Gorgeous looking world. The art style is colorful and pastel, reminds me of Pirates of the Burning Sea actually. Say what you like about the game, but the graphics were cool. from the interiors to the vast exteriors and the whole setting – every shard is a hollowed-out rock spinning in an interstellar tempest – the Deadspell Storm – that tore apart their planet. It’s lit by holes in the roof of the shards, the light from that storm.
Instead of some lame fantasy world which is just renamed Middle Earth where the elves are from the tree place and the dwarfs are from the mountain place and the evil guys are from the evil place – it’s a SETTING where you can tell stories.
Characters can be two races – humans and some humanoid critters with hooves that look like Draenai; and they can be of three archetypes – warrior, spellcaster or rogue – which have three disciplines each, so nine classes. That’s not that unusual.
What distinguishes a character is not its class, really… but its skills.
You don’t upgrade the skills you find – they level up as you level. You just get more of them. LOTS more. But you can only use five at a time, yet all are always available. The strategy is in putting your skills in the skilldeck, because each time you use an attack, the combat system chooses a different row of your skill deck – five new attacks scroll up into your bar whenever you use one.
There’s also no target ring – your attack hits whatever you are pointed at. And there’s no swapping of weapons. If you use a ranged attack, you use your ranged weapon. If you melee, you use your melee weapons.
Deck building – that’s what makes you different from every other player. Your particular build will depend entirely on what skills you use and how you put them together.
You don’t start out weak, you start out strong and get stronger.
You don’t start out with patchwork armor and rusty weapons, either. The character creator lets you make a character that looks however you want the character to look. Clothes and weapons with better looks might drop, but the stats aren’t part of your gear. They are contained in sigils, that add the uber stats to your stuff.
So you can always look like what you want, from day 1.
I haven’t even gotten into the High Houses, or the two kinds of experience you accrue.
It’s a whole new game by a European developer who isn’t trying to make a better WoW. Will it work? I have no idea. But I will definitely be giving it a try, because when MMOs try to be different, they deserve a look. This won’t be hyped to heck and back like AoC or WAR, and there’s a very real chance that the kind of people who might like a unique game will never hear of the Chronicles of Spellborn, especially since it comes out around the time of WoW’s expansion, which is all we’ll be hearing about for the next six months.
I’m not playing WoW (not yet, anyway…), but if Spellborn turns out to be fun, I’ll be exploring a world which hasn’t been pre-spoiled by dozens of tell-all gaming websites. Like EverQuest back in the beginning, when nobody knew anything about it and it was all new.
I LIVE for games like that.