ArcheAge is a fantasy sandbox MMORPG
Character creation is where some of the uniqueness of the game really begins to shine. There’s a good amount of customization present – a bit thin on races (western humans and elves on one side, eastern humans and cat-people on the other side), but the various selections for facial appearance are nicely numerous. Particularly appreciated is the fact that you can spend all your time carefully crafting your Adonis/Aphrodite, creating a near-mythical peak of physical beauty, and then slap your choice of some seriously massive and brutal-looking scars to undo all your hard work. Put simply, the true test of the flexibility of a character creation system is whether or not you’re able to create a completely horrific freak, and let me assure you – this is quite possible, so kudos to the developers.
After selecting from typical fantasy races and classes, your character spawns in their specific continent and is then provided a basic set of quests to get accustomed to the narrative and gameplay mechanics. The quest structure is smartly designed in that they showcase the game's various environments in addition to providing the player with basic land, sea, and air mounts. Along the journey, additional quest givers can be located all over the game world to provide quests ranging from the typical kill this number of monsters to helping a farmer plant crops. Even if most of the quests aren't particularly interesting, it's impossible to ignore the lure of more gold and possible loot items. In regards to loot, it's one of my complaints with the game in that the various sets of armor and weapons aren't that visually distinct and doesn't provide much unique customization. However, it is noteworthy that mounts can be customized with armor to provide protection in battles. Mounts can even level along the player to allow for new skills such as enabling mounted combat.
But it gives you enough options, enough different opportunities, that these issues take a backseat to what really matters: it’s organic. ArcheAge is a sandbox MMORPG developed by XL Games and published by Trion worlds. It came out of the beta about a month ago, and the number of players has been rising ever since. ArcheAge is a fantasy sandbox MMORPG that sends players on a journey across the great continents of Nuia and Harihara. In search of the legacy of the Delphinad, the greatest city to ever exist, they will unfold the secrets of the Lost Continent as well as whatever adventures and treasures that turn up along the way.
The game also comes with a base creation process that I found to be very immersive, as the whole process does require a lot of attention and strategizing in order to get the job done properly. There are also a variety of professions that you can choose from, but before you do that you need to create a home. ArcheAge does resemble real life to some extent, and that’s what made it very realistic for me. Once you create the base, you need to expand your own territory through fighting, be it other players or the AI enemies you can encounter.
My favorite feature of ArcheAge is the class system though. You go from picking a starting class, to adding another class on top of it, to adding a third class on top of those two within only a few hours of playing. The little detail I like the most about this is that the combination of your three classes gives your character a title. For example, an occultist who plays music and partakes in witchcraft is a Tombcaller. When you level, you can get points to distribute in one of these three trees. Spells and abilities have combos that require use of other tree spells. So once you get use to the system, you can build some nasty combinations to fit your play style. These can be reset with in game currency. Indecisiveness comes with a price, but is a welcomed feature.
I am a player that prefers, or perhaps almost needs to have the A and D buttons set to strafe, but for some odd reason strafe does not control boats, vehicles or gliders and because of this I have had to set my turn keys to SHIFT+A and SHIFT+D in order to control vehicles or boats at all. This is a workaround to an issue that can easily be fixed. A highly brought up suggestion is allowing players to choose the option of a windowed full-screen mode. It would be highly beneficial to the game, as it adds more convenience and enjoyment to those playing it.
