Business & Games: The Blog

My first experience with these MMOs was rather disappointing, as BOTS!! (tm) just wouldn't bloody ru  and support was, at best, scarce. So I put Acclaim out of my mind for a while and only recently decided to return to it and look into 9dragons.

Once the Beta ends, I suppose real ads will go up there.

I've only played 9dragons a couple of times, for a few hours each time. Hence, my feelings on it stem from what you might call first impressions. The game's premisis has (or should have) 'win' written all over it. China? Martial arts? Temples? League of Beggars? Hell yeah! Unfortunately, a good idea does not a game make, especially when the execution is poor. And in this case, it is poor.

Allow me to stray from the topic just short enough to make a bitter remark. I usually trust Wikipedia (although never blindly), but the page for 9dragons reads more like advertising than anything else:

9Dragons is a MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) created by Acclaim Games. The game features cutting-edge full 3D graphics but is also authentic to the heritage of unique martial arts. Based upon China during the Ming Dynasty, it includes actual Chinese geography and historical features such as the Great Wall of China and the famous Shao-Lin Temple.
[...]
Indy21, a game developer in Korea, originally created the videogame 9Dragons, then they made agreements with both "Persistent Worlds" and "Acclaim", to allow them to market and sell 9Dragons to the European and American markets. The original In-game story for Indy21's Korean version was written by best-selling Wuxia novelist Jwa Baek. Fearing the Eastern themes within the game would be difficult to grasp for Western gamers, Howard Marks, CEO of Acclaim, hired best-selling author Steven-Elliot Altman to rewrite the In-game story and create the original English background lore.

Cutting-edge graphics? The game looks like a poor man's version of WoW and doesn't hold a candle to newer MMOs, such as LOTRO. Then, there are the little things, such as initiating a conversation with NPCs taking you out of real-time mode and throwing you into a pre-rendered scene with a static camera. Graphics aren't the first thing I look for in RPGs, mind you. However, stating that 9dragons has cutting-edge graphics is a bit like saying Quake 2 is currently the epitome of 'hot' as far as shooters are concerned. That is to say, hilarious.  

Me smashing some sort of funeral stone. In the background, the Spice Girls.

Back on the subject. The phrasing for most NPC texts (including quests) is painful. I don't know who put it together, but I'm curious about what they had been drinking the previous days. It's a mix of engrish, redundancy and can generally be described as the tongue one may use when trying to mock Chinese people attempting to speak English.

During the great war, the war was ravaging the country at war. Warriors (going at war), made war upon their foes, who waged war upon them. You dig?

Much to my surprise, I quickly found out (upon completing an awfully dull tutorial) that the servers are rather crowded. Now, I do not mean to sound like a snobby bastard but I quickly (and sorely) noticed that most of the players I ran into where a part of that special breed of MMO cretins, with English knowledge not extending beyond "u give itemz plz?". As such, I decided to avoid them and hunt far from them. Another factor that led to this decision was that I was, after all, playing a kung-fu themed game and therefore, I was in the ironic peril of someone ninja'ing my loot. Furthermore, we all looked the bloody same! It's ironic that the game has so few (very very few) customization options for your starting character when you can spend anywhere between 20 minutes and 2 hours making yourself a face in EVE Online, a game with spaceships. 

An aptly named gentleman.

Quests: As I previously mentioned, I didn't get sucked into the game for long enough to get to the interesting quests. You know, the ones that aren't "bring me x from y" or "deliver y to x" or "kill 10 x for me". Let us assume however that they exist.

Music: Here, I could not be objective if I tried (good thing I don't). However, being used to the western MMO tradition, where music is wondefully groovy in a tarvern (groovy in a medieval fashion, of course), only to switch to a thunderous march of Wagnerian or maybe Orffian inspiration as your character enters combat mode, I expected more from the 9dragons soundtrack. Mind you, the music isn't bad. It's just...not very captivating, to the point where having it on or off won't make any difference.
Graphics: my girlfriend asked me why I'm playing older games and she's not even a gamer!
Combat: the game has a few specifics but overall, it's the same old cooldown-based system.
Advancement: what's interesting here is the minigames that you have to go through to train up/learn new abilities. However, from what I've seen, there aren't too many of these and as such, the risk of them getting old fast is rather big.

Minigames

Classes: a system of Clans is in place, with each clan belonging to one of the two proverbial sides. As a note, one clan is for male characters only and another is for ...*suspense*...female characters! This Escapist article quickly came to mind.
Website: Disappointing. The design reminds me more of a platform or even a browser-based game than a full-fledged MMORPG.

Now, mister Frodo, now!

Backstory: It's a Kung Fu game, who cares about the story? Joke aside though, the idea is good, if somewhat underdevelopped.
Other notes: The artwork is decent, as seen in the loading screens. 

Part two of this article will come whenever I can bring myself to run the game again. My conclusion so far is that 9dragons simply isn't worth the time. This has nothing to do with the game being in beta, you may have noticed I barely touched mechanics and such (although the camera is rather annoying). The problem is that the game gives a general impression of being rushed. They put it together using ideas from MMOs that sell, completely buggered the content by poor writing and managed to turn an idea with potential into a mediocre game. Until next time, I leave you with the famous snake decapitation scene.

Father, no!