Review Spells of Gold disappoints morons at Thunderbolt

[Vault Dweller]

Tags: Spells of Gold

<a href=http://www.thunderbolt.be>Thunderbolt</a> has posted a rather negative <a href=http://www.thunderbolt.be/reviews/viewreview.php?rid=425>review</a> of <a href=http://www.buka.com/game/Game_17.htm>Spells of Gold</a>, a trading RPG from Russia, giving it <b>4/10</b>. Of course, the reviewer seems to think that <a href=http://www.blizzard.com/diablo2>Diablo II</a> is the best fantasy RPG evar, so readers discretion is strongly advised.
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<blockquote>Spells of Gold is more of 'what if' than 'look at this', which is a shame really. <b>Just as we thought there couldn't possible be room for another RPG on the PC</b>, Oxygen pop up with the idea of having a thriving world with fluctuating economics. Had we been given a central index of towns and their import and export prices then we may have been talking about a different game, but what is also needed is a stronger, more involving plot to keep the player interested and eager to get to the next step. Instead, just as you're digging in to find the best sale prices, you become distracted by a whole other table of play opportunities involving RPG levelling-up and pinning down the plot. There have been efforts to make robust play structures come together, but with a deft hand for detail. The problem here is the different options of trading, levelling up and following a plot just don't get along with each other, more of a row between neighbours on a street than a happy-go-lucky village. So in the end you just chase round each section as the game dictates it, meaning a frustrating and ultimately confusing time. Shame. </blockquote>Shame indeed. I've never thought that public education is that bad nowadays.

 

[Fez]

Oxygen are stupid and dishonest.

 

[Sol Invictus]

This game is awful. It deserves every negative review it receives because most of the quests consist of running from one town to the next on fed-ex delivery quests. The fluctuating economics hardly works, or hardly matters, because no amount of trading will yield anywhere near the same amount of rewards as a regular fed-ex quest.

As for RPGs, well, there's certainly a lot of room for improvement despite what Thunderbolt's opinions are.

 

[Whipporowill]

I've gotten the impression that it sucks from all over the place... so mebbeh these guys aren't the morons you portray them as VD?

 

[Vault Dweller]

Sometimes people arrive to correct conclusions for stupid reasons. Sadly that doesn't make them smart.

Surely, after the king that is Diablo 2, the pretender that is Sacred and the card-playing online megathon Etherlords 2, can there be room for another title of the same genre?
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Just as we thought there couldn't possible be room for another RPG on the PC

Need I say more? Btw, feel free to check their KOTOR review if you didn't already.

 

[RJK]

From someone who is currently playing it

It is a fine game. As a person who has actually played the game for more than just a day, I'm just posting to clear up some misconceptions.


Trading is easily the most profitable activity. To say that quests offer more money than trading merely demonstrates a person's weakness at trading. For instance, I occasionally follow a particularly trade route that produces millions of gold after several round trips.

Each item of goods on this route gives between 6-14k profit each; I currently can carry 25 items. For comparison, characters currently pay me up to just over 12k for certain quests, so it is obviously more efficient to go between 2 towns on 2 different worlds to make an average of 500k gold than to rely of quests for gold.


There are more missions than just deliveries/letters. There are also 'kill bandit/undead' missions, as well as 'go to X on map and steal item Y', not that this in itself constitutes broad variety. I haven't advanced enough in the guilds to see what interesting quests they offer.

I do however agree that some effort could be made for certain characters to not give -ve karme missions, or to primarlily give +ve karma missions, etc. Also, I certainly would welcome more to each world than towns and bandits.


RJK.

 

[Sol Invictus]

From what I understand the game blows monkeyballs. No amount of 'trading sim' is going to save a bad game from being a bad game.

 

[Fez]

The game is a disaster, you'd have more fun just burning your money and looking at the burning pile while you masturbate. It is dull, pointless, badly thought out and the developers are twats. I hope they and their families all die.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Well, even if the execution is flawed, it's an interesting concept to add to a CRPG. I've always enjoyed space trading games, so having a CRPG with a trade system seems like a really good idea to me. After all, a mining town, which is a staple of a lot of CRPG towns, would have tons of raw materials, but they wouldn't have the things crafted from those materials in most cases. You should be able to get iron ore pretty cheap, but a chainmail should be fairly expensive there, for example.