Pros: Graphics aren’t too bad, switch between three weapons for three interchangeable classes, land and ship based combat/content
Cons: Extremely grindy, PVE is boring, quests are shallow and repetitive, poor English translations
Gameplay: 5
Graphics: 6
Performance: 9
We recently took out some hours to try the release on Steam of Florensia, a maritime based fantasy MMORPG from publishers GamesInFlames, in which players can explore the vast world of Florensia by land and by sea. A classic quest-focused/themepark style MMORPG, players are given four different classes to play as and customize (Mercenary, Noble, Saint and Explorer) where they can complete content either on land as their character or in one of five different craftable ships. The game was originally launched back in 2008 and now it’s being published by GamesInFlames as Florensia Western Global.
Given that the game is eight years old the graphics, in fairness, have held up quite well. Whilst far from the types of full 3D graphical wonders that we see being released these days, even in the F2P market, the cutesy anime quality that the game holds is a lot more forgiving on this more simplistic style. Whether textures, character and creature models, animations, UI, the game feels more basic as much as it does “old”, that at its original release it would have still felt a little blank and generic in places.
If our experience could be summed up in two words then “basic and generic” would probably be at the top.
Our three hours of game time as the ranged rifle/dual pistols Explorer were spent almost exclusively on a rather tedious PVE quest grind, the whole structure of the quests firmly established from those initial quests that this was going be a classic Asian grinder. On the one hand the quests weren’t exactly linear, and there were plenty to fill up our quest log with, but the story to them was fairly meaningless and the actual tasks were generic: go kill 20 Fungi, go kill 20 Nanani, go kill 20 Ground Parrots, go kill 12 Dodo…. Those were the bulk of our first quests, having to go to the same area, kill one set of creatures for a good 20 minutes then head all the way back to town to get the next quest, and then head near enough back to where we’d just been just to do the next quest. Running alongside these kill quests we had two “collect” quests, collecting Necklace pieces or pieces of a Magic candle, all of which dropped from the different creatures we’d be collecting.
Completing these quests probably took the best part of two hours and took us nearly up to level 10, the issue for us wasn’t so much that we had to keep going back to town (which was annoying as an NPC in the vicinity of all these enemies would have been far easier), or that we had to kill so many, or that they were all in the same area, it was a combination of all of these things as well as the fact that the combat was so boring.
In our ten levels we only used one skill (we did learn another one at around level 6 but didn’t need to use it) so “combat” was targeting an enemy, hitting this skill shot that had a long enough cool down that it took another 3 to 4 basic attacks to kill our target. The enemies required no tactics, we could simply stand there and kill them without much of a problem, maybe using a heal potion/herbs after every ten enemies as our taken damage stacked up, but as we couldn’t fire and run at the same time we essentially ended up fighting in melee range with everything after our initial shot. We had the same fight over one hundred times grinding through these quests and even towards the back end of our play session it didn’t look like this formula was going to change any time soon.
The other portion of our session, aside from the constant running around back and forth between NPCs, was the ship element to the game; early on we picked up some ship based quest that gave us access to our own ship. Finding this ship was ridiculously unintuitive, initially picking a quest up from the shipwright who had a “Dock” button where we could check out our ship, being told to then go find our ship at the dock (but seemingly not the “Dock” function), speaking to a port manager who then referenced we needed to pick up food and a crew for the shipwright to get our ship… the bad wording/directions (and generally poor English translations) as well as the frankly unintuitive design made finding our ship an absolute pain that took far longer than it should have.
Once in our ship, that are equally as customizable as characters where you can pick up gear for them and spend skill points to acquire new abilities, we headed out into the sea/world map environment. As with the land the sea was a litter of mobs that we had to kill; steering with WASD and firing into our ships cannon firing arcs was interesting, but again the lack of skill and complex tactics required for early level combat made ship combat just as much of a grind as land combat.
Whilst the game is rich in features (PVE, dungeons, PVP, guild combat, crafting, sailing, marriage system, pets, resource gathering and a lot more) the problem is that they are quantity over quality; they are implemented but done at the most basic level and it doesn’t feel like the developers ever asked “is this fun?”. The quests and PVE combat were the same throughout and the new player experience just isn’t enjoyable (at least if you don’t like Asian grinder MMORPGs) and feels like artificially created long play session due to long quest chains to make the entire game a time sink.
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