OmeGGa Kollective: 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!