The Chronicles of Spellborn has a new site live that is actually good. It may not be the best of all things, but it has what I want: gameplay information at the top. The game has an odd take on hotkey bars: you get one bar at a time that rotates with each attack. What especially interests me is that they have learned from City of Heroes:
Dress to Impress — What it really means.
- Right at character creation, you can choose from a large variety of clothing and armour, i.e. there is no “newbie clothing”. In other words, “you can look cool right from the start”
- Pick a ranged and a melee weapon from a vast assortment. Your attacks are based on Skills (like “Slash”). Such Skills can be executed with any melee weapon, be it a long-sword, double axe or dagger. That means, you can freely pick any weapon that looks cool on your avatar. When a Skill is executed, the avatar will automatically equip the designated weapon. E.g. when you use “shoot” the avatar will switch to his range weapon. With the weapon choice, you also determine your visual fighting style (one-handed, one-handed-with-shield, two-hander).
- You can wear the weapons and armours in any situation you want, because you can upgrade and customise them. You do not need to switch to uglier equipment because it is “better”. It means that even the short dagger from character creation can become your personal “epic” weapon if you upgrade it with powerful sigils.
: Zubon
I wish I could get really excited about one of the new MMO’s coming out.
Warhammer seems to be the biggest hype machine right now, but for all the neat-sounding gameplay offerings, I just don’t like the visual feel. It seems kind of lifeless to me, a bit like Everquest 2. Like the buildings are made of cardboard, and the players are painted wooden mannequins. Reminds me a bit of Everquest 2. WO’s gameplay may turn out fantastic, but I just don’t know that it’s a world where I’d actually enjoy spending time.
Conan looks much nicer to me, but I’m kind of iffy about the whole barbaric blood-and-guts vibe. The Conan universe is never something that I’ve felt drawn to in book or movie form, and my impression of the game isn’t feeling that different so far.
Like Conan, The Chronicles of Spellborn has some really beautiful imagery; that looks like a world I think I’d like to spend some time in! Unfortunately I don’t have much faith that it’s going to be a solid product. For example, their website doesn’t clearly explain how TCoS will differentiate itself in a way to make me want to spend dozens or hundreds of hours with it. Instead they spend time explaining to me that resistance rank zero to rank +5 is an exponential curve divided in 64 points, which may be a perfectly good design decision , but is just a tad more detailed than I’m really looking for. And if they can’t don’t even have a sense for what I, as a consumer, want to see from their website, I’m not too optimistic they’re going to have a good sense for what I want to see from their world.
So I’m waiting to see what 38 Studios and BioWare have up their sleeves, and keeping my fingers crossed.
- James
City of Heroes Issue 11 brings weapon customization. Open that link in a new window and look through it. That’s hot. I know that we are used to getting all kinds of pretty swords and guns in other games, but this is something new for City of Heroes.
Note a feature that Chronicles of Spellborn intends to use: appearance is independent of function. These weapon options are available in the costume creator. Apart from a few unlockable pieces in each set, these are all available from level one, and you can switch between them when you change costumes. You get your pretties immediately, and the developers only need to balance one set of numbers per power.
Unfortunately, applying this to all powers will be far more difficult. The developers have pled that no one realized how popular this (customization, the famed costume creator) would be during the original development. You have a long time to wait before you can start using green fire and black ice, if that gets added at all. Given how often costume options are obscured, this seems more important to me than the costume customization.
And yes, there is a shovel available for axe and mace users. Rejoice, The Shoveler cometh.
: Zubon
Cameron of Random Battle tells us that EQ2 will allow you to wear purely decorative armor, replacing the graphics (but not stats) of the armor you would normally wear. Go for the best stats, but cover it with your favorite look.
Awesome. I am also looking forward to Chronicles of Spellborn’s plan to decouple appearance from stats in equipment. Of course, I am spoiled by City of Heroes, where you can pick your look at any time (but half the powers hide it anyway).
If you are committed to the standard loot-centric model, this is a nice way to work around having everyone look the same. I wonder if it applies to weapons; I have this image of someone using a very fast weapon but showing a huge slow one, so it does the giant hammer swing at lightning dagger speed.
: Zubon
I have just added The Chronicles of Spellborn to our list of MMOs on the side. (They’re hiring, by the way, if you want to head to The Netherlands.) I have had some interest in the game, especially since reading that they planned to deal with weapons by giving you the stats and letting you pick the weapon appearance you want (i.e. Warrior 20 does 50 DPS; do you want that to be a blue sword, a green spear, a red club, whatever). Or maybe I have that wrong. Rather than display further ignorance (or do any research when I am already running on caffeine tonight), I thought I would punt this one to our readers. Have any of you been following the game and wish to introduce it to the rest of us in the comments? Heck, if the developers have a 1000-2000 word intro that they would like us to post, we can do that.
: Zubon
