[Xion Valkyrie]

Originally Posted by Vexx

We're trying this for a week or so at the house. Pluses and minuses so far .... the Source game engine obviously has a lot of potential ... be interesting to see if the design team takes this past the hints of the potential.

Random notes:

UI Mode switching takes some getting used to if you're used to FPS or typical MMO layout. Not nearly as bad as some games since the WASD layout is still core but still tinkering to see if some anomalies can be corrected (like the WASD not really being an "over the shoulder point of view").

It's not really supposed to be over the shoulder, it's supposed to be God of War esque. It also supports a gamepad by default, if that's what you're more comfortable with.

The initial 3 characters (2 female) are obviously giving a lot of the less secure players some issues with their delusions of manliness ... the player base seems to have a large percentage of the "usual idiots" and the chat tool doesn't really help much to manage that. chat spammers make town chat basically useless. Chat tool is .... awkwardly ancient feeling and lacks a lot of usefulness (e.g. "ignore" feature?).

Ignore is /block

Actual combat mechanics and effects are very fun, I like actually being able to run behind a pillar to avoid arrowfire and catch a breath. The mobs seem to have the same restrictions - they get tired, they miss, etc.

Okay, having equipment damage actually reflected on the character is very cool... minus points for it all automatically being fixed on return to town. You have to go shopping anyway so it'd be more immersive to have the vendors fix them. Crafting is interesting (as in you bring the mats in and the vendor does the work).

The equipment damage/repair system is a bit weird in this game. Each equipment has durability, which gets lowered when you get hit in dungeons. When they go to 0 durability, they break in the dungeon, and you have to fix it. When you finish the dungeon or when you return to town, the durability gets reset. However, as you use your armors through dungeons, you lose condition. If you look at your equipment, you'll notice that there's a condition bar. Every time you enter a new dungeon, or every time you change zones within a dungeon, the condition of your items drops by a certain amount: helmet[6], gloves[4], chest[2/3], leggings[2/3], boots[2], weapon[1/2], shield[1/2]. When your condition is low, your durability on the items is lowered (items break much easier). When it hits 0, your item 'breaks', and you can't equip it again until you go ot Ferghus to get it repaired. The repairing cost is based on the level of your item, the type of item it is, and the deterioration on your item. For every point of condition Ferghus restores, it adds 1 point to its deterioration. This means that after a while, the deterioration on an item can cause an item to become very expensive to repair. You don't notice this in boat 1 because boat 1 doesn't make you lose condition, however, starting from boat 2 you'll soon notice that you have to repair your hat quite often.

I will never understand the "korean" fixation on not letting you reroll characters with the same name. Sometimes I'll design a character, get ingame and figure out he/she looks like crap or that I don't like the class... so I reroll and most games let me reuse the name.... but not many Korean games. Some of them forever bury the name, some make you wait a day/week. The most hilarious was one game that locked the slot with a crying character for a week before it died. Every time you logged in the character stood in the character choice line begging you to save it

I believe it's 1 month for Vindictus. However, there's a bug right now in that if you take a name of a character that was previously deleted, you can't access the Marketplace or Item Shop. It's supposed to be fixed on Dec 1 though.

In general, I'm giving it a thumbs up so far (only gotten to lvl 15) though - free is good, though I haven't really looked to see if the cash shop is prudent (like Grand Fantasia, DOMO, etc) or a rapefest like the EQ2 F2P version is (I play eq2 over on the monthly sub servers).

Cash shop is mostly aesthetics. Although you can buy tokens which extend your play time (however, you can buy them from the in game Marketplace too). There's also underwear and hairs that add +LUK, which isn't all that useful right now, but will give a slight advantage later on when boss drops become more useful (still a very tiny advantage though). There's also some items you can get that aren't in the game which give nice stats (bunny ears, sunglasses), but those can be sold in game too, so you can get them without paying real money.

Overall, it has one of the more balanced cash shops I've seen.