Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Atlantica Online - What Would Bartle Think?

If you're a fan of customizing your character avatar to your exact specifications so that its unique look stands out from the crowd, Atlantica Online is not for you. The character creation options limit you to a small number of faces which look pretty similar anyways. The standardized armor system doesn't help either and you will find a number of clones hanging around the leveling areas.

If you are an explorer who just has to find out what is up that trail and behind the babbling brook, I can tell you right now there's nothing there for you to find. Everything can be found on your handy map/mini-map. Even supposedly hidden treasure chests.

If you love your fluff and cool pets that follow you around; sadly, AO is virtually fluff-free. What little there is usually purchased from the Item Mall. Even the usual vanity stuff like mounts, outfits, and titles have stats elevating them to the status of useful items.

But for everyone else, Atlantica Online has something that is sure to appeal to them. For the socializers, there are comprehensive guild and mentor/apprenticeship systems. They can communicate to peers of their level in the peer channel globally and will always be rewarded handsomely for lending a helping hand.

The killers will have their hands full with a combat system that plays more like speed chess than the usual hotbar mashing. There's plenty of PVE mobs to grind and when you get tired of those, there is a full-featured PVP league system (Free League) and weekly tournaments. If you are in a guild which belongs to an alliance of Nations, you might even find yourself embroiled in open PK called Wars.

The achievers will think they've died and gone to heaven as there are plenty of bars to ding. Level cap is 120 and there are also the 8 other mercenaries in your formation to level from scratch. Roughly 90% of all items found in the game can be crafted and there's many different crafting skills that you can learn. The aforementioned Free League also sets another bar to conquer as you PVP your way from rank 18 all the way to the top number 1 spot.

So go get your Bartle quiz done and see if AO is right for you. You really can't go wrong with the price of admission.

3 comments:

  1. For combat and questing how would you contrast this to W101? You get minions to control and level do they each have their own skills too?

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  2. Yes, and each mercenary type brings something different to the table. There are currently 21 different types of mercenaries with more coming soon and only 8 spots for them in your formation. So you can tailor your formation to your preferred playing style.

    The combat is more complex than W101 which shouldn't come as a surprise considering the target audiences.

    The questing suffers from really bad English translations but there are some really bright spots to the design. For one thing, they don't attempt to throw a wall of quests at you in every zone. There is only one main quest storyline and very rarely do you get additional side quests. They also have what I call the Tome of Knowledge done right. Also, the main questline will teach you almost everything there is to know about this game along the way. It really is the thinking man's MMO IMO.

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  3. Interesting. If I wasn't wrapped around ROM I'd give this a try. As it stands, I'm not sure I'll fit into the ROM end-game. It seems some of the dungeons only open at certain times and I'm not into the whole box my playing time into very restrictive schedules.

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