Tantra Online: Mandara Map

In an earlier post this month I gave my opinion of Tantra Online: a new/old 3d mmorpg that has been around for a while in Korea and the Philipenes, but that has just now opened up its Global servers.

I was really taken by the game: its interesting classes, good leveling speed, nice graphics and environments and a more than decent storyline. The thing that annoyed me however was that some of the starting quests had me running around the whole map, killing enemies that were too far apart. I know this is a common element of many games, but in this case, I got really frustrated.

Instead of abandoning the game however, I decided to map out the enemies, thus providing me and anyone else that wanted to play Tantra, or that was simply stuck on a quest, with some relief:


And some quick words of advice:

1. Complete the first few quests quickly.
2. Use the teleporters to finish quests easily.
3. Go to Mandara dungeon to level quickly after lv10. Party with mages for fast leveling, as they have strong AOE spells.
4. Libertine is a boss-like mob, with a lot of HP.
5. Talk to all of the NPCs every once in a while. They have hidden quests.
6. Purchase some teleportation scrolls. You can quickly port back to town to empty your inventory and then return to your hunting ground using the town's teleporter.

I still havent figured out how to enchant items, so I'm saving all the upgrade items in my warehouse. I'll post back with a quick guide when I figure it out.

Rakion - Action/Fantasy MMO

Sometimes I get fed up. When I say fed up, I mean with everything. No, Im not a depressed or angry person in general, but I have my mood swings. So yeah... sometimes I get fed up with stuff.

Take MMORPGs games for instance. Last week, I got fed up with clicking on a monster, ordering an attack or a skill and having my character have all the fun of lifting his (actually her :) sword above her head and slashing the ears off of some orc. Over and over again... I froze; my character standing in the middle of the battle field, idle. The monsters paced idly around me, minding their own business.

My hands dropped off of the keyboard and mouse and hung beside me. I looked over to an immitation katana/daikatana that I have mounted above my immitation fireplace. "Looks like fun...", I thought. I got up and unsheathed the blade, holding it tightly with both hands by my midsection, dreaming up senseless monsters with 1/8 of my HP that might want some of this. I lifted the sword above my head and slashed downwards. "Feels good", I thought... "Feels real good!"

Time for something new. Time for some Action.

Rakion is a small game from publisher SoftNyx. Smallish downloadsize, smallish install size.

Download Size: 320 MB
Install Size: 550 MB

Action RPG, sounded like just what I was in the mood for. In this game you use the mouse slash the enemy and unleash combinations of attacks and skills. You are also equipped with a short range and long range weapon, which adds even more variations to your fighting style. The ability to solo or pvp in instanced maps, a standard RPG Gear system (buy new weapons, armors, etc) as well as Pet usage, that Im a sucker for made Rakion sound way promising.

A lot of promising games out there though... how many really deliver? Let me just tell you how my day went, playing Rakion, and you can conclude for yourself.

When you first start the client and choose your game (the other SoftNyx games are launched through the same client), you are presented with a list of several international servers that you can connect to:



On closer inspection however, you can see that there are only 197 users playing at that time, in the whole US/Canada. The game appears to be much more popular in Europe, where 626 users can be seen playing.

I really liked this server list, because I often wonder exactly how many people are playing the game I am on. In other MMORPGs that I have played, people often get dissapointed from some patch and leave the game or stop playing until they correct it - however its all just speculation and you can never tell. I am sure that the game developers keep this secret, so that blogs and websites dont give the game bad publicity: "...World of Warcraft user numbers are dwindling due to bad patch... " etc - and stupid titles like that.

So, there are a lot of promising games out there... but how many really deliver? Let me just tell you how my day went, playing Rakion and you can conclude for yourself:

Character Creation

There are five characters to choose from, giving you a pretty good variation for this kind of game. Here's what we got: Knight, Archer, Blacksmith, Mage and Ninja:







There are two weapons that each character can use. A close range and a long range weapon. Each character has unique strike combos that invovle combinations of left and right mouse button clicking, sliding and jumping attacks as well as a powerhouse GRIP attack, executed by pressing both buttons together. In addition, depending on the pvp game setup or map played, each character has a Chaos Mode - a superform that is charged up by killing enemies and that gives you great strength and abilities, which are different from your other attacks. So good variety here.




After selecting a character, the game takes you through a specialized tutorial where the various attacks and abilities are introduced to you. I liked this part. Kinda like a n00b map, only I can take as long as I want practicing. Since the game has skills that are released using button combinations, all skills are unlocked from the get-go, so you can easily spend 5-10 minutes trying to figure out tactics, like chaining attacks and figure out your own weak points (so that you dont have to do that in the middle of battle).





I picked the Ninja (was hot), the Archer (was hot) and the Mage (used fire spells, which are hot):





Gameplay

There are two game modes. There is a single player mode, in which you can attack monsters in dungeons and try to beat your previous best time, train your character - if you are having trouble getting owned in pvp - and generally have a fun time. As you progress and increase your level, you will gain access to more and more maps and gain the ability to beat your previous time, netting you more experience and cash to buy items. You purchase stuff from an Item shop attached to the welcome screen, btw. Lot of expensive things, so after a couple of hours of gameplay I was not in position to purchase anything at all, which was annoying.

The second game mode is the PVP maps, in which players can host a game and let others join them. Sounds great at first, since there isnt just one server ramping up lag for everyone and you should be able to find a game in your area.

...Ya think? Well, I live in US-Central and after 1 whole hour of trying to join a game I was rejected from each and every one, despite being on a T1 university backbone! I even tried to host my own game and let others connect to me, but after another hour that I kept the server instance open, I only saw a handful of users connect to me and get kicked cuz our respective speeds were too slow.




Conclusion

This game could be really fun. The gameplay, classes, slills and abilities were all fun and I would have loved to play against other people, which is exactly what the point of this game is. Unfortunately, I was not able to connect to any of the servers to try them out. I may try to play this again sometime in the future, if/when I move to Canada :)

I leave you with a sweet fanart of a Chaos Mage and my hopes that someone can maybe tip me off as to how to join in the action in Rakion!



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You can see all my screenshots and Rakion wallpapers here:

Rakion

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Atlantica Online - The Great Atlantica Experience

When I heard that a new MMORPG was comming out, where the objective is to find Atlantis I was giddy with joy. To the intelligent gamer, this should immediately mean several things:

1. This game has a story. Something that many new games are completely missing.
2. This game will not be a run of the mill fantasy RPG. After all, what does the legend of Atlantis have in common with Lord of the Rings?
3. This game has a clear OBJECTIVE! Not only that but it is the great motivator behind playing the game in the first place. "We must find Atlantis at all costs...", I role-played in my head!



While reading up on the available info, I realised Atlantica would be turn based and my jaw dropped! I imagined a Final Fantasy VIII type of interface with skills executed like Limit Breaks or something like that. I enjoyed FF8 immensely, but I didnt wanna play an MMORPG with that game model. To be perfectly honest, I couldnt imagine what it would be like, because you need to be able to stop time and create the battle "instance" in such games. Perplexed and seduced by the gorgeous CG graphics that were being released around that time, I ended up obsessing over what this game had to offer! Were we on the brink of something new, finally/ffs!



That was more than enough for me to download the CBT client and give the game a try. To be perfectly honest, I was playing another MMORPG and we got talking about Atlantis, and one of my guildies invited me to the game - thanks gameneko! The download was large and the install enormous. Took a long time to update also, but I was patient.

Download Size: 2.7 GB
Install Size: 5.8 GB

Character Design

The classes can be confusing. I wasnt sure what kind of character I wanted to play. It appears that you dont necessarily pick a race/class in this game, but a type of weapon that you want your character to wield. This hinted to the strategic significance of each weapon, which roughly goes like this:



> Sword : Can attack a single target, has highest defence
> Spear : Can attack two enemies that are in a column
> Axe : Can attack three enemies in a row, only in front row
> Gun : Can attack three enemies in a column
> Bow : Can attack any single target with great force
> Cannon : Can attack a group of enemies within a certain viscinity
> Staff : Can deal magical attacks and heal allies

Going on the advice of my friend, I picked an AXE user and proceeded forth!



Graphics

The game has beautiful openning graphics and client program, as expected from a game released in 2008. In game graphics are good, but not amazing however. Some of the textures used on the monster models seem a bit too squared off at times.



I was very confused, since the character models were very nicely done. This impression stayed with me until the end of my testing, actually: characters = very good, monsters = clunky.



The game's environments however are nothing short of spectacular. hills, valleys, weird crystaline structured and passageways in the open field as well as in the cities. Detailed homesteads and random NPCs populating the cities make them come alive.




The thing that I found really helped me get around the lame graphics issue, was the character designs themselves. Blocky as they might have been, there was plenty of variation and originality in their design to help me overlook them. Some of the monsters literally hid their ugliness behind their loud colors and idle animations:






I know very well that graphics arent everything in a game. The sheer sizes of the battles in Atlantica might have forced the developpers to tune down the graphics significantly to boost the gameplay. This is particularly evident during the game's intro scenes that features a full scale, engine driven, 16P/2/16E war in the background of the login screen, that was nothing less than a slideshow. Other than being used as a benchmark to test one's system, I must admit its pretty depressing to watch your computer grind at the welcome screen, when what you really want to see is some gorgeous graphics and a streamlined introduction.

"Shitty Welcome Screen Slideshow is Shitty...", I muttered to myself and moved on...

You can talk to the NPCs that idly inform you where to go if you want to buy/sell, recruit mercenaries or "talk to the town official, that needs you for some deed"; you can even try to recruit them to the city your guild owns! All of this information was passed on to me through exploration and I found it to be a great way to clue the played into some of the deeper elements of the game.



Gameplay

Lets talk about the gameplay now, and explore what a turn based, fantasy rpg is like. When you first start the game, you are in a dream state where three hot maidens representing Strength, Spirit and Ego.



They tell you that you are a decendant of Atlantis and that only you may reclaim the power of your ancestors -- and to do this you must find Atlantis. Great stuff.



Next, you recruit some mercinaries out of the classes listed above, and then some. When you battle, an "instance" is produced on the open field, where you enter a battle zone, while your character simply appears locked in battle to other players. You have an overall turn time, each merc has its own reaction time has a reaction time, left clicking performs a normal attack and right clicking preforms the merc's special skill (you get more later that you can assign to quickslots).




The battles are very fast paced for a turn based game and there is a lot of stategic thinking you have to do on your feet, because you and the ememies can move around within your ranks (so front liners can be moved out of danger if their health is low) and in addition you have to pick up enemy drops during the game, or else they vanish after three turns. Its pretty fun, dashing in tongue-in-cheek to pick up a chest you know has something good inside, although your merc's life is hanging by a thread :) Greedy git!




To add to the fun, there is a cimematic camera that shows you your guys fighting face to face with the enemy. Its pretty fun, especially so you can have a good look at some of the baddies. In large battles it just slows you down from queueing commands to your guys, but still its fun to have around and brings a more P2E feel to the Turn based battle style.

Quests

Storyline branches out pretty quickly. The quest stories are kinda fun to read, and they definately stick to the theme (I dont believe I'll be amazed by any storyline offered in an MMORPG, like I did in Vagrant Story or XenoGears).



Now, lemme ask you something.. gamer to gamer: Whats the most annoying thing in any MMORPG? ... yeah... not being able to find who gives the quests, and/or not being able to find the monsters you're supposed to kill - right? Well in Atlantica that, my friends, is a thing of the past! You can just select a quest, press a button and your character will AUTO-MOVE TO THE QUEST AREA !!!! I was like.. OMFG, DUDE, thats like someone inventing toast with pre-spread butter or peanutbutter options with bonus JEAM!


Equiment Enchanting

So after a long grind/hunt, what do you do while your guy is running back to the NPC on auto-pilot to turn in the quest? Well, you open up your inventory and start enchanting of course! Yeap thats right! No more enchant NPCs, NO MORE armor you cannot wear and... and ... NO - MORE - FAILED - ENCHANTING !!! YES !!! Its true! Enchanting never fails in Atlantica (sounds more like paradise every day right!?) and this is how it works:

You combine two weapons/armors with 1 enchant stone to make a +2. Two +2 items with 2 enchant stones make a +3. Two +3 items with 3 stones for a +4, etc. So basically you never sell your armors and stuff to the NPC, everything is always useful AND items are naturally recycled which stabilizes the game's economy. After a certain level, you can wear heavier armors but by then you probably have some +5 stuff on you and are ready to start over. Sell the things you have in the Auction House to make some cash and so goes the cycle of life.



Final Comments

I take it its pretty obvious that I really liked this game. Couple more positive things I can add here though.

I frequently suffer from ALT-CHAR-ITIS:

In the great world of Atlantis, my friends you will never have to do that, because you can have EVERY class inside your OWN army and develop them in any way you see fit - all at the same time!. "Live vicariously through your toons!", I always say (not really.. but sounds good here)





In stopping. Amm.. did I mention that guilds can own towns that they can build structures on through proper research and development and can wage war against other cities? Now Im stopping... Im stopped.

[Kida, from Disney's Atlantis: The Lost Empire][Was Hot]

Great game - play it now!

/stop

/sado myself

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You can see all my screenshots and Priston Tale wallpapers here:

Atlantica Online

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Priston Tale: A Retrospective

It is always good to remember where you came from. I have always respected those that are proud of their origins and uphold the name of their nation or institution with pride. I was in that kind of mood when I went looking for an old MMORPG that could maybe be responsible for shaping the very rich MMO scene we see today.



Priston Tale was voted best MMORPG of 2004 in Korea. Now 2004 doesn't seem that long ago, and if we go by Korean standards that's kind of a great honor. So I download Priston Tale to have a look for myself:

Download Size: 840 MB
Install Size: 1.8 GB

The client app looks and behaves clunky. The game takes way to long to load - something like 4 minutes on my simple test system. There were also some display overlay issues that prevented me from taking proper screenshots - a good sign of buggy graphics. The following image was supposed to be the title screen. Instead its a rather cool firey aurora!



The character selection screen, actual game loading time after selecting your character and getting excited about playing the game it truly disappointing. Total load time for me was 6 minutes, when I had already picked my character and was returning for some more exploration. I think that's pretty outrageous for an older game, that doesn't even have spectacular graphics, so that you could at least justify the loading time.

The game starts with a little animation of a baddie making a mess of some town and a bunch of scared citizens freaking out - good motivation for a new player and an excellent way of putting a face on the enemy - something that is grossly missing from many modern MMORPGs.

Have you ever wondered that? Who's the real bad guy in this game? I cant just be fighting all of the monsters and some of the bosses that are hiding deep inside some dungeon, where they're not even bothering anyone... Weird eh. [that's what a good PVP system solves, btw]

There are two races, with four classes each to choose from:

Temskorns [like Terrans]: Mechanician, Fighter, Pikeman, Archer
Morions [like Elves]: Knight, Atlanta, Priestess, Magician

There are enough character types to go around:



The terrible translation is evident from the very beginning, where they cant even agree in the same line, how to spell the name of the races. This is a common problem in all these games, since they are Korean and translated by Koreans, but thats still pretty sad.



There are two orignial classes here:

The Atlanta, a javelin throwing, magic using bundle of cute. She's on most of the Priston Tale wallpapers out there and looks like fun to play with. I chose the mechanician however, cuz I thought he was more unique (and it had been a long time since I had played a Engineer-type in any game... I think since I played a demo of Anarchy online... is that Free2Play yet?)



The Mechanician, is said to use Constructs to his offensive advantage. Sounds interesting eh! In the early stages of the game that I played, I was not able to use any constructs what-so-ever, which was more than dissapointing and my main weapon was a one-handed claw (so that I can equip a shield as well). This looked and felt awkward, since everyone knows that claws come in double handed sets and are used for close combat from an assasin type character, which here are the pikemen. They should have let the n00b player have some kind of essential construct to play with so that he/she could understand their role in the game.



Immediately as the game starts you notice that you have a little dragon flying around with you. He's very chatty, helps you with the basic quests, reminds you of things you need to do and fights with you too. Apparently he will evolve into a dragon when you level him enough, but I didnt see any dragons around the higher level characters in town, nor did I see little dragons around them at all, so they maybe integrated with the character or you might loose them when you go through the rank-up stages later on.



Guide Ran gives all the n00b quests up to level 20, so there is no running around to get quests from NPCs. She doesnt look at all like any of the characters in the game - instead she may have stepped out of her Korean office for a smoke some late afternoon and the Priston Tale programmer was so taken by her beauty, that he transcribed her in the game as-is. Very uninpiring and boring conversations can be had with her every time you have another quest to turn in.



The other NPCs are cute and have fun animations. I had no problem with them at all, having already lowered my expectations with regards to the graphics, I found myself liking the easy, almost loli atmosphere in here.





Time for the first grind and I'm off to fight some green slug things. I only need 5 of them, but the respawn rate is so peculiar that you find yourself sitting in the middle of a pile of enemies that continuously respawn. Usually there are 5 of them around you, and although you hardly seem to take any damage from them, and thinking its good for leveling, you just stand there with the Right Mouse Button pressed down (yeah.., thats how you attack - very bad for carpal tunnel!) fending them off for like 10 minutes.



The inventory and character window system is clunky like the rest of the interface that doesnt always do what you want it to. Camera rotations are handled by the arrow keys and movement with the mouse, so I felt like I needed to be left-handed to have the best position to play.



The Map system is one of the best I have ever seen in the game. You can maximize the map, which shows you your character and environment in the bottom left where you can move around and fight and everything, the local map right above you on the top left and the world map on the right hand side - Very useful!



The second quest required me to kill some Hobgoblins, so I run up to one and smack him a couple of times, he smacks me back and ENDS ME IN 3 HITS! So the quests go from grindhouse to field boss level fight in one step. Uncool. I had to party with others and gain 5 levels before I could take one of them down. I needed 7 in total. Took too long, grinded in uninteresting environs for about 2 hours and consequently I felt my interest in the game wind down.



Night time brought me some surprisingly beautiful scenes. And you know, I wasnt born in 1995 so that all I know is cinematographic games. I found myself regressing to Amiga and Commodore64 games that gave me so much entertainment in my youth. I took some screenshots, went exploring around a bit - at lv9 I could survive any of the surrounding maps and found several interesting places to explore.





But that was it for me. The terrible client program took too long to boot, would often hang and freeze during gameplay and to be perfectly honest, the graphics are not up to par anymore. I like a lot of cute/loli type games out there but Priston Tale just doesnt cut it anymore. The makers of the game know this already of course and are designing Priston Tale 2, which appears to have spectacular graphics!

Overlay issues really did mess with me. The graphics would some times dissapear and reappear. A high spec computer may be able to cope with these troubles, but if you had it wouldnt you be playing something visually amazing like Perfect World or Aion, to name but a few?



In conclusion, I got what I was looking for. I could see the RPG/questing and guild/party elements I liked and a warm community welcoming anyone that may still be interested in starting a new character in Priston Tale. The precursor elements to a recipe that has been seen carbon copied to so many new games was there, and wether or not PT was the one of the first ones to do it.. I dont really care. It was fun to play a Retro-MMORPG. I feel that I can appreciate newer games much better now, but I can also see how much their core hasnt changed!



I look forward to seeing what the guys over at Yedang Online have come up with for us in Priston Tale 2, which is also Free-2-Play and will be micro-transaction supported. A newly formed online portal called Key to Play, apparently hand picked PT2 for its debut - a pretty good bet if you ask me!



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You can see all my screenshots and Priston Tale wallpapers here:

Priston Tale Online

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