Shades Of Twilight

As luck would have it, just when I finally get my hands on Armed Assault 2 and planned to spend time making my own combat missions to play in it, I discover a new free-to-play MMORPG, called Jade Dynasty.

As the name implies, it’s a Chinese-themed MMORPG. Don’t worry, the language used is English. However if you roam around the starting city, you can find an NPC called “Unknown Scholar”. He is a vendor that sells cooking recipes, and his recipes are in Chinese.

If I understand it right, Jade Dynasty is known under different names for different markets, and it originated from China. Hence, when it made its way to the USA, they translated it.

Since I’ve never played it in its original Chinese form, I can’t tell you if anything has changed in terms of gameplay. However, one thing is for sure – it’s positively addictive. I get the same sense of “I need to complete 1 more quest” every single time I need to go to bed.

Graphics wise, they are clean and crisp. Demands on the PC isn’t very heavy. I can easily slide everything to max at 1280×720 and still get 30 FPS on it.

Levelling inside is pretty fast, and the thing that really got me chuckling is that, if you enter into the “meditative state” while in town, you actually earn xps! In fact, each time you earn xps, the amount is roughly the same as killing 2 mobs of your level. The time interval between xp gains is about the same as you going out into the wild and grinding mobs for xps. Levelling in this game is also different from most others – you pick ONE skill to upgrade or learn, and you pick a 2nd skill from a “Tome”. That’s all. Health and other attributes seem to be automatically adjusted and compensated for.

The second interesting thing is that there is a “bot” built right into your game client. You can actually put heals and spells into the relevant hotkey slots, and start the bot going among a group of mobs. You will automatically kill mobs and pick up loot. When your health runs low, the botting client will heal you with the potions you put into the heal slot (or with a heal spell you specified to be cast at a fixed interval).

It’s so sophisticated that you can tell the bot client to attack only specific mobs or to adjust intervals between spell casting, plus radius you want to detect and attack mobs in.

Yes I’ve used this function in the official game client to quickly kill quest mobs and get my quests done quicker.

This game is definitely noob-friendly. They have a list of NPCs you can call up at any time for you to click on, and you will automatically run there. Also, in the quest log, their names are hotlinked and once you click on the names you will run to them.

However, being noob-friendly doesn’t mean it’s not deep. It’s very deep. Even now at level 25 or so, I’m still figuring things out. For example, I still am not too sure about the difference between an “Esper” and a Skill. To me, they work the same. You cast it, it drains your mana. There are other stuff, too much to mention, that you will have to figure out how to do as you level up. Yes there’s in-game help but honestly, I haven’t actually read through it yet.

So as you can see, right now I’m kinda hooked on this MMO. I really wish I can split time between this and ArmA 2.

Related articles by Zemanta

• E3 09: Jade Dynasty is dynamite! (destructoid.com)