the Defend mode. With this mode enabled, your characters will automatically attack surrounding enemies. What this means is that you can park your characters in a relatively safe area and just leave them to kill and kill and gain experience for you. In Healing Stance, your Scout will even auto-heal your party. Right off the bat, it seems as if the developers acknowledged the fact that many people don't like spending their lives playing time by grinding, so they just give you the option to set your party to automatically do that for you. It is insisted, however, that this is not botting. And really, it isn't exactly an auto-play mode, as your characters will not pick up loot and you can't use skills. There are a few other factors that keep this from being used as a leveling machine. For example, casks that unleash hordes of monsters can overwhelm an unattended party. Also, there are some monsters that will knock a Scout out of his auto-heal mode. Even with these measures, it only takes a glance over every few minutes and a key press to keep things going at the most. I'm confident any potential for abuse will be eliminated sooner or later. I just hope that it's done in a creative way, and that it doesn't start a cycle of fixing a problem with another problem.
Sword of the New World also distinguishes itself with a 3 character combat system. The custom party options are tempting, but so far as I've seen, they really function as one "big" character with a diverse set of skills. It's just that when one of your characters die, you suddenly lose a branch of skills. You can rotate characters out so that you can have a try at each different class and take advantage of skills needed in a particular area. Unfortunately, it seems you really don't need to pay attention to your group dynamics in order to breeze through the first 20 levels or so. It doesn't bode well for a gameplay depth, but later levels may prove to be where the real meat of the game is. SotNW has your standard "talk to person then go fetch" quests, weapon construction and upgrades, PVP, and the never-ending search for that rare piece of equipment. So while the rich art style and the use of 3 characters are unique, at the heart there's not much here that hasn't been done before. If it's priced right, it could be a nice diversion. Right now, however, it would require a huge overhaul to compete with the big MMOs out there. For now, I simply hope to see it pull away from its roots just a little more.
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-Fights with Fire, GameVortex Communications AKA Christin Deville |
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