OMG RPG

Coming out of closed beta this week is the latest game from Perfect World Entertainment entitled Jade Dynasty. It's another free to play MMO from the same company that brought us Ether Sage. At E3 we got to get a hands on look at the game, and we walked away perplexed by what we saw. The game is not the usual run of the mill MMO, but that could be a good thing!

In speaking with Craig Beers, one of the product managers at Perfect World, we find there to be a lot of enthusiasm when discussing this game. For them, it could be a new road in the well traveled path of free to play mmo's, one whose payout could be significant.

The back story on Jade Dynasty is the search for everlasting life (also known as my Saturday nights, but that's another story). The story line and characters share a look and feel with the Dynasty Warriors franchise made by KOEI with an added effect of color. The color in this game stands out greatly and helps to enhance the gameplay as the SlashNoob is always a sucker for great artwork.

Picking factions (classes) in this game is also new and different. If you'd like to play as mage style class, you can actually tweak the class to focus yourself either to range attacks or physical attacks. This kind of enhanced customization got me more interested in the game right away, because let's be honest, who HASN'T wanted to tank as a mage? This leads into the customization piece as each class must then join a faction that can offer them different options, so all in all according to Beers, there's roughly 25-30 playable classes (SWEET).

The demo started out with a character called the Modo (Beers' favorite class). This necromancer style character can transform into many different forms to do battle, each of which will affect the style of combat (range vs. physical) the character will inflict and can take. Also, your tanking, healing, attack stats are not derived from your abilities but from your armor. Something we thought odd, but it makes sense given the free to play strategy of them preferring you to buy gear with money rather than with in-game coinage. 

As Beers opens up his quest log he asks me, "do you hate having to find the NPCs you need?" To which my frustrated face answered without me having to say anything. He then double clicked on the name of the quests giver and the character started moving all on its own towards the NPC. A pretty neat feature that will certainly make quests turn ins a lot easier.

But the helpfulness didn't stop there, there are other options for gameplay that Beers introduced including "meditation" that allows you to rest in a city and still earn XP points. That's right, sit down relax and earn XP, this is AWESOME! Well, awesomely lazy. You can also "dream" which is something you can do once you get a certain in-game item. This happens right before you log out and helps you continue to gain XP even while you're completely logged out.

Is a little bit of laziness good for a free to play game? On the plus side, users continue to matriculate towards the level cap and thus feel a greater sense of accomplishment and are perhaps MORE invested then before. On the negative side, you're doing without actually doing and some might call that cheating.

There are other ways to collect XP points without putting in a lot of effort. If you're not interested in completing many of the 14,000 quests currently in the game, you are more than welcome to grind away. Grinding now has a best friend, it's called the "Invigorator". this nifty number allows you a bio break while your character goes Chuck Norris on a group of baddies. Basically, every 20 minutes or so you can work the invigorator up to full capacity, set your character up next to a group of opponents, click the invigorator and walk away. Your character will destroy anything in the area that's even remotely bad, while you go do something else. Again, bad thing? Or great thing? Our jury is still out.

Finally, the last feature is the group XP function. The fundamental function with this is that if you and your friends are all questing, but not in the same area, you can still share XP points with each, so you're all leveling up at the same pace. The most important thing though is that if there's someone you're just really not huge friends, you can choose with whom you share XP with.

All in all the game was a lot of fun and definitely something worth hoping into for the open beta. These "lazy man's" XP options in my opinion are not necessarily a bad thing. The key point Perfect World is trying to accomplish is that playing together with your friends is fun, and all friends play at different speeds and times. So why not allow them the ability to keep up with each other so that the game remains fun? Personally, I think its a great idea and will definitely draw in an audience of users. Will it be a huge mainstream success? Only time and the beta feedback will tell. But even if Jade Dynasty doesn't find eternal life, death doesn't seem to be in near future either.