Well, I’m pretty thoroughly done with the betas of Deicide and Hero Online that I started a month ago. That is, I played through both closed betas and some of the open beta of Hero and played about 4 hours of Deicide before realizing that my time would better have been spent mutilating my face with a spoon.
deicide online
First off, because of the font they use in the logo, I parsed the game’s name as “decide online” for about 2 days before re-reading it. Their web page was sufficiently broken (longstanding nested php warning garbage and such) that I didn’t bother looking at it very much – which closer investigation I hope would have led me to realize the correct pronunciation sooner.
I give the game a 1 out of 10. Because (despite their best efforts) it DID eventually download and run.
To quote my brief review on MMORPG.com:
Terrible waste of time. I spent 3 days trying to download the beta client – they updated the program halfway through my first attempt and removed the original file, requiring me to start over… Gameplay is awful. The controls are non-intuitive and generally require you to click 4 or 5 times before the right target is hilited. Music is standard, graphics are mediocre at best, and there is absolutely nothing about this game to recomend it without a complete rewrite.
The game’s redeeming factors… hrm. Well, they do something interesting with classes. Every character tracks their level in 4 classes (melee, ranged, black and white magic). The cost in soul crunching time wasted to advance each level seems to be a function of both the individual class level in question and your total level. The type of attacks you use determine which classes you get xp in (you start the game with a sword, bow, and two nuke spells).
Other than that? It’s horrid. Controls… well. Umm. Center click and drag to rotate the camera (a difficult proposition for repeated use on any modern mouse with a wheel for the middle button). Left click to move and to try to select a mob or pick up a drop. Left click a few more times before you actually manage to click on what you meant to. Right click to attack. Right click to attack again. Right click to attack again.
There is no auto-attack feature. At least, if there is, I haven’t figured it out. Sometimes you’ll attack 2 or 3 times from one click, but most frequently you have to spam the mouse button.
There is no tutorial and no help menu. There is some ‘tip’ spam that floods your message window with all sorts of useless information (like suggestions to refrain from pvp or to pick one class and stick with it). Actually, the message window spam is pretty pretty bad even without the tips – it seems to show xp/gold earnings of nearby players in addition to your own, but of course it doesn’t say who got the level, etc…
The town you’re dropped into at game start has a total of 3 npc’s. I think it had 3. I’m not about to log back in to check. All of them have pretty stock Korean MMO’s for Dummies type chat menus when you click on them. Naturally, “quest” is a clickable option on all 3, but doesn’t actually do anything. One or two of the 3 are shopkeepers, so you can dump eq drops on them… but that’s about it for town. I think i saw a guy on a chariot but don’t know if that was a player or just background animation (there does seem to be some of that in town).
In short, Deicide Online is a soulless little game that should never be approached without a hazmat suit and soap.
hero online
On the other hand… Hero Online is a textbook example of what the Korean MMO industry is doing right. I give it a 6 out of 10. It could be better, but it’s about as good as free MMO’s tend to get. There’s good storytelling (well, as good as you can hope for in a game currently in open beta). Actually, no. Compared to most imported MMO’s I’ve played and enjoyed (like Ragnarok and RF Online), the translation is great. And interesting, and the story was obviously originally written by a talented and creative individual.
When you first fire up the client, it may be unbearably slow. I’ve not got any real idea why this is. But it’s slow, really slow. Character creation is slow, character and server selection is slow, loading the game once you choose a character and server is even slower. They might be doing this to train you to be patient when playing.
Every time you zone, your character is put into a protective mode for 30 seconds before anything can attack them. You can still manipulate inventory, drink potions, etc… while paused this way. You cannot, however move. If you walk, it will break the protection.
When you create a character, you are not tied down to any particular server. This is nice in that you don’t have to maintain different sets of chars to play with friends who might have wound up on different servers. I mean, I’d love it if Warcraft let me drift like that. It’d allow me to play with both family, friends, and coworkers – all of whom are spread across 3 or 4 different servers. However, it’s not the most practical idea for a larger game that cares about their economy – but with Hero’s pay model and the sort of inflation that one expects from this particular sub-genre of MMORPG’s, it works.
The death penalty is pretty standard for this genre as well. You lose a bunch of experience. Like at level 14 I remember losing something like 5000 xp a pop, which is a pretty big amount at that level. It is possible to level down from a death and it is also possible to lose an un-spent skill point when you die. However, what isn’t standard is that when you die you have a choice of whether to respawn somewhere safe, or just start back up where you are. When you do this, you’re brought back with like 1 hp and 1 chi and have the standard 30 second timer to drink potions and figure out how to continue.
One other thing that Hero Online is doing well that is a departure from the norms of its sub-genre is the user interface. They’ve evolved beyond the traditional left click to move, right drag to adjust the camera, 8 hotkeys for skills/potions model. They actually use the keyboard. Almost every letter on the keyboard has a use. You can use the keyboard to do almost everything. Like… walking to an arbitrary location and manipulating your inventory. But they have a ‘target closest npc’ button, an ‘attack’ button, a ‘get something from the floor so I don’t have to try to click on it’ button, and many more.
other players
To interact with another player control+click on them for a menu of options. You have to use this mechanism to invite somebody to your party or to trade with them. At least, I never figured out any keyboard shortcut for it.
There is a friend list for keeping track of people, but it’s kind of buggy and poorly documented right now. It does let you know if a friend is logged on to a different server and does allow for conversations with friends in a separate (and minimizable) window.
Partying is pretty hectic. Mobs are worth more total xp when killed in a party and xp yield is based on the relative levels of the people involved. I never bothered to figure out the exact math, but it’s probably something like this:
Suppose a bandit is worth 600 xp if you kill it by your lvl 15 self. Your lvl 14 friend logs in and together you slaughter bandits. Now, each kill is worth 650 xp a shot but you’re splitting it (not quite evenly) with your buddy, so maybe you’re getting 335 per kill and he’s making 315. And of course, you’re hopefully killing things at least 2x as fast, and with a significantly reduced cost in hp pots.
The disadvantage of partying really is that everyone’s offensive damage dealers who can tank for themselves. There are no traditional party roles like in other MMO’s. So it winds up feeling a bit less like partying and a bit more like soloing in a group.
Players can also form guilds (costs like 2 million gold). I’ve got no experience with that.
items and appearances
Character customization is almost nonexistant. You get to pick one of four character models: male or female, sword or rod. In addition to the weapons that each model is named for, there is a single weapon type that is specific to the model. Male swords are the only type that can use bows for example. All characters of the same type look exactly the same. No choice of hair colour or anything.
Items come with semi-random modifiers, similar to those in Diablo II. And, like Diablo II, you can slot items with gems to further enhance them. With the one minor catch of which everyone familiar with this sub-genre is all too aware. Upgrading equipment is expensive when it works and devastating when it fails – you lose not only the item you were upgrading, but the gem (or gems – using more than one of the same type at a time improves chances of success) as well. Personally, I think the chances for failure are way too high. I think I attempted about 15 or 16 item upgrades (including a few with 2 or 3 gems) and had probably 4 or 5 successes. Items that have already been upgraded become more difficult to improve further – thus going from no bonus to +1 is pretty safe (but I’ve still failed those) and going from +2 to +3 is pretty dangerous.
The enhanced versions of individual pieces of equipment get shinier with bonuses. At +1, an item takes on a silver sheen, and at +3 the sheen turns gold and becomes much more visible. I’ve not seen anything higher than +3 up close. I don’t believe that they exist. 
It is important to note that just like only one type of character can use bows but two types can use swords, so too is armour restricted. Armour drops come in two types, male and female. Stat-wise, they’re the same. They just want to be mean and give you useless stuff. In fact, I noticed that I tended to get way more female drops than male drops with both of my male characters. I didn’t play a female long enough to notice if she got more male drops.
However, it’s not necessarily necessary to just chalk those drops up as vendor trash. Even though your characters can’t trade with others until level 10, they can access the bank. Bank space is something like 720 slots of goodness shared between all of your characters on the account. So, you can either save it to use on another char OR you can sell it to other players who realize the glory of this whole shared vault space and might want to use your lvl 2 axe of noob twinkage +3 on an alt of their own. Equipment doesn’t soul bind, so you don’t have to vendor your old gear either.
The player-run shops are nice in Hero. They’re the standard issue merchant stands that any player of sufficient level (in this case lvl 10) can set up at whim. Drag items into the interface and set prices, other players buy them from you. Two nice additions though are that it is possible to set up shops where you purchase things from random passers-by (I never did figure this out, but did sell off some gems to one guy this way) and that there is a separate marketplace zone where 99% of the commerce happens. Yup. They separated it from the main town. This is as great for lag reduction as it is for suspension of disbelief.
The central marketplace area is actually accessable via teleportation from any “tavern” for a small fee (1000g, chump change once you’re earning 600g per kill as a level 16 char, told you there was inflation). All zones (well, at least every zone I saw) have a small safe area with a tavernkeeper type NPC who will sell you potions, buy junk, and give you the occasional quest. Taverns are also where you go if you choose to respawn in a ’safe’ location after dying and where you land when you use one of the inexpensive little teleportation items (1000g from the merchant or free in bundles from quests and other sources).
Your choice of equipment and pets (the game has a decent pet system) doesn’t really affect your appearance either – all equipment of the same type and level looks the same, regardless of any stats or bonuses on it.
At level 10, you pick a class (independant of the model you chose at creation time). Options here are warrior, assassin, hunter, and physician. In addition to getting your class you can also start learning skills from books – and classes are really nothing more than a pair of free skill books (one book of active skills and one that gives you a passive stat bonus of some sort). Every so many kills, you get a skill point. Ranks in skills are purchased with one or more points. The skill animations are nice. They’re flashy and loud and well animated (as are the normal combat animations – this is a kung fu themed game after all). They’re also not very well balanced.
Hero Online follows the traditions of its fathers by engaging in some very potion-dependant behavior. Potions are cheap, stack to 100, weigh almost nothing, and have no cooldown timer between uses. New players won’t need to buy potions for a while, but once you get enough money to start buying them – and once you realize just how inexpensive they are… you’ll never go back. At level 14 or so, my characters started buying potions in batches of three or four hundred. They would then start hunting mobs listed as level 18-25. Sure, they’d burn through potions like a flamethrower through butter, but they still made more than enough money off of each kill to pay for the pots they spent.
quests
There are a good many quests available for the doing in Hero Online. You are told about new quests when you get them, and a stub entry appears in your quest journal. Most of them are your standard issue foozle whacking and drop gathering. Some are standard issue UPS deliveries. Some are frustrating, many involve going back and killing mobs you outgrew several levels ago. All of them are interesting – if you read the dialogue. The developers boast of having some top notch martial arts novelists on the crew, and I don’t deny it. These guys are good, even if it is a mediocre translation, the story is there. And it’s actually kind of important.
Number one cause of problems when questing is skipping over the dialogue. If you read it, you’ll not only know why you’re killing little piggies but will also know what to expect from future quests, will know what the individual drop items in your bag actually mean, and will know when the journal lies to you. There are quests where the journal tells you to talk to a given NPC and then proceeds to lie about their location, or, better yet, the journal will tell you the wrong NPC entirely. The best examples of these are a quest where you’re given a load of goods and told (by the filthy lying journal) to deliver it to the banker in town – but what you’re actually supposed to do is take half of the goods to the smithy and half to the tailor; or, there’s the time when you’re looking for the Mad Physician in the Highlands because the journal says so but he actually lives deep in the Poison Swamp. The quest NPCs told you the correct information multiple times, but you didn’t listen and your journal lies to you 
Rewards for quests range from uninspiring (like obsolete equipment or less gold than you spent on potions to complete the quest) to the amazing (like a full set of lvl 30 jewellery, 75% of a level’s worth of xp and enough gold to buy a horse). There’s not really any rhyme nor any reason to the rewards you get for each quest, and you can’t tell what the reward is until you go to the giving npc and ask them about it.
skills
The potion spamming game is further exacerbated by you characters’ weapon skills. Skills cost chi (mana) to use. Well, there are potions that cure chi, and you can spam hp and mana potions at the same time. Now imagine that skills never miss. That’s right. Push the skill button, guaranteed damage. When fighting mobs higher level than your character, it quickly becomes cheaper (less potions per kill) to spam your skills than to rely on normal attacks and only use hp pots.
Now that skill balance problem I had mentioned. I only have any real experience with three weapon skill books (rod, axe, and bow) and with two classes (hunter and physician), but I noticed a huge difference. As far as the classes go, the hunter’s active skill is taming pets – basically only useful once every many levels unless you’re using it to sell pets to non-hunters for big piles of money (which you should). The physician’s active skills are heal spells. So far, they’re all useless.
The first spell offers some basic hp healing. It’s efficient as far as the ratio of chi potions spent to the potential cost in hp potions saved, but you have to also take into consideration that potions are instant and skills are not. So, even after you’ve got 3 or 4 ranks in healing and the spell heals something over 200 hp for 30 chi (and figuring your char probably has 250 hp and 150 chi at the time)… you’re still better off drinking gallons of healatives during combat. And out of combat, there’s a meditate button that accelerates your natural healing by enough to make it the preferred healing of choice for those too cheap to buy potions.
The physician’s second spell is a poison cure. That’d be wonderful… if it worked. Shortly after players progress to the level where they might actually have this spell, they’re probably going to be introduced to their first poisonous critters: lvl 25-30ish toads, snakes, and spiders. Average lvl 18 character with no poison resistance gets hit by your average level 25 poison toad and he starts taking 14 damage a tick for several seconds. Over a few hours spent killing said frogs, that damage really adds up. So when I got my detox spell, I was excited. And I tried to use it. And I was still poisoned. I cast the spell 2 more times and the poison finally went away. But it really just expired on its own. Many many more attempts at using the spell to cure poison returned the same verdict – the spell doesn’t do anything except cost mana.
The passive skills seem to be a much better investment than the active skills. Hunters get +def for their passive ability and physicans get +chi. That’s raw damage absorption and raw damage output (and potion efficiency) respectively. My hunter is strangely invincible. At level 18, having achieved level 5 in his passive skill and received something like +30 def as a result, he took less damage when killing lvl 30 poisoning spiders than did Eric’s lvl 20 physician when killing unarmed (and notably un-poisonous) lvl 18 bandit type mobs. Of course, I also had to drink like 8x as many chi pots to keep my skills going and he was able to be very casual about them.
I know that warriors get some dang powerful damage output type buffing from their active skills and that assassins have the fairly standard (and arguably pretty useful) stealth + backstab type combo of abilities that can be used to start fights off on the right foot (ie, with the mob at 1/4 health) or to escape/avoid combat. But aside from that, I don’t know much more.
As far as weapon skills go… It generally happened that the rod skills FAR outclassed the axe skills for my physician. Likewise, my hunter didn’t really like his bow skills – and I suspect strongly that the sword skills would have been a better choice. The general pattern for the first level books is to give 3 different weapon skills at ranks 1, 3, and 5 respectively.
As you increase in skill ranks, the skills you already have become slightly more powerful and slightly more expensive. When you get a new skill, it is generally less expensive than your previous skills and slightly more powerful.
So, with bow as an example. When you are rank 5 in bow, your brand new 3rd level skill is cheaper and hits harder than the second level skill which is cheaper and hits harder than the first one. The same was true with axe and was mostly true with rod/spear skill with the exception that the 3rd rod skill is an AoE attack that cost a little more mana than the 2nd single target attack did (but hit multiple targets, each for comparable damage to a single hit of the 2nd skill).
But why are the skills unbalanced, you ask? DPS. The first two rod skills have obscenely short animations and cooldown timers. It is possible to hit the skill button repeatedly and not only hit harder than your normal attacks, not only hit more reliably than your normal attacks, but hit faster than your base attack rate normally allows as well. The axe skills all hit for damage comparable to the rod skills but are way slower – if you’re not missing very many swings it’s actually faster to kill things with normal attacks when using an axe. Bow skills are pretty much in the same boat as axe skills, with a strange glitch. The second bow skill seems to allow you to use it again before it’s done cooling down, getting a rate of fire almost as fast as rod skills, but not quite. The rate of fire on the 1st and 3rd bow skills is as slow, if not slower than axe cooldowns.
I don’t anticipate that they ever will fix these balance issues. I don’t see them as caring about that sort of thing. Besides, when it comes down to it, just spam more potions. That fixes everything.
stats
In addition to skills and skill points earned semi-randomly (depends on how you level), players get 5 points every level that they can allocate to one of their three stats. These are strength, dexterity, and intelligence. Strength increases max hp (always a good thing) and damage output (even for bows). Certain levels of strength are also required to equip certain weapons (axes, spears, big swords, etc…). Dexterity increases your defense as well as your attack accuracy and speed. Dex is also required for but doesn’t really seem to increase damage output on some weapons (rods, bows, light swords, etc…). Intelligence mostly just increases your maximum chi but also has a minor affect on your accuracy. A few points of int are required in order to equip skill books (you only need need 15 int for the first round of weapon books and 30 int for the second round – character level + 5 points).
Your choices in stats make an enormous difference on the kind of character you wind up with. My physician was a balanced str/dex/int build because (foolish me) I assumed that all of the stats were generally useful. It works out well enough, he hits hard, hits accurately, and has mana to spare (especially when you consider his ranks in the physician’s +chi ability). He hurts when things hit him, but not terribly so.
My hunter was all dex. All dex. This has two interesting effects. One, he is practically invincible. When you add the hunter’s +defense bonus on top of the enormous bonus you get from having so much dexterity, he just simply doesn’t take damage. At level 18, he can frequently kill a lvl 25 toad w/o taking a single hit – and when he does get hit, it’s for like 4 points. Two, he has the offensive potential of a blind kitten in a wading pool. Despite his using “dex-based” weapons, he doesn’t do any damage with them. In order to kill something even remotely close to his level, he has to use skills. And as I have said before, the bow skills are terrible. The only time the hunter reliably took damage was when fighting more than 3 mobs twice his level or when fighting named NPC’s who use skills (skill damage is a separate category than regular damage, which is why skills are so effective at blowing through defenses). Of course, when he takes damage, he doesn’t have very much health with which to absorb it, so the potion button is still important, but not nearly as critical as it could be.
If I were to do it over again, I’d probably focus on dex (like 3 points per level) while putting one point per level into each of strength and intelligence (plus any points I need to siphon from dex initially in order to get my int up to lvl + 5 for skill book reasons).
And, I just might do that. The game is free, the system requirements are low enough that I could almost run it on my cell phone, and as they clean up bugs and migrate features missing from the Korean release… it’s got some good potential. Especially if they can do something about the slow load times