Asian MMO screenshots and short review

[HeavenShallBurn]

Perfect World is an MMORPG originally developed in Beijing where it has more than 20 million members. It's been licensed out to companies running versions in several asian countries. Malaysia released the Open Beta of their English version back in September. I joined the first day and have been playing heavily since, here are my thoughts on the game.

*Graphics quality is lacking compared to many MMOs, the textures aren't so good and at spots collision and clipping errors appear.
*Flipside of the above is it doesn't require a cutting edge machine to run. I'm running it fine on a 3 year old machine with extra memory.
*The translations is very heavy Engrish, text can be almost impenetrable at times. But it's not hard to puzzle out what is actually meant via the quest context floaters and the pointers can lead you where you need to go most occasions even if you don't understand.
*Fully 3-d. The environment of Perfect World is fully 3d, you can swim and dive in the bodies of water, scale the mountains, fly in the sky, ride mounts. Ride a land mount standing atop a flying mount, etc. And you can fight anywhere, underwater in the air on the side of a cliff. I've dueled players above the "Capital" city of the game skydiving to break out of power range then opened a mount skittered around the walls and ambushed them submerged in the river under the bridge they charged across.
*Gameplay is tactically diverse and engaging, the player population is friendly.

In short a damned good game, and free to download and play. It's funded via the cash Item Mall like Sword of the New World. These screenshots were taken a few days ago I'm several levels higher now due to some rep grinding and certain very profitable quests

Flickr Gallery of Screenshots

 

[trancejeremy]

I tried PW. I was pretty impressed (especially by the character customization), however I found the interface (and the whole game, really) to be a bit imposing in complexity.

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

A lot of the complexity is IMO due more to the lack of help functionality, and bad translation than real complexity. The functions are actually simple once you get past the lack of explanation. It hit me fairly hard at first but there are several forums with very good Newb FAQ to explain those issues.

 

[YourSwordIsMine]

Can you jump?

This is probably my biggest beef with most asian MMO's. Doesnt seem like that big a deal but it erks me no end. And it looks really good graphically.

I guess I should also ask, is it point and click movment or keyboard keys?

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

Not only can you jump you can do enormous wuxia jumps and even double jumps. You can also use both point and click and keyboard movment

I tend to use a hybrid style most of the time. W key to run forward and pan with the mouse. Unless I'm traveling a long distance, then I set a marker on the end location fly up above the level where the highest mobs spawn and then click on the marker and mess around with macros/spells/inventory/chat/whatever

 

[YourSwordIsMine]

ah sweet, that makes me a happy panda

If I decide to create an account I'll PM you my toon name if you'd like.

This might be something to check out.

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

If you choose the WereBeast class you can play a panda warrior (ala the WoW Pandaren) who wields giant glowing weapons. Enjoy

My main rig's processor just died I'm posting this from an old comp it could be a little while before I'm back up on PW while I replace the processor.

Main toon is on the Oracle server an elf priest named Amanerial. I made the toon the first day of the Beta when each class/race combo had only one model. For Elf Priests this was a female model, the male model wasn't released until the second week of the Beta. There are still some class/gender restrictions but those are on "Beastkind." WB are warriors and are only male, WF are a pet class with poisoning/leeching magic and are only female. On the other hand WF get a free Tank and some nice powers. They're the most powerful class up into the low 40s and even in the end-game are the wealthiest characters because they require the least money to level up their skills/gear/abilities/pots.

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

Back with a new processor and memory upgrade. Unfortunately in the switch-over I lost my password and have to start anew until I can manage to recover it with a new account. Which means over the next few days there'll probably be additions to the Flickr gallery from a new set of low-level chars. I've started grinding hard with an int-focused WF build because they level fastest and amass the most wealth of any class in the game.

By the time I turned in my first quest I was lvl4 and had 11000 yuan (IG $) by contrast it took me nearly 3 hours to amass that much as a Priest, and I spent most of it again on pots.

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

New screenshots from the low-lvl characters I've started on my new account are in the Flickr gallery at the top of the thread.

I'll note having to re-lvl is frustrating, not least because there are a lot more levels. In WoW 60-70 is endgame. In Perfect World levels go up to 105 with coming expansions to match the Chinese servers where it's above 130. This is a game where at lvl70 you're just beginning to make the transition to a more raid based play experience.

Later I'll throw some pics from other character classes in but right now I'm on grinding for levels to make up where I was at when I lost the previous account.