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A long PW Review
Bernoully
Member Posts: 174
To start off with, where my MMO upbringing is grounded in: I started off with Ragnarok Online in the Comodo days, then moved to Flyff and skipped past Kal and several months in Voyage Century. It's mostly the Asian assortment, not so much on the Western MMOs.
I'm playing Perfect World Malaysian English version, so I dunno how the others are doing.
Lore-wise, Perfect World is supposedly set in the Chinese mythological Pangu, some ancient world. It's really more of Chinese-flavoured high fantasy, which I personally preferred to Korean "standard fantasy". The graphical style seems to be somewhere between Lineage II and WoW, much more solid than Flyff... resulting in 1/4 cartoony and moderately colourful world. The terrain is huge and few places look the same. With the flight feature, there's just plenty of places to explore.
PW Characters have the best physical customization I know to date, which I heard is only rivalled by City of Heroes and Villains. Three races are in the game: the humans, werebeasts (a good change from orcs) and elves... wing elves they call it. You can virtually mold and colour yourself funny, and there's a seriously long list of hairstyles to choose from. Unfortunately, armour is non-customizable in terms of colours: you get the same armour sets of light, mid and heavy. Since this game is F2P, there's obviously the shop item clothing, which is still not in the CB yet.
Fortunately or unfortunately as one views it, quests drives this game and this is where all the monster grind is hidden. According to some players, levels 1-30 will have an abundance of quests, and the exp-level ratio begins to taper much from there onwards. Every level, a significant set of quests will open up, and this is where the exploration comes in. Those who jump into the grind blindly will definitely miss all the rewarding quests, which includes special equipment. The drop rate is forgiving enough, and most early quests wants things in multiples of 5 lesser than 50. PW Quests in general shouldn't take more than 3 days to finish, casual-gamingly speaking.
You start off with easy fetch quests, several items and just talking to NPCs. As you level up, you are encouraged to go to the satellite towns/villages, where you'll find more quests and stronger enemies. The warping service in game is fairly cheap, and you'll be using it to backtrack to old NPCs where new quests are available. The quest makes one feel that the world is indeed linked up. AFAIK, quests are different for all 3 races, because of the coverage you spread from your racial hometown. The same NPC for one race will give a different one for another, and this is mighty plus. 
Still reading? Anyway, the combat is either melee hack-and-slash or projectile-lobbing, nothing special but they do the job. Other than HP-MP, there's a Vigor bar that builds as you perform certain actions, and it can be used for special skills. The skill trees aren't very huge, you get like one or two combat abilities in the earlier stages and you'll be using them a lot, for a long time. There's a combo system or something, that I'm not sure of.
Pets, not much comparison to talk about. The werefox class is the only class that can use attacking pets, like beastmasters. Other classes can get luxury pets, but not to the wide variety found in WoW. There's some ultra-expensive mounts in the shops, and humans get to ride on flying swords. Werebeasts have their air and land monster mounts, and the wing elves can fly by default. PW probably is the only 3D MMO with two characters on a single mount, for couples.
As for the crafting, it's pretty standard. There are 4 classes of crafting, and some resources cross path with each other. There are single-harvest nodes all over the world, and most items doesn't really need more than 20 of the same things in the mid-upper section of the game.
Okay, now the monsters themselves. As with all 3D game models, there are reuses but the variety is fair enough... however the names are where the variety makes its mark. The same breed of creature will have its mountain version, riverside version, desert version, and the illusion is enough to convince that the world of PW has a simple ecosystem of its own. Of course, not all monster show a direct interaction with each other, but some quests will elaborate on that. Unlike the signature monster races in WoW like Murlocs and Nerubians, PW monster races are felt but very weak in impact. They'll be a passing motion to your eyes, in a sense. Definitely much better than the Monster Level 1-2-3 crap that Flyff uses. 
Because the features and the world engages so much, there's not much sense of community other than a bunch of friends who joined in together. People will be mostly asking for directions and about solutions to quests. People running around busy with quests is currently a common sight. There's names that are white, pink and red as opposed to the standard light blue, so I assume they are related with PKs or PvPs.
There's guilds, PvP arena, open PvP duels and territorial wars, but you won't find it in this review because I'm not familiar with them. The CB doesn't have housing system yet, butit sounds promising so far.
Perfect World is an enjoyable MMO to play, especially compared to the standard Asian MMO. Better than the rest. Th0e game world has a good presence overall despite the not-perfect translations in our M'sian version. Heard they'll be fixing it, but just how many of these have perfect translations anyway? If you're stuck in a MMO rut, just give it a try, the MMO messiah is nowhere near this year.
Comments
Very nice write up, as I have stated a few times this game is by far the best FREE MMO I have played to date.
It seems to be flying under the radar but people will be catching on soon enough. I figure the community isnt active talking wise because a lot of people are suprised with the game and are too busy figuring things out, especially being in a beta stage. I am sure once the game goes full force the community will pick up.
Out of every 100 men, 10 should not be there,
80 are nothing but targets, 9 are the real fighters.
Ah, but one, ONE of them is a warrior,
and he will bring the others home.
-Heraclitus 500BC
Nice write up indeed, and I agree with you on several points. This game is the BEST F2P MMO I've played thus far. It's that good. If they can clean up the translation and tweak the skill trees in beta, this game will absolutely rock.
This is still in closed beta. Everyone is busy chasing the rewards that are promised to the higher levels. I suspect this will change as the other versions seem more focused on community.
Originally posted by Sandcastle
PW Characters have the best physical customization I know to date, which I heard is only rivalled by City of Heroes and Villains.
SWG has the customization of this game. Almost exactly like this game.
Originally posted by Sandcastle
PW probably is the only 3D MMO with two characters on a single mount, for couples.
again SWG has a few two player mounts. not for couples
but theres a 8 player mount as well.
Bren
while(horse==dead)
{
beat();
}
Bren
A mount is just an organic vehicle. You can't compare them because a mount is a vehicular sub category.
SWG is a payed to play game so there is no comparison.
Out of every 100 men, 10 should not be there,
80 are nothing but targets, 9 are the real fighters.
Ah, but one, ONE of them is a warrior,
and he will bring the others home.
-Heraclitus 500BC
Bren
A mount is just an organic vehicle. You can't compare them because a mount is a vehicular sub category.
While I don't disagree with you I think you missed my point. What I meant to say is this is the only game with multi-player mounts -as- animals. SWG had multiplayer mounts that were all vehicles. I believe that all the animal mounts in SWG were single passenger however.Bren
while(horse==dead)
{
beat();
}
This is still in closed beta. Everyone is busy chasing the rewards that are promised to the higher levels. I suspect this will change as the other versions seem more focused on community.
Yup, I agree the community will eventually develop once people get used to the features. Such are closed betas, we explore what the game is capable of first~