Warning: TLDR post
Found this interesting game on the web. It's currently in Closed Beta in NA and EU. The game is originally Asian. (please don't stop reading here lol)
It is described as an MMORPG that is very similar to EVE Online, in the sense of being a sandbox when it comes to skill training, what to do, player economy, territory claiming, etc.
Combat is tab target, but it has an Overt-Feint-Block system, each counters one and is countered by one, so it could be pretty interesting.
Overview
Age of Wulin is a free-to-play martial arts MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) set in a charmingly realistic representation of medieval China, with 27 regions representing all geographical areas of the country, with an amazing 130 km² of open world to explore, and that doesn’t even include instanced areas – all presented with stunning graphics and available to enjoy soon in English, French, and German. Many thousands of quests, vast and diverse regions to explore, and 20 challenging instances make Age of Wulin one of the most expansive and ambitious free-to-play MMORPGs to date.
You will not find elves, dwarves, strange monsters and other fantasy creatures here. Great care has been taken to create a medieval martial arts world that is so real, you can almost taste it. Yes, the kung-fu skills you can master are amazing and jaw-dropping – you can learn to glide through the air, run up walls, and across water – but no weird monster or magic being will cross your path and disturb the image of a perfectly crafted, realistic online world, just as it existed in China centuries ago.
The Age of Wulin RPG experience is an adventure like no other. There are no classes or levels, you hone your skills in various ways and can easily become immersed in the breath-taking living game environment: Over 20,000 NPCs inhabit the detail-rich landscapes, cities and villages, but they don’t just stand around – they live their own lives, have their own personalities and react to your actions in sometimes surprising ways.
NPCs and Random Encounters
Every NPC forms their own opinion about you, depending on their own nature and your actions – so don’t bump into them or knock them over, they may get angry! Once you’ve created a big enough impression, be it in a positive or even a negative way, they may give you a special errand or item which may lead you to experience one of the unique random encounters. There are a vast number of Random Encounters hidden in the game, and they can play out differently for each individual player! Each encounter is highly sought after, since many rare items and skills can be obtained through them. It is entirely possible that you could gain a unique ability that no-one else in the game will manage to get!
Kung-fu Skills and Weapons
You are born into a rich martial arts culture where you can choose your own path to becoming a master. You can join one of eight sects, each with their own philosophy, orientation and specialist kung-fu discipline, fighting style and weaponry. Here you learn and practice your skills, however like a true scholar, you can travel and learn skills from other sects to gain more abilities and become an even more experienced master!
Whether your preferred weapon is a shining blade, double daggers, a stick, simply your fists, or you opt for hidden darts to eliminate your enemies from the shadows… There is a myriad of ways to battle it out in this immersive online experience. Fights are not won by monotonously pushing buttons – they are built around a rock-paper-scissors system, so you will have to watch your opponents and anticipate their moves, leading to very dynamic encounters.
Professions and Offline System
You can take up one of 17 professions, which range from the more common blacksmith or hunter to truly original ones, like painter, beggar, musician, or chess player. Each of these professions brings its own benefits – an experienced chess player may benefit his group in a fight with his acquired tactical skills. The opportunities are endless!
It doesn’t all end when you log out of this RPG either. Your character remains in the world and will continue training skills, selling items or producing goods, effectively becoming an NPC to everyone else on the server. Other players can interact with him or her, and can even abduct you to sell you on for their own profit! This isn’t just online gaming, it’s true role-playing.
Guilds, PvP and PvE
You better find some friends to band together… how about forming a guild? Guilds can purchase a guild castle and expand it as they grow their influence. The guild castles are part of the open world and can be visited by all. But as there are only a limited number of these castles available, other guilds may try to conquer yours and challenge you to a battle. These guild battles can see 200 to 250 members on each side, making them truly epic events. The system prevents moonshine raids so no need to stay up all night for defence!
There is plenty to offer for smaller groups too. Fights between 2, 4 or 6 players result in a more tactical approach, where you can utilise your skills to your full advantage – either by battling it out on the water’s surface, or by fleeing over the rooftops to avoid certain defeat under the hands of stronger or more numerous opposition. If you enjoy cooperative play against a common enemy, a range of quests and instances present you with challenges on many different levels of difficulty.
Play for free!
These are only a few of the features to grace Age of Wulin, one of the most anticipated martial arts MMORPGs to date. Age of Wulin will be available in English, French, and German for download on the gPotato portal in early 2013. If you are new to MMORPGs, this online martial arts game will guide you in taking your first steps into the exciting world of medieval Chinese kung-fu – but if you are an experience MMORPG player, get ready to be blown away by the ingenious and innovative features which can only be found in Age of Wulin. Best of all, it’s completely free!
Few points why I find this game worth trying:
- skills and progression like EVE online
- guild territory claiming with guild castles (and building/improving castles) and guild wars/battles
- open PvP
- players run the economy
- massive world
- overt/feint/block tab target combat system
- sects (NPC factions) and sect wars
- special missions like spying, stealing books, kidnapping, arson (damages guilds for the guild war), escort
- your character becomes an NPC when you log off (you can even kidnap offline players)
- more realistic Chinese theme, not the standard bigass armors and swords AZN mmo
NA link: http://www.ageofwushu.com/ EU link: http://wulin.gpotato.eu/ I will be testing it out today to see how it is.
ADDED:
My first impressionsOh yes, this game is amazing... There's so many features I spent 3 hours of playing yesterday completely overwhelmed. I still don't understand 3/4 of the stuff that it is offering me. But 3 hours was enough to know this game is very well made. It just offers so much. I was a bit sceptical when I heard so many people / websites say that it's like EVE Online. I just couldn't imagine a medieval Chinese MMO from Asia to be like EVE.
But I was pleasantly surprised, this game IS quite similar to EVE. Not only does it have a ton of features, it also has all those small details that make the game feel very much alive. The graphics are very decent, but should run on most machines, if you ask me.
Here's my first impressions (after about 3 hours of gameplay):
- The combat system is interesting. At first I thought it would be more like a standard tab target system, but it is a bit special. There's a lot of interaction between the people fighting, so it's not just "spam the best attacks". You have to react to your opponent. This is done via the Overt/Block/Feint system. For example if you use a Feint attack on someone who is Blocking, he's going to get knocked down / stunned. If you use an Overt attack over someone who is Feinting, that guy will get stunned/something-alike as well. You can also use your Flying skills to dodge attacks and such. Overall it feels very tactical.
- Fuckload of skills. There's just so many skills to train. You have a lot of different attacks even at the start of the game.
- The whole "Become an NPC when you're offline" thing makes the world feel very very alive. You see random players performing everyday jobs when they're offline, from being guards, to carrying goods around the village or even begging. When you're logging off it lists 4 jobs and you'll be doing one of those when you log off. The list depends on where you log off, so if you log off near a tavern, you could as well become a "tavern servant". It was just great seeing places and cities full and lively because of this. It felt very immersive.
- Professions aka gather/crafting skills: There's a lot of those as well. You can be one of the standard profession like miner, woodcutter, farmer, etc or pick up one of the more non-standard ones, like painter, muisician or even beggar. I only tested farming so far. To farm you have to buy seeds, plant them in a field, use fertilizier to speed up the growing process if you want on the plant. What I really liked here is that there is nothing instanced about this. You plant on a field that everyone uses and the plant that you grow is visible by everyone. Again this makes the world feel very live. When the plant is grown, your plant might get infected by insects or weeds, in which case you have to use the anti-weed or anti-insect "pots".
- The economy is almost entirely done by players. For example farmers get farmer product, for example wheat, turn it into flour, sell the flour via player stalls to chefs, chef uses it to cook food for players to eat. Players can set their own stalls or rent the static stalls in the cities/villages for in-game currency. You selling at your stall can even stay in the world when you log off. You can also set a message that you will yell to other people around the stall every so often.
- In the start of the game you have to pick a school to join. I'm still not sure what all that determines, but it seems that you get the basic set of combat skills and learning from your school. There's also a bunch of features when it comes to Schools like school missions, school offline jobs, school reputation (you can even get punished by your school for having a negative rep!), school warfare. There's also internal school positions that players can occupy. These are determined by weekly tournaments and the best fighters get the higher positions on the school, which everyone can view by going to school interface.
- On top of the regular quests that you get from NPCs, you also have special missions that are related to several areas in the game (Guild missions, School missions, World missions). Those include stuff like hunting kidnappers and criminals (other players), stealing scrolls from other schools, patrolling for your school and looking for spies from other schools, ....
- Guild territories and castles. There's I believe 32 castles that guilds can claim in the game. When they claim a castle they "control" that territory. I'm not sure what controlling a territory does, but I think the controlling guild gets some extra money from taxes. The guild castles are also not some useless places - they provide a lot of benefits to the owner guilds, depending on how much they upgraded it. The guilds can upgrade castles with a bunch of additional buildings and NPCs. This provides an incentive to attack/defend castles and overall guild warfare. Guild castle wars are scheduled afaik, so there's no midnight castle captures when your guild is sleeping or something like that.
- Open world Player Killing: you can kill people freely as much as you want, until you get caught. I'm not sure yet what you lose by dying, but I believe it's not a full loot on death game. Anyway, when you kill people you accumulate kill points. Get enough kill points and your name will turn orange/red for other players and NPCs to see. At that point anyone can hunt you down and certain NPCs will attack you. Infact go high enough and there will be a bounty on your head that a player can claim when they "catch" you.
If you're killed/caught for being a PKer, there's two options: you go to jail for a certain period of time or you're "executed" (that's if you killed a lot of people, doesn't mean permadeath, just a harsher penalty afaik). You can also bribe guards and stuff for an earlier release.
- You gain XP from doing almost anything, be it either combat, missions, farming or world exploring. That XP is slowly converted into Cultivation points and those are used up over time to train skills. You can even go to special meditation places, where your skills train slightly faster (like top of the mountain or a cave). On those special places you can also participate in so called group practices/training, which involves multiple players performing combat moves that boosts skill training. You actually play a minigame when you do that, which brings me to the next point:
- Minigames. There's a bunch of minigames in the game that spice up some tasks. For example in order to do group training, every player in participating in the group training has to play the minigame. The minigame consists of simply pressing the directional keys and letter keys in the correct order as displayed on the screen. Caligraphy life skill minigame example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU3CnvV6tiM- This game is very low fantasy. Apart from the Kung Fu moves and Flying skills, the game looks very realistic. One thinks "big eyes, big tits, big armors, big swords" when the term Asian MMO is heard, but this is not the case here. The character models, gear and weapons look realistic. There is no silly looking armors and stuff. You're not fighting any monsters or mystical creatures (at least I haven't noticed so far), you're fighting either real players or NPCs that are human.
- The world is HUGE. On top of making it feel very alive, it's also very pretty. There's so many beautiful places. The cities and villages look amazing and realistic. You're actually playing in real medieval time China (Ming dinasty). You can use your own horse or pay for cart/boat ferry transport to travel around the world.
- The game has a lot of small details as well. Just to list a few, for example the hunger: your character must eat or he/she will suffer certain penalties. Or for example when you walk around the village you can bump and push people around (much like Asssassin's Creed), or scare them off if you ride in the village with your horse at high speed. They even yell at you saying stuff like "Watch out!". Just these small details that again make the world/game feel alive.
- The in-game music is awesome. Subjective opinion ofc but I think it's really good (of course it is chinese music).
Here's a few screens I took:
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loginPlayer stalls in the cityvisitors can't see pics , please
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loginWorld map aka Ming dinasty medieval Chinavisitors can't see pics , please
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loginPlayers become NPCs and take on different jobs when they go offline. White player names are all players. Me (Crubensan) and the guy on the horse are online, the other 3 are offline.visitors can't see pics , please
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loginFarming on a field. I can actually see what other players are growing.PS don't be fooled by the quality of screenshots, it doesn't represent in-game graphics very well.
