We took some time out to play Forsaken World from Perfect World Entertainment, a fantasy based MMORPG that was originally launched in China in 2010 and hit Western shores in Dec 2012. We’ve glossed over the game a few times over the years keeping up to speed with updates and expansions, but for the first time we committed a more extensive play session to check the game out in a little more detail.

Starting from the initial Land of Origination zone we played through the entire area that took us all the way up to level 30; so what did we think? Well, not all that much to be honest.

What the game has going for it is to start with is that there are a few different races and classes available, for our play session we went with the Demon Tormentor, this particular race being the only option for the Tormentor class, and vice versa. Character creation isn’t terrible, a few colour changes and sliding scales that give it a respectable (if not superior) customizability, however, once you step into the game it all kind of goes downhill. The graphics are just way under par for an MMORPG heading into 2016 and can’t compete in any way shape or form with the newer releases, or even some that have released in the two or three years. Even with the revamp the game had a little while back it is still a world littered with block textures, flat environments painted to give the effect of depth (badly), a pretty horrible user interface, low quality character models… it just generally looks poor.



Now, we’re far from graphics snobs, even if it does give a bad first impression, if a game is good and fun and interesting then we can overlook weaker graphics, but the fact is that there was nothing really of not in Forsaken World. So far from being able to overcome dated graphics, the game was a let-down in other areas as well.

Questing is the key focus of the game, at least in the starter zone, but there was nothing entertaining about it and it felt like a complete grind. Firstly it was completely linear, picking up one quest at a time, complete, hand in, pick up next quest, rinse and repeat. The quests themselves were pretty similar and generally revolved around killing a dozen or so of the same mob, usually in an area littered with these enemies that once killed would near instantly respawn so there were always hundreds of them. Not that they posed a threat, none of them would aggro and so we could literally sit in the middle of them all and either spam our abilities and hit tab to fire off at the next one, or use our convenient Wraith Surge when it built up to insta-kill everything within 10m. The number of enemies was insane (but fairly typical of Asian MMORPGs) where presumably at a time more players were passing through and so a faster spawn was needed, unfortunately we only saw one other player in our entire time in the game so now it is overkill, further accentuated by these spawn areas are generally split up by long journeys where there’s absolutely nothing to kill or do other than travel for a minute.

The traveling was annoying. There were two instances where it was really annoying. We could bind ourselves to a Town Portal, but this means reaching a town and there’s only one in the starter zone right at the beginning of the zone where you start out. At one point we were halfway round the map and tried to jump off a bridge to our fiery deaths (not even sure what the death screen looks like as the mobs are no challenge whatsoever), which were blocked by invisible walls… only one wall was a little further down the mountain and so when we jumped it let us fall down a little bit and then wedged us, so we had to portal back to town and then walk all the way back (which we might have had to do if we died anyway). However, when we hit level 20, once more we were about halfway round the map, we unlocked the Solo Instances that we could teleport to an instance location to complete a quest, unfortunately upon leaving it took us to an entirely different area and we hadn’t finished our quests in the starter zone, so we had to travel all the way back to the beginning of the zone and auto run for nearly 5 minutes to get back.



The Solo Instance itself was hit and miss, we were loaded into a camp where we were with other Initiate soldiers, part of our first quest was getting into formation quickly. As the NPC soldiers all moved around quickly (albeit their animation was a slow walk, so they were just gliding across the ground..) they got into a random formation with a single position available that you had to get into within the time limit. It was quirky and a little different, and once or twice it would have been cool, but making us do it five times was arduous. From here we then had to fight an Initiate, only it was a 3v1 with us and an NPC Tank and Healer fighting him, so the battle consisted of us just standing there and unloading everything on him, trying to defeat him within a minute. We were never under threat, we didn’t even have to move, but we beat him. Then handing in the quest we were tasked with fighting another Initiate… then another… then another…. Sorry but no, at this point we just quit the instance.

The most entertaining moment in the game for us, in our entire thirty levels, was getting a quest to kill a named boss that could only be injured with a quest item; upon reaching him another player was wailing away trying to kill him but not making a scratch. We watched his futile attempts for a minute or two and then just used our item and one hit killed him, leaving the player to just turn to us and “… what the hell.” like we were some kind of GOD! We said nothing and just walked away all mysterious.

That was about it though, that was our entertaining moment, the rest was a series of disappointments and head shaking, coming to an area where NPC guards were fighting goblins and the guard positioning was so bad/random that you had Guards “fighting” (read: the attacking animation over and over) either at thin air or even at each other so it looked like they were scrapping (which initially made us think the quest was about sending the guards mad).



Overall the experience was very dull, we’ve played a lot of MMORPGs and Forsaken World is one of the titles that is very low, if not at the bottom, of the list due to how long we played and how little we got in return. Is there stuff to do at higher levels? Probably. Does the content get more interesting and challenging? Possibly. However, we shouldn’t have to grind through thirty levels of content, in an area that is one of the newest additions to the game, before we start having fun. There’s plenty of new and even slightly older MMORPGs that do a much better job of making the game exciting from the moment you jump in (including Perfect World’s other title Neverwinter, which has its own problems but is far better).

SCORE

• Graphics: 5


• Performance: 8


• Gameplay: 4

• Pros: The game is at least free to play, a good range of classes to choose from.


• Cons: The graphics are terrible, too many glitches and bugs, the gameplay is linear and dull.

Final Score: 5.5

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 18th, 2015 at 1:02 pm and is filed under Articles, MMO News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.