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Unbiased Overview of Silkroad Online
mindspat
Member Posts: 1,367
Silkroad Online: Great game to pass the time while having fun and it’s completely FREE!!
I had pondered the notion of a free mmorpg that had no costs to initialize game play. Not having to purchase a client nor pay monthly subscription fees is intriguing. Thankfully Silkroad Online appears to have a business model based on the appearance that players will pay to give their characters an advantage in game play. The beauty is that you DO NOT need to purchase anything to actually enjoy the game!
The game play is very simple. Click on a creature to initiate combat then occasionally spam a special or two, pick up the loot and do it over again. It feels comparable to Lineage 2’s style of game play. The overall structure of the game appears as a loot/kill/level grind although the early levels establish a good amount of transparency to these redundant tasks.
Advancement is interesting. You gain “skill point experience” and “experience points” which are two different things. Experience Points levels your character and Skill Point Experience is used to purchase, or invest, into skills and abilities for our characters advancement. EXP is gained through defeating your opponent whereas it appears that skill points are awarded depending upon the amount off damage you inflict per attack upon your target. Skill Point EXP is gained per attack and EXP is gained after you defeat your foe.
The setting is a mythical Chinese environment with exaggerated martial arts and huge eccentric creatures. Crafting appears to be welcomingly advanced compared to the basics of the combat and character advancement while trading seems lucrative.
Characters are based upon pre designed notions and backgrounds with no true ability to individualize your characters appearance upon creation. Choosing from a sword, spear, glaive or bow has slight variations in your attacks and defensive abilities whereas three different options for armor preferences create a “specialty” type of roll while also adding a minor bit to individualism.
The graphics are nice! While they are not the best they definitely instill a nice ambience during game play. I would say the graphics are a LOT better then WoW (in my opinion) and a little less then Lineage 2.
Combat animations seem true to generic marital arts moves with some exaggeration although it’s not quite what one would expect after watching their favorite Shao-Lin Kung-Fu movie.
Lag is not as bad as one would think when you load into a city with an obvious 200-300 players standing around you. A decent PC system should prevent client side lag and the server lag appears to be at a minimum; I’ve been playing on a new server named ALPS.
The English dialogue is poor. Many things make little to no sense and there’s a multitude of descriptions which all have the same text for different skills, abilities and items. You’re bound to notice some nuances which might not make sense at first glance. I found it odd although it did not affect my game play.
I’ve had much fun playing 2 characters through to level 11. It reminds me of the fun I had playing Anarchy Online on the Noob Island where I must have ground out 5-6 players for several days at a time. I found it more fun then World of Warcraft even though it could be said that it’s less complicated and even more simplified.
I’m having more fun in Silkroad Online then any other MMO at the momment even though I would normally prefer complicated and challenging games over the simplified “everyone-can-play” ones. There's easily 20-40 hours of decent and enjoyable game play here and it's FREE!
In a nut shell, give it a try. It's FREE!!!
Comments
I also thought i'd put my few words in here... hope you don't mind...
This game compares greatly to the game guildwars. The rewarding combat and great use of team, skills, graphics, and even SOLO (which i love) makes this game GREAT to get into! I've been playing for about 8 days now and i think its quite safe to say that this game reaches out way past the depths of guild wars mainly for one reason... The max level... Guild wars got quite old to me after i had 4 maxed characters and pvp'ed my butt off all month long... seriously pvp is great, but i'm into expanding my character and his abilities not endlessly killing other people.
2 pet pevees so far about this game though..... the server lag is a bit much, and at times its tough to get into my server! (Venice) Also I hate how npc theives appear in the worst places at the worst times! Endless times i have been innocently killing baddies, trying to hit level 23 and randomly pops out an npc theif who takes two swings and i'm gone!.....
All in all i LOVE this game... I think its much more fun than guildwars... AND ITS FREE!
go get it you'll love it.
ugh! Not sure why it duped every single paragraph, MS Word maybe? Anyways...
Yeah...it's a cool game and very gratifying when it comes to instant action even though there's many hurdles to overcome through the noc thieves and traveling. It's fun non the less.
Silkroad was one of the best games I ever played until I got to a higher level. The amount of experience and time it took to level each time greatly increased until grinding became the bane of my existence, but quests do help out a little bit. Eventually you'll be so good and accustomed to grinding getting to level 11 is something you do in a couple hours. What kept me going in this game was the competitive nature to reach the highest level and to be able to do well in PvP.
yes yes the xp system has failed us all, or has it? buy gold tickets and waste your whole day leveling only 1 level
for those high level people. Lagg has not helped either... but that doesnt stop most people especially wannabe
noobs. alright back to the lagg problem, yea i know theres a lot of people playing SRO and most just leave it on
and open a stall to make it worse. But there are other games with more people and they have less lagg. Of
couse some of those games may not have the same graphs or nice skills but you get the point.
I played the game for about 3 weeks, and was pretty much in love with the game. 8 characters (and 3 accounts) later, I finally got up to around level 17 (Yea, I'm one of those people who remakes characters a LOT cause there's so many builds to play with) and got around to playing in the thieves den. Then the gankers really kick in, lol.
The game is incredible except for 3 problems, one of them minor, 2 of them fairly big.
1: Lag. Not actually that big a problem really, there's really almost no freeze lag, which is the one that tends to kill people. Just a lot of slowdown.
2: Thief gankers. They seem to infest the higher level areas, players who you can do 5-50 damage to and that love to chase you down and rip out your innards :P This actually ended up being the reason I left the game. PvP with no way to fight back isn't PvP, it's just pointless ganking and no fun.
3: Character creation. I love to customize, and this offered nothing o.o; which in and of itself wouldn't be that bad, but you can have 3 characters per account...and it takes 7 days to delete one T_T which means you better have a friend if your anything like me (a build test whore) cause your going to be transfering all your toys to a new account when you run out of your slots, lol.
The best thing this game has going for it is the skill system. There are TONS of combinations you can create if you like to experiment.
Basicaly though, if you can put up with ganking, you'll love the game. If you hate being ganked, avoid it.