Lhynn
Arcane
- Joined
- Aug 28, 2013
- Messages
- 9,932
Well, with the upcoming expansion i thought we could discuss this game.
Introduction
Basically is a semi open world (There are exits in big maps to go to a map nearby) sandbox based on the age of wuxia (chinesse martial heroes), it has a strong emphasis on player aligment (basically good/ evil/chaotic all based on your action in game) and and as far as i know is based on a series of books.
The player asumes the role of one of said martial artists, picking a storyline (Which will be the main quest that will introduce you to the game). This game features no classes and no level based content (some instances do require a minimum passive level tho), it also introduces the idea of offline players (which sadly failed in implementation but is a thing thats being adressed in expansion after expansion.
The game is full pvp, with safe zones being limited to small areas in maps, those safe zones dont work for either criminals, bountied characters or pvp attackers tho.
Game features over 30k npcs, every single one with an aligment, a name and a social status. You can gain standing with those npcs in a variety of ways, positive or negative. Even being close to one or walking by one can modify their attitude towards you. Become relevant enough to the world and some characters in it will react to you. You will get asked by them to do quests, sometimes even small chores, they will maybe send gifts to you, or give them to you in person. And behind that theres an extremely complex system that gauges just whose attention you can get by what you are wearing, your own aligment, your title, etc.
Character system
The character system is unique, there are no classes and every character starts out the same, every character can learn every skill in the game. But soon you are confronted with your first decision, you have to pick a school, or decide to train on your own, whatever you pick will become part of your identity and the main way you will progress tru the game.
The latests updates of the game have also added the option to betray your school and join a new one, at the cost of lossing everything youve learned from said school (which can be everything, nothing or something in between depending on the player)
Skills come in several types, first you have the passive internal skills, of which you can only have 1 active at the time, which will provide you with base attributes such as str, dex, con, spirit and breath your max hp and and energy reserve, your basic defense against non physical skills and the amount of punishment you can guard against. They are also aligned to either yin (feminine side), yang (masculine side) or taichi (balance of both). And gear is tied to this, because the gear needs to be the same as the inner for its attribute bonuses to have any effect.
Then you have active skills (based on cooldowns of 1.5 sec between skills and each skill has its own separate cooldown), active skills are categorized under martial styles, each martial style has a set number of unique skills that no other martial style in the game has, every set in the game being completely different and easily recognizable from the rest. The basic gameplay is modeled after rock paper and scissors, every set has what they call overts, feints and a parry. overts beat feints, feints beat parry, parry beats overt. Overts come in two kinds, either lock move or AoE. Game also features a rage mechanic, rage points are won by hitting someone thats not guarding, getting hit, or guarding a hit. some skills, usually the strongest move in the style, will consume rage. Guarding will not only generate extra rage, it will proc the styles parry effect, reduce damage by half and prevent most over skills effects.
The third kind of skills are the flying skills, you can dash on the ground or the air, double or triple jump, walk on water or run up walls, move faster than the wind, etc. These are limited by a fly points pool, which slows regeneration the lower your points go, so keeping them high while keeping yourself mobile becomes a game on its own.
Game features over 800 skills and over 100 skillsets, and each skillset has a different flavor, most skills (around 90%) have unique animations. Each skillset has its own theme and flavor and can be considered a separate "class". you can use a different skillset if with a 7 second cooldown between skills of different skillstets.
Itemization
Everything in this game comes in 6 qualities, woog, iron, copper, silver, gold and jade. Higher qualities have hidden bonuses in the case of skills, or set bonuses and higher stats in the case of gear. Gear can either be looted from enemies or crafted by players, the one that is looted from enemies is capped at silver, thus garbage by current game standards, plus crafted gear usually has special skills attached. Gold and jade can also be gotten from tournaments, arenas or from participating in school events, but these are fairly specialized and not as good as the crafted ones.
Character Progression
Wushu doesnt have a normal mmo progression, first you have skills, almost every skill in the game can be leveled, this is time based, but before going over details with that ill explain cultivation.
Cultivation is the process of turning gained exp into cultivation points used to level up skills, you can get up to 999 experience points at the time, these experience points can come from 5 different sources depending on where you got it from, they are turned at the pace of around 10k cultivation points per hour, costing around 60 experience points, making running out of experience a hard endeavor if you are an active player.
These cultivation points are spent in turn at around the same pace, 10k points per hour on a given chosen skill. and cultivation required can range from measly 500 cultivation points to millions of points required. Both the process of converting experience and spending cultivation points can be accelerated in game by different means.
The game expects you to procure skills to level up by diferent means, usually in a coherent way. for example increasing your school skills requires you to do favors for you school. Getting other school skills means that you have to go yourself to the other schools and steal them from them during a daily event, killing other players for it if you must, while defending yourself from the members of said school. Different sets use different weapons.
For more exotic skills both passive and active you need to do other activities, these skills are extremely rare and hard to come by as a rule, but also often very powerful, or at the very least often offer an utility you wont find withing your own school.
Finally you can either leave your school temporarily or permanently to join a faction and learn powerful skills, your aligment, gender and even your school assosiation may play a role on your ability to get into these factions.
Grind?
The game has many systems in place to prevent grind, it rewards players that do many different things, but it also rewards perserverance, it expects the player to keep doing activities during months to give them great rewards, even if only a few minutes a day. In my opinion this is the best aproach to an mmo, while not always preventing a burnout it does take a while to get there.
P2W
Jianghu is a place where money talks, while you can get everything in the game by playing, you can convert your money to the games currency. The rates are p. retarded tho, and anything of value demands astronomical sums of money, thus few people can afford it.
That said the publisher does sell exclusive sets, that while not the most powerful, can grant a more flexibility to your character. One of mi primary sets is actually from the cash shop, i own like 10 of those, but all were bought from other players with ingame money for cheap.The rest of the monetization is vanity shit and a bit of convenience, like horses the faster ones are gotten in the game tho) or items to change gear/cash shop sets aligment.
Final thoughts
This was prompted by the new expansion coming to the game, which as many features as it carries for the players to see, its not even the tip of the iceberg, most changes are to the code and the internal structure of the game, and it is massive in scope.
More info
This post just covers the bare minimum of whats in the game, and ive even left out some of the very basics because im a lazy fuck.
To close this rant, Age of Wushu is not a game you can just play casually, but this is the reason i like it, its a mmo that demands more from the player, while maybe not in terms of time investment, it does in commitment to keep playing to get anywhere. The rewards for doing are far more meaningful than anything ive seen in any other mmo tho, and that in itself makes it one of the very few where its worth playing and sticking around.
Introduction
Basically is a semi open world (There are exits in big maps to go to a map nearby) sandbox based on the age of wuxia (chinesse martial heroes), it has a strong emphasis on player aligment (basically good/ evil/chaotic all based on your action in game) and and as far as i know is based on a series of books.
The player asumes the role of one of said martial artists, picking a storyline (Which will be the main quest that will introduce you to the game). This game features no classes and no level based content (some instances do require a minimum passive level tho), it also introduces the idea of offline players (which sadly failed in implementation but is a thing thats being adressed in expansion after expansion.
The game is full pvp, with safe zones being limited to small areas in maps, those safe zones dont work for either criminals, bountied characters or pvp attackers tho.
Game features over 30k npcs, every single one with an aligment, a name and a social status. You can gain standing with those npcs in a variety of ways, positive or negative. Even being close to one or walking by one can modify their attitude towards you. Become relevant enough to the world and some characters in it will react to you. You will get asked by them to do quests, sometimes even small chores, they will maybe send gifts to you, or give them to you in person. And behind that theres an extremely complex system that gauges just whose attention you can get by what you are wearing, your own aligment, your title, etc.
Character system
The character system is unique, there are no classes and every character starts out the same, every character can learn every skill in the game. But soon you are confronted with your first decision, you have to pick a school, or decide to train on your own, whatever you pick will become part of your identity and the main way you will progress tru the game.
The latests updates of the game have also added the option to betray your school and join a new one, at the cost of lossing everything youve learned from said school (which can be everything, nothing or something in between depending on the player)
Skills come in several types, first you have the passive internal skills, of which you can only have 1 active at the time, which will provide you with base attributes such as str, dex, con, spirit and breath your max hp and and energy reserve, your basic defense against non physical skills and the amount of punishment you can guard against. They are also aligned to either yin (feminine side), yang (masculine side) or taichi (balance of both). And gear is tied to this, because the gear needs to be the same as the inner for its attribute bonuses to have any effect.
Then you have active skills (based on cooldowns of 1.5 sec between skills and each skill has its own separate cooldown), active skills are categorized under martial styles, each martial style has a set number of unique skills that no other martial style in the game has, every set in the game being completely different and easily recognizable from the rest. The basic gameplay is modeled after rock paper and scissors, every set has what they call overts, feints and a parry. overts beat feints, feints beat parry, parry beats overt. Overts come in two kinds, either lock move or AoE. Game also features a rage mechanic, rage points are won by hitting someone thats not guarding, getting hit, or guarding a hit. some skills, usually the strongest move in the style, will consume rage. Guarding will not only generate extra rage, it will proc the styles parry effect, reduce damage by half and prevent most over skills effects.
The third kind of skills are the flying skills, you can dash on the ground or the air, double or triple jump, walk on water or run up walls, move faster than the wind, etc. These are limited by a fly points pool, which slows regeneration the lower your points go, so keeping them high while keeping yourself mobile becomes a game on its own.
Game features over 800 skills and over 100 skillsets, and each skillset has a different flavor, most skills (around 90%) have unique animations. Each skillset has its own theme and flavor and can be considered a separate "class". you can use a different skillset if with a 7 second cooldown between skills of different skillstets.
Itemization
Everything in this game comes in 6 qualities, woog, iron, copper, silver, gold and jade. Higher qualities have hidden bonuses in the case of skills, or set bonuses and higher stats in the case of gear. Gear can either be looted from enemies or crafted by players, the one that is looted from enemies is capped at silver, thus garbage by current game standards, plus crafted gear usually has special skills attached. Gold and jade can also be gotten from tournaments, arenas or from participating in school events, but these are fairly specialized and not as good as the crafted ones.
Character Progression
Wushu doesnt have a normal mmo progression, first you have skills, almost every skill in the game can be leveled, this is time based, but before going over details with that ill explain cultivation.
Cultivation is the process of turning gained exp into cultivation points used to level up skills, you can get up to 999 experience points at the time, these experience points can come from 5 different sources depending on where you got it from, they are turned at the pace of around 10k cultivation points per hour, costing around 60 experience points, making running out of experience a hard endeavor if you are an active player.
These cultivation points are spent in turn at around the same pace, 10k points per hour on a given chosen skill. and cultivation required can range from measly 500 cultivation points to millions of points required. Both the process of converting experience and spending cultivation points can be accelerated in game by different means.
The game expects you to procure skills to level up by diferent means, usually in a coherent way. for example increasing your school skills requires you to do favors for you school. Getting other school skills means that you have to go yourself to the other schools and steal them from them during a daily event, killing other players for it if you must, while defending yourself from the members of said school. Different sets use different weapons.
For more exotic skills both passive and active you need to do other activities, these skills are extremely rare and hard to come by as a rule, but also often very powerful, or at the very least often offer an utility you wont find withing your own school.
Finally you can either leave your school temporarily or permanently to join a faction and learn powerful skills, your aligment, gender and even your school assosiation may play a role on your ability to get into these factions.
Grind?
The game has many systems in place to prevent grind, it rewards players that do many different things, but it also rewards perserverance, it expects the player to keep doing activities during months to give them great rewards, even if only a few minutes a day. In my opinion this is the best aproach to an mmo, while not always preventing a burnout it does take a while to get there.
P2W
Jianghu is a place where money talks, while you can get everything in the game by playing, you can convert your money to the games currency. The rates are p. retarded tho, and anything of value demands astronomical sums of money, thus few people can afford it.
That said the publisher does sell exclusive sets, that while not the most powerful, can grant a more flexibility to your character. One of mi primary sets is actually from the cash shop, i own like 10 of those, but all were bought from other players with ingame money for cheap.The rest of the monetization is vanity shit and a bit of convenience, like horses the faster ones are gotten in the game tho) or items to change gear/cash shop sets aligment.
Final thoughts
This was prompted by the new expansion coming to the game, which as many features as it carries for the players to see, its not even the tip of the iceberg, most changes are to the code and the internal structure of the game, and it is massive in scope.
More info
This post just covers the bare minimum of whats in the game, and ive even left out some of the very basics because im a lazy fuck.
To close this rant, Age of Wushu is not a game you can just play casually, but this is the reason i like it, its a mmo that demands more from the player, while maybe not in terms of time investment, it does in commitment to keep playing to get anywhere. The rewards for doing are far more meaningful than anything ive seen in any other mmo tho, and that in itself makes it one of the very few where its worth playing and sticking around.