So here it is, my first mmo-a-week report. I apologize for not posting it yesterday, but I put in over 12 very frustrating hours at work and pretty much fell asleep the moment I finally got home in the evening.
I am going to see how the play-along journal format works out. I’m kind of torn on it, but it’s what I’ve written so it’s what I’m posting. Just imagine that today is really Nov 4th and we’re skipping through days with every couple of paragraphs 
Week 1: Dragonica
I’ve heard about Dragonica for a while now through banner ads but didn’t really give it a second thought. My first impression: cutesy korean mmo with all of the cookie cutter website components one expects. Seriously, do they sell MMO-in-a-Box or something at convenience stores over there? Dismissed the game entirely and thought nothing of it (like I do with the five or six other identical games I see this way every day).
Yesterday (the day I decided to torture myself), I got involved in a conversation on GamerDNA where someone had posted some of her screenshots of the game. After asking a few times for specifics on what distinguishes the game from everything else out there, the only answers I got were “pretty” and “no clicky combat”. Which… doesn’t really distinguish it from very much of anything imho. I almost decided against trying the game for week 1 when I read on their front page that the servers were planned for maintenance from 1000 to 1700 GMT+8. Ammon fails at math. GMT+8 != GMT-8 (where I am). So in stead of the game being down from 10am to 5pm my time, it finished patching at 1am, I think.
Away we go!
Registration and Download
Well, step one is to get the game, ne? Let’s see here… pointing browser at their site shows me a big animated floaty flash “SIGN UP” button. I think that’s probably what I want 
Hah! I didn’t have to fill out the whole form. This game is published by IAH, and I’ve apparently already registered with them in the past… Yup. A quick check through my email shows that they’re the folks who’d done Granado Espada (a particularly boring game that suffers from one of the major sins of game design – it actively discourages you from playing). So I dug up my old credentials and I’m in. I didn’t even have to fill out the captcha for some reason… it was pre-populated for me. BOGGLE.
BOO! Registration failure number one: They require me to fill out a survey before letting me in. It’s not bad, but it’s longer than fits in my current browser window. Yup, and every question is mandatory. Double boo. What are my favorite online games? Ones that don’t gate registration by asking me what my favorite games are…
Registration was really comparatively painless there. At least the English was readable.
On to the download then. Hmm. They offer a number of download mirrors in Southeast Asia as well as a custom download manager of their own… Huh. I don’t trust that. I think I’ll just click the “official” download link and see what happens. 1GB. I’m getting a consistent 85-95Kb/sec… which translates to a 3 hour wait. Ok then, I’ll wait and poke at game info while I do.
Research and Waiting
The website is surprisingly informative. Often, all they give is poorly organized crud about how fantastical and amazing the experience of their Revolutionary Buzzword system is. This site impresses me by not being totally useless.
The first question I always ask myself is what classes are available, and what can I expect from them. Often, the name of a class doesn’t necessarily mean any similarity with previous offerings. For instance, I recall one particular game (that I won’t mention because I’ve mentioned already) where the Scout class was the game’s primary healer. Scout. As in traps and daggers. And rez. Anyhow, I’m not talking about GE, really I’m not.
So I click on “Classes” under Guide on the page’s top nav menu. And behold, I’m given a wealth of information and a link to a skill tree calculator. Duly impressed.
And it looks like we’ve got a class promotion system… with some fairly predictable class choices. Looks like a choice of four basic classes at the beginning followed by a choice of a specialization at 20… and a class rename at 40 (no choice there, just a new name, but that’s pretty standard).
Most of the classes are largely predictable with two exceptions. Archer is a top tier class and Healer is a subclass of mage. This implies that people are probably healing themselves so one can safely discount playing as a healer – unless their buffs are awesome. This also implies that it might be possible to play as an archer without getting chewed to pieces in melee. I think I’ll go that route, since it’s not always an option
The tier two archer classes are “hunter” and “ranger”, words that I like to use interchangeably when describing a certain type of character. It turns out that hunter means the more traditional hunter type with a net attack and some improved archery sorts of abilities (and a wolf summon and a few self buffs and a rocket launcher). By “ranger”, they mean more of modern army spec ops ranger with a plethora of fun toys like machineguns and summoned tanks and grenades and homing missiles and the highest rate of fire in the game. I know which one I’m picking if I actually play through 20.
The download has since slowed down – I’m looking at 5 hours and counting. Aaah, the joy of games without reliable western hemisphere download servers.
Looking at more of the site, I find a map of all keyboard options. This is nice, most games only tell you this in-game, and you have to know the secret button to bring up the help in the first place. Heh, emotes are hotkeyed.
A couple hours of actual productivity at work later, I checked back and the download has completed.
Installation and Startup
It looks like a pretty standard installer with an open beta license agreement that must be clicked through. They are kind enough to display the minimum system requirements (which in this case can be summed up as just any machine manufactured in the last 5 years). Naturally, they try to put it in an “ego folder” with the company’s name… but whatever, it’s a standard issue installer. At least it’s fully translated and doesn’t have broken characters on buttons
Aaand they install HShield. Boo on them. I really should start running these games in a VM to protect myself.
Patch server took a while to respond. Of course the game installer I downloaded from their official main link isn’t even close to current. I would time it, but I’ve got better things to do. Regardless, it’s taking long enough that I should probably get something to eat while I wait.
One trip to the break room to scavenge leftover (free!) pizza later…
I click start and get to wait while a bit longer while it launches the actual client – windowed 1024×768. The interface is pretty and high resolution. It shows clear kMMO heritage in the ui chrome, but it works.
I have to choose both a server and a channel. This is interesting. Channels are basically instances of the world accessible by all characters from the server. There is no description of the differences between the servers. All I have to go on here is whether I want “Kaye”, the blue dragon with horns and glasses or “Elga”, the purple dragon with red wings and earrings. I think I’ll go with Kaye, it being the first one on the list and also appearing to be the less populated of the two (overcrowding means more competition for mobs to grind).
Looks like I have four character slots, being watched over by the aforementioned dragon. Apparently it wasn’t glasses, it was a monocle she(?) is wearing. Character selection screen is clean and largely intuitive. If the whole game’s UI is like this, that’ll be happy stuff. And character creation is likewise very slick, if a bit overly cutesy. I get a feeling I’ll be choking on the cutefulness soon enough so I may as well get used to it now.
First Session
Game is side scrolling action in the vein of Maple Story and others, in case I hadn’t mentioned that before.
I have a shoulder faerie of sorts. It is cyan and is named Pororing… which I’m pretty sure is one of the textbook names for cute little slime creatures everywhere (poring and poporing are some of the first mobs one encounters in Ragnarok Online). The little faerie drowns me with exposition, which basically sums up as “young hero, venture forth and slay the dragon, but level up some first, k?” They then let me into a movement tutorial… which quickly turns into a “save the villagers” quest given by a little blond girl with a voiceover in what I can only assume is Korean. Beautiful quest info dialog, good item tooltips over rewards.
Seriously? Three guys in platemail with halberds can’t take one cartoony wolf? Heh. Oh well, they tell me where to find the kill button and let me go. My first usability complaint is that everything is zoomed in waay too close to be comfortable as an archer. Maybe I can find some kind of display option for this, but I doubt it. Ooh, nope. Mouse wheel out zooms enough to be tolerable.
Turn in my quest and enter the first town…
Woo! Halloween! The decorations are fun. Heh, I wonder how that is going to skew my experience here.
The minimap is nice with obvious icons for points of interest showing where I pick up quests, etc… Four quests at once as a kMMO newbie? Right on. Now if this amount of content actually continues, we might have something here. Fetch a cake or someone who’s too lazy to walk half a screen over… sure, why not. While idling in town a bit, I catch some of the global chatter… and it is a mix of Thai, someone selling some drops, and someone shouting for help in all caps
And I am 18% to level when I’m ready to leave town to do my first set of real missions (two to kill sheep and two to kill trees). I ding 2 off of the first sheep pull. After a bit of searching, I find the skill tree to handle my level up… and I apparently have 20 skill points?! But for whatever reason, the abilities I have to choose from all cost 15 or 20. That sort of needless inflation irks me. Unless I start finding ways to earn these skill points 2 or 3 at a time, this is a failure of design. Regardless, I spend 15 of my points on the Moonwalk ability (to jump backwards out of melee range) – it is really just a pre-req to the Moonwalk Shot ability that looks much more fun.
Killed a few more things, dinged 3, returned to town and ran around turning in quests.
Moonwalk Shot wound up being fun but a bit of a finger-twister to use – it’s a combo that requires you to fire off both abilities in rapid succession, but it is surprisingly effective as a primary attack right now, so I’ve been dpsing things down with it 
Grind, grind, quest, grind, quest…
Completing all of the realistically soloable missions in the first town takes me to level 8. This includes repeating the first instanced sort of content four times, each at increasing difficulty – but curiously enough, my final score was higher with each successive completion. These replayable missions look like the best source of equipment and exp in the game and seem to be geared toward parties of low level characters. I have a mission to complete the final level of this instance, but it highly highly recommends at least two people (possibly requires it), and I’ve not seen enough locals to stick around waiting to form a group.
I did see some of what I assume is Halloween event content in my two latter instance runs, they added some pumpkin headed npc to the boss encounters who dropped a cosmetic drop. I now have a little mutant bat hovering over my shoulder in addition to the little mutant pororing faerie thing. The major difference between the two seems to be that the bat is actually locked in place exactly behind my head at all times, and he doesn’t pop up modal dialogs telling me how to equip pants.
The other two missions I have left are to hunt down rare spawns. This upsets me a bit since I bumped into and killed something unique previously – and can only assume it was one of the mobs I have a mission to drop now. I think I am going to look for the next town now, maybe murder everything in my path while I head out there.
The Moonwalk is getting a bit easier to use by now, and it is probably the only reason I survived the 4 star Big Bad Wolf instance boss, but the control scheme is still a bit off to me. The amount of movement my left hand is having to engage in is really counter-intuitive to what I am used to in an MMO. X is the kill button, C is the jump button, so I’m shifted down into carpel tunnel land with my hand slid almost entirely off of the keyboard. Skill hotkeys can go into QWER/ASDF, and they default the level 1 skill to A. I tried moving it around, but that felt even stranger. I have bound Moonwalk to D and Moonwalk Shot to S, so I tap D
Halfway to the second field area, I actually encountered one of the rares I need to kill (so they are probably not all _that_ rare if I’ve already seen both of them). Unfortunately, a mage came along and I did not get credit. Kill stealing in this day and age? Seriously? Have they learned nothing? Dialog with quest NPC’s also leads me to believe that loot theft (or at the very least intra-party ninja looting) is a very real possibility – this is probably why the final instance rewards are handed out via a modal dialog in stead of simply dropped on the ground like everything else.
I shake off my bitterness at losing the kill and head out to the second field, the one marked level 3+.
Upon entering the level 3+ zone, the first thing I notice is that I am being swarmed by level 6-10 mobs now. Come to think of it, my very first kill after the few puppies in the intro sequence was a level 5 “upgraded” sheep, a few feet from the entrance of the “level 1+” zone. Looks like we’ve got some standard issue level inflation going on where players are expected to grind mobs 3-5 levels higher than them. At least that’s better than RF Online where fighting anything less than +7 was a complete waste of downtime that could have been better spent idling in the mines. Also, I _am_ level 8 by the time I feel basically done with the first field, so I am actually at level for the mobs in the zone, despite what the sign at the entrance said.
The second thing I notice after clearing the mobs that jumped me upon entering the zone is the presence of quests marked very clearly on the map. One daily mission (complete with a blue bang) and a yellow marker (which turned out to be a wanted poster listing 3 more rare spawns to hunt). So… the quest content has rapidly dropped from interesting and sufficient to advance meaningfully to a daily grind mission and boss hunting. Not surprised, really. Perhaps I will just keep plowing through until I find the next quest hub, perhaps they’ll have real missions for me in town two after all.
Second Session
Ok, I’ve given my arm a good rest and am back for more punishment. I don’t remember actively associating video games with physical pain since playing marathons on the old NES controllers twenty years ago. It’s kind of nostalgic, but mostly it just reminds me that I’m old.
On a whim, I checked the other server this time, and sure enough, my character doesn’t exist over there. Kaye it is then.
Awesome! Upon this new login, the game asked me if I wanted to date one of the other newbies in my zone. No thank you.
30 minutes and 54 kills later, I am 70% to level 9 and have to take a break for my arm and play some Torchlight in stead.
The second field is largely identical to the first, just with higher level mobs – most of which are reskins of the first zone’s. Nothing surprising there, but it’s worth recording. The further I get, the more varied the mobs seem to become. I’m no longer facing homogeneous groups of wolves or spiders or sheep, but am getting different skins of wolves with a spider or two mixed in for projectiles. The encounters are becoming a bit more challenging, but strafing backward and firing constantly still seems to be a viable strategy for 90% of the pulls.
Was unable to bring myself back to the game after the break. Physical pain really is a strong deterrent to my interest.
Other Sessions
Tried second instance, it was essentially identical to the first one, just with higher level mobs.
Apparently the quest limit is 7 at a time – which, conveniently enough, is conveniently the number your tracker can display at once. I had to drop some low level rare mob hunting missions to pick up new ones in the 3rd field – which featured a real quest hub. No new town in sight yet.
I was unable to solo the 3rd instance at level 9, but then again, the recommended levels for the first version of it were 10-11.
After dinging level 10, the monotony really started to set in. I acquired new and interesting ways to kill things, but that really just meant more ways to play twister with my left hand. My basic special which knocks things down apparently knocks them into the air first… and I can combo with an ability to juggle mobs in the air, as long as I’m only dealing with two at once. Versus a group of three or more, doing so just leaves me open to attack. Also, the new attack is useless versus bosses since they are immune to knockback.
Eventually, I hit level 12 or 13 before I completely gave up. Playing in higher level maps is certainly more interesting, but it really is all the same thing over and over again. The side-scrolling nature of things only adds to the monotony. In a normal side-scrolling console video game, you cover a LOT more ground than here… and the map is at least two dimensional. Dragonica maps are 1.5d lines that you pace up and down ad nauseum.
Combat
Combat is fast and frenetic, as promised. It looks like most attacks have at least some area effect to them, but I kept finding myself relying on normal attacks and mobility more than specials, and not just because the game is nursing some fierce hatred for my left wrist. The special attacks available to my archer are really not that much more potent than sustained rapid arrow fire – and they cost mana. Specials seem designed for burst – not sustained – damage. This ain’t Everquest style cooldown whack-a-mole, there’s a lot more effort required to activate everything. Many attacks seem to depend on combinations or movement patterns to be useful anyway.
The game keeps a combo meter every time you hit an enemy without more than a 2 or 3 second break in between. Once you hit a fairly low combo level, you start getting bonus exp for the resultant kills. The highest combo I noticed was around 100, and I think I was getting +30% xp near the end.
Mobs are goofy and predictable. Attacks all seem to happen on the left-right axis, so stepping forward or backward is a great way to dodge an enemy’s attack or miss with one of your own. Every so often, a mob you kill will fly off into the screen and leave a crack like broken glass, I would not be surprised if these were the results of crits made at a sufficient combo level.
Art and Music
Cute characters with big heads. This extends to mobs as well as players. Even the spiders you fight in the first zone are kind of cute for spiders.
The game is all side-scrolling, and the places where the map is not actually 100% horizontal detract from it a bit, bumping into walls when you should have just been able to run in a straight line, etc… But because of the boring side-scrolling nature of the bulk of the map, they really can afford to do some interesting things with background art. The backgrounds are all pretty nice, but the foreground elements tend to get on my nerves.
The music is entirely forgettable, soulless derivative fare. It’s not bad or detracting, it is just literally devoid of anything to mention. Not one tune caught my attention or stuck in my head, despite the long hours spent playing with the volume at a quite audible level. Perhaps it was just drowned out by the sound of my wrists cracking?
Stability
There were a few hints of stability concerns while I played. Once, the game crashed when quitting, and once it crashed my video drivers while logging in… Not sure what to make of it, neither instance impacted my actual ability to play, but they are evidence that there are a few concerns with the client. I also got randomly disconnected several times, in a variety of situations and zones – which did impact my ability to play.
I give the client a B- for stability. The crashes never happened during actual gameplay, and the network hiccups only took me back to the login screen..
Final Grade
Dragonica is an amusing diversion. I could not, however, even begin to conceive of spending money on it. I give it a 6 out of 10.
Pro
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Con
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Afterthoughts
I was not able to get into crafting or grouping. I was not able to really figure out what the whole smashing items apart for souls was all about. I was not able to reach the second full service town or do a class upgrade.
I don’t think any of these elements would have changed my opinion much, but they might have extended my interest in the game a few more hours.
What’s Next?
For week 2, I am going to look at Alganon, which launched open beta yesterday.