Some shots taken in Skyforge. Click to see these on Flikr.
Skyforge is a Science Fiction based MMO. I’m not impressed. The graphics are pretty good, but don’t show much imagination. And the animations are stiff and clumsy.
What is Good
There are a few things that are good.
- The graphics are nice, but don’t show much imagination. The lighting is bright and materials are shiny. That’s in keeping with a Sci Fi feel, but things could be dirty rather than always clean and shiny.
- There are lots of cut scenes with audio dialog to lead you through the process of getting started.
- Some of the traditional ideas are tossed out for a new paradygm. After the intro flash-back to your previous life, where you play for a while, you die and discover your current existence as an Immortal.
- You can change your class at any time to any of the available classes. Usually you are class locked when you create your character. And you don’t get to change later because translating your gear to the new class would be pretty much impossible.
- You can change your look, including gender, at any time, first time for free, and for a fee after that. Not sure if the fee is small or large. Usually, you can buy a complete makeover for a pretty expensive price, like $10US.
What is Not so Good
- The continual NPC cut scenes and audio dialogs slow the game play down to a crawl and get ponderous after a while. These are about playing the game rather than about the lore of the world.
- The world does not feel open and expansive. You are continually moving from one little place to another, even when you are in the City getting your orientation. It seems like they are either using an older game engine that does not support large places, or they are dumb’ing the world down to support older machines. Tera and Wow are full of much larger places.
- The “Change your Style [character look and class] at any time” philosophy causes them to eliminate the ability to have multiple characters. You get only one character. No multiple races either. You are human immortal god – full stop. I personally like the variety of playing multiple races and classes, without switching. Also with the old scheme, you switch areas and progressions as you switch between characters. None of that here.
- The class / talent / ability progression is way too complicated and the manual spending of points is an old out dated way to progress in these games. Notice that Wow and GW2 have greatly simplified their talent trees / glyphs, Tera has done the same, and not since Dekaron have we had to assign our progression points manually to progress our characters. These other games have learned that folks want to play the game and not mess endlessly with tuning their characters as they progress.
Combat is strange and confusing. While it is easy to spam the mouse buttons and number keys to kill things, there are two odd things about combat: (1) The key assignments are fixed rather than changeable. (2) Combo skills keep changing, so as you spam [1] you see [2] blink between different skills that you can use at that time. But the problem is that these changes occur so quickly that you can’t keep up. I’m used to skills being enabled after another skill or after a cooldown, but having one skill change into another in a fraction of a second as I’m fighting is just confusing. Not fun. Too complicated.
This game was created by the same folks that created Allods. I recently saw a review of Allods, which I tried a couple of years ago and gave it a pass then. But now I see that they have a very interesting new race that is a triple of creatures that work together as one. I’m going to go give that a try, even if the graphics look more primitive.
By the way, each screenshot gets a map reference inserted. Here’s one:
“Maps/Capital/MapResource.xdb” 14600.7 15495.3 945.395 0 0 -0.658548 0.752539 14600 15500.2 947.346 0.024984 0.0285498 -0.658074 0.751997 1 1.70382 0.0113723 0.268
Pass on Skyforge
I’m going to pass on Skyforge.
Guess I’ll go find Allods and see if it’s better now than it was a while ago.
ww
Windy Weather 