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Wednesday 5 March, 2008
Gameplay:
The gameplay of Sword of the New World is a very unrelenting experience. In comparison to mainstream MMO's, SotNW's(sword of the new world) dungeons offer triple the amount of monsters, but at less than half the toughness. It gives the player the feeling of fighting mobs of enemies rather than slowly killing three chunky guys. This way, even though the difficulty isn't much easier, the player doesn't feel completely powerless, as he/she can still kill at least a chunk of them before they need to run away and heal their party.
SotNW starts off with you only being able to create the given classes: fighter, musketeer, wizard, scout, and elementalist, but during the game you can find, trade, buy or gain character cards from quests. These character cards can each be used once to create new characters that are not given in the normal creation menu. Its not unheard of to see players commanding three of the same character, created from the same type of card, because he/she traded to obtain multiple copies of the card. while SotNW does not offer the greatest variety of character classes or skills and weapons, it allows the players to create different combinations of characters, which in themselves create new possibilities. Some players like having three musketeers to fend of enemies before they get into melee range, some players love elementalists because they have the most effective spells that hit multiple targets, some people insist of keeping at least one scout in a party because of their healing abilities.
Design:
SotNW is a very intriguing MMO game that has kept me playing it longer than most other MMO games i have played. Usually i play until I'm level 20-30 until I get bored because experience points roll in way to slow, but SotNW gives the player more things to look forward to. It has multiple elements in the game that have no actual effect on the gameplay but they make your characters look cooler. I currently have all my characters wearing the same clad white regal clothing as if they were all going to some magnificent ball dance, and although it has no actual effect on my fighting abilities, it is awesome nevertheless.
there is also the very intriguing element of gambling in SotNW. Players who have extra gold to spare begin to upgrade their weaponry, which gives the weapon higher damage. It doesn't cost much to upgrade your equipment to level four, but when you upgrade their capabilities past that limit, there is a high percent chance that the next upgrade will fail and cause your equipment to become forever unusable. This is a factor of the game that keeps players always active with their use of money. And once a weapon has exceeded limit four, it begins to shine a white glow(sweeeet), and upon reaching the seventh upgrade, which is extremely difficult to, as upgrades five and six are very difficult to pass without getting the weapon broken, the weapon begins to glow pretty colors.
Many of the attractions of SotNW lie in the security that players love the aesthetics of their characters. You can buy clothing, upgrade equipment, buy hats and even buy poses, which lets your characters make amusing gestures and poses, which is almost useless, but i bought all the poses anyway. And lots of hats.
SotNW is a highly engaging game and although i wouldn't say its one of the best games out there, its still worth a shot, also because its free and awesome, especially for an MMO. :3
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