2 Comentarios de DragonSoul

1. Brent (November 30th, 2011 at 7:48 pm)

   Review of DragonSoul
   In a word this game is complicated. This truth becomes transparent when part of the quest for receiving your first pet involves a quiz. Unfortunately, the complexity increases from here. There are eight kingdoms all vying for superiority. There can be multiple guilds within each kingdom and guilds can band together to form legions. Confused yet? Hmm, I’ll try harder. You receive your first pet at level 5. You learn that your pets can be improved three ways – stars, evolution and synthesis. Your pets can increase in stars by feeding your pet other pets you obtain. However, you can only feed pets other pets that are equal or higher in level and in star level. This seems fairly simple to make a three star pet: feed four pets to four different pets to get four of them up one star. Feed two of those pets to two others to create a pair of two star pets and finally feed one pet to another and voila, a three star pet. There are three star pets when you hit level 5. There are six star pets at level 30 and nine star pets at level 60. To get the maximum stars you just need 2x where x is the number of stars. That’s only 64 six star pets consumed. But it’s 29 for the nine star pets (512). Sadly, to evolve a pet also requires a sacrifice of another pet of equal or greater stars. This process requires ‘evolution stars’ that can be purchased from the game shop. While I played the beta, I did manage to find one extra evolution star in my bags. But I am unsure if this was an actual drop or one of the hundreds of bonus gifts that the game designers handed out to keep the beta players happy. Synthesis is almost similar to evolution, but different.  And you have to use two pets of equal or greater stars in this process as well. You might do better sitting through a Hawking lecture and understanding wave function collapse.
   The game play was very laggy for me during the entire beta test. I don’t have a T1 line, or a fiber optic connection. I’m just your average gamer playing on an average internet connection. Most of the time my frames per second (FPS) never got above 010 (yup, that 10). It became worse during boss fights or when there were multiple mobs in the screen. There are also some serious connection issues for some players. It was quite common to have one or more players disconnect (dc) during a boss fight in an instance. The game incorporates a bot system. Honestly, the bot works excellent. So good in fact, that the bot was better at downing difficult opponents faster than I could mashing buttons. But some skills didn’t quite make sense; their duration would last much longer than the cool-down. That just meant that you would be wasting all your MP when the bot would recharge the skill as soon as the cool-down timer finished.
   Like many new MMORPG’s there were plenty of low level quests to push you through the start, these quests tapered off and quickly became replaced by repeatables. By level 50 you might find a few new quests each level, but then it was back to doing repeatables. Experience is not to be gained by grinding through hordes of opponents either – at level 62, my character would be given 42 points of experience for killing a level 60 mob. Unfortunately, I need 437105 experience points to reach the next level. So I can setup the bot to kill over 10000 mobs, or I can run repeatables. You can spend your hard earned money to purchase items that will help you level faster, 2X experience orbs that last two hours, and something called Sands of Time, that uses a combination of the Schrodinger equation and the string theory. (Just kidding, I have no idea how they come up with the numbers.)
   In addition to the standard HP and MP bars, you also have an Energy bar. No, it’s not a high protein snack, but you consume energy every time you accept a quest. We were given energy pills in the beta, but you will have to purchase energy pills through the store to keep leveling. So literally, you have to pay to play.
   The skills in the game are pretty standard for an RPG. Spend skill points to gain new abilities or improve upon existing abilities. But in addition to using the skill points, after level 20 you also need to spend some of that experience to apply your skill points. Each class can use two types of skills depending upon the weapon, but changing weapons mid-fight is all but impossible. And there are certainly not enough skill points to master the two different trees available for each class.
   Mounts are easy to come by. You are given a mount at level 1. It only slightly increases your movement speed (+20%) and you can only perform your most basic attack while mounted. You can receive three more mounts at level 20 that improve your speed by 40%. But all of these mounts have a shelf-life of 30 days. After the mount expires, you have to purchase another mount or become a world-class distance runner. You can spend more of your money to purchase a mount, but again, this comes with a 30 day self-destruct guarantee.
   You can choose two Lifeskills to develop. These skills are inherently linked, Hunting and Tailoring, Mining and Forging, Gathering and Pharmacy and Quarrying and Polishing. To keep with the general theme of the game, these skills are complicated. You have to gather/mine/quarry/hunt 500 of the same items scattered throughout the world before you can progress to level 2 and be able to scrounge for level two items as well as level one. The production sides on these Lifeskills require far more items than just what you have to pick up off the ground. To create the first Tailoring item you need seven different things. Some of these tailoring items are only occasionally dropped from level 30-40 mobs. So, although you start the quest at level 20, it might be another twenty levels before you can actually create anything. Quarrying/Polishing can be only learned at level 60 and above. So you might be halfway to the second level before you decide to drop that Lifeskill and decide to make rings, pendants and necklaces. Regardless of your profession, you will need to store a large amount of materials to create items from your Lifeskill. This is when you first realize the issue of storage space. You backpack is very limited, and your storehouse is not much bigger. Of course you can pay to enlarge your storehouse; you will always feel that there is just never enough room.
   Items come in the standard white, green, blue and gold quality. Some items also come with sockets, but you have to use a socket tool to open the socket up. Then you have to either have a gem drop or purchase it from the store to be able to place it in that socket. You can also improve the chances that the gem will actually stick into the socket by getting a rare drop or purchase items from the store. Armor can be found in sets with set bonuses. The bonuses are substantial enough that you might find yourself as a level 60 character playing in level 40 items. Shoes, gloves, shoulder pieces and kneepads all come separately. You might have a boss only drop one kneepad or glove. Not to worry, another boss ten levels later might drop another glove for you.
   The combat is fairly well conceived. Most of the mobs are non-aggressive and only respond when attacked. This becomes ingrained until you have a quest in an area where the mobs attack anything that approaches them. Aside from the dismal FPS, some of the instances and boss battles required teamwork and skill to emerge victorious. Expect there to be a learning curve when meeting a boss for the first time. The game designers also try and shake things up and spawn certain bosses in different areas of the world. These mobs can be just as challenging and the instance bosses.
   The classes in DragonSoul are as lopsided as I’ve ever seen. And this game was intended to be a MMORPG PVP setting. The warrior class has the defense of a tank as well as a substantial physical attack. The assassins are only half a step behind the warriors. The hunters and mages are pathetic. While they can match the warriors and assassins in damage output, they don’t have half the defense or evasion to survive a few hits from an aggravated boss. While I was playing the closed beta, I read a discussion where a level 60 mage and a level 61 hunter were both PK’d by a level 47 warrior. Playing a mage, I avoided any form of PVP. But I can only imagine how complicated an eight-sided war could be.
   The world’s detailed creation and graphics were actually well done. However, all that beautiful imagery is shattered when your mount runs through a tree or a building (typing ‘noclip’ didn’t help). You can also get easily caught up on a corner or a ledge and you just ‘skip’ back a few yards and run at it again. You can see the efforts of the game designers in censorship and ‘addiction programs’. Unfortunately, this was almost as bugged as so many other parts of the game. Most racial slurs were censored as expected; though somehow the F-bomb hasn’t quite made it to the list. But ‘kill’ is also censored. And so is ‘ho’, not just the stand-alone word, but any portion of any word. “Show me what to kill.” Becomes “S**w me what to ****.” You have to pretend that you are awarded more experience points for solving the puzzle on Wheel of Fortune.
   All in all, I’d rate this game a 1.5 out of five stars. If I had to sum up this game in one sentence, I would say that “It’s a complicated cash-grabber.” There are some truly great things about this game, but that’s not enough compensation for the rest of the failures. No doubt, there will be some people who pour a lot of time and money into playing this game, but I don’t anticipate the volume of players necessary to make it interesting. Compound that with the fact that you will be paying real money for almost everything, I prophesy a hard crash and burn. Sorry Giant Interactive, buy a copy of Get Smart for all of your employees, because you ‘missed it by that much.’
2. Dragon Soul Tester (January 2nd, 2012 at 8:48 pm)

   Storage Space is very limited, and Premium Storage items will leave much to be desired. Hence will not encourage people to buy. This is a suicide strategy for the Game providers, considering that the life skills require a hell lot of different mats. The game is nice to play ONLY if it had a decent Storage system. I have never played another game with such a Storage limitation. Personally, will stop playing this game coz of this.

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