Lately most of the mmorpg games developers are busy hyping their upcoming MMORPGs by promising the best voices overs, graphics, but they rarely talk about gameplay and when they do, i don’t see much improvements from what we have now. It seems that it remains to the independent developers, small companies to improve the current mmorpg recipe. One of these companies, Kalicanthus Entertainment recently launched their open beta event for their upcoming fantasy MMORPG, Craft of Gods.
Craft of Gods is a fantasy MMORPG based on Slavic mythology which promises to appeal to PvP gamers through RvR/PvP and also to the PvE folks, through a great character development, housing, dungeons and other neat features.
The game introduces you the world through a series of quests on a small island, map. Here you learn how to fight, gather materials, and do some quests. The quests are what you would expect from todays mmorpg, nothing fancy or innovative, but they do their job. Unfortunately the quests UI and dialog system could use some work, since it has some bugs sometimes/bad implementation, but nothing serious that could deteriorate your adventure.
Character movement and camera are WOW standard, which can only be a good thing, since i find this the best camera and movement system until somebody creates something better. On character development things gets very interesting, where you can control each attribute when you gain levels and also you can choose abilities from several magic schools, melee, ranged and more on the spot, anytime you have the skill points to buy. So basically you can become a fighter that has magic powers and also uses bows, tames animals, summons things, and plays at the piano:) How good and balanced you’ll become, time will tell, but it is great to have complete control, instead of having a developer thinking you are too dumb for it or it’s too risky. Indeed this will cause balanced problems, so the developers will have to work more on this, after and during release.
In combat you use the special melee/magic/range abilities like in any other mmorpg where the animations are good, but sometimes they are out of sync, your target is too far or too close. It could be internet/server lag or problems in the model’s animations. Sounds effects are decent but they don’t always play at the right time when you fight or they are missing. Music is quite good and provides the right atmosphere for a fantasy setting.
Environment graphics are very nice on high detail, with a good view distance, where you will encounter lots of nice forests and points of interest.There is also a detailed scalable video setting and the game starts by default with a sharp filter and glow. Character models are decent, nothing spectacular, but the particle effects are like ten years old which damages the combat effects and world detail(even Asheron’s Call developed in 1998-99 had better particle effects).
On my adventure i also encountered some problems with the introduction to the main world, where you level by quests grind or by farming mobs (killing specific mobs until you faint). They are a lot of quests, but you don’t know which ones are recommend for your level until you talk with the NPC. They hold good item rewards, but usually they require a very high level to wear which make no sense and loot tables are also a bit messed up since they have the same problem.While exploring is fun, the background story is lacking a decent introduction. There is no bigger picture, no world conflict, or at least I failed to notice an element of this magnitude. I believe that every sandbox mmorpg there should be a good start followed by a intensive story for the player to get him hooked and keep him playing – introductory story/quests/world events/etc.
Overall Craft of Gods it’s a promising mmorpg with a great character development system where you control what class/muticlass your character will be. A mage/fighter/ranger? Or Stallone/Jet Li/Megathron?:P It has a good soundtrack and a interesting world to explore, but suffers due to an old particle system and rough introduction to the game, quests, scope and also some minor problems with the combat.
The developers are planning to release Craft of Gods at the end of May 2010. How much of the things above will be fixed will see, but if the developers do their thing in the upcoming months, this could turn into a gem. Also if you didn’t have chance to play the open beta there will be a trial with the release, so you wont buy the game blindly based on hype or some article like a lot of the gamers do these days.
