Forsaken World Review #2

[NoCashReq has entered the room.]

Here I come to save the Da-ay! Or at least interject a little mild entertainment, which for my hectic life is about the same.  It is I, NoCashReq, here with another look into the MMO Forsaken World. In our last installment, i forgot to include my BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front) and put the scores at the end of the article, two things I wanted to keep at the beginning so if you only wanted to know a 30 second shot of my opinion, you could get it, and if you wanted the full experience that is FBGR, you could happily read on.  I am returning to that format, and so you will find these parts at the beginning of each of the postings regardless of whether I am posting a full review or the new format of several posts for one review.  But enough about that, back to the game...

 When we left our story last, I had managed to create two characters for this game, a dwarf sharpshooter and a stoneman defender, and had made it through the basic levels early in the game, and headed out into the world to stake my claim to GLORY!

And then I became a florist.

 BLUF:  The games strict adherence to classes leaves you a single path for your character, and although the game mechanics do allow for choosing which skills you have on quick keys, there isn't enough room to find your own path. The community largely ignored me, and I them, as there were no real reasons to involve them in my questing.

SCORES

Learning Curve: 3/5  Character development is smooth, even, but narrow and ultimately did not allow me to try my own style of play due to the strict adherence to class roles.  The fact that all races had only some of the classes available to them was annoying, and the amount of options within the role was not enough.

Community: 2/5  No interaction, despite attempts to reach out, ask for help, or at least talk to others.  Everyone seemed to be off doing their own thing, and with the combat system being so easy to wipe out most enemies without trying, I can see why.


 BEYOND THE TRAINING

Wait, wait wait wait, did you say a florist?  Yes,this game allows your character to have multiple little side jobs like herbalist, cook, potionmaker, etc. and gives you little tasks to teach you the basics for all your jobs.  Little stuff like this allows for a more rich game experience, creates little projects for you to do while questing, and basically gets ignored as you search for monsters to kill.  Or at least it did by me.  Seriously, I wanna shoot something, not go throw stuff in a pot and go "BLAM!"

The regular story-driving quests that follow the initial training grounds involved an inordinate amount of running to and from Non-Player Characters (NPCs) to have long drawn out discussions about your quest, the meaning of life, and other stuff that I, in my infinite wisdom and extremely finite attention span, mostly glossed over once I realized that there was no important information.  Really,  why should I carry on long preset conversations with the computer unless the script is filled with useful information, or is at least entertaining with ribald chicanery and offbeat sarcasm?  The auto-direct saved me from wandering forever on these runaround quests, as finding anyone by chance seemed impossible, and skipping the dialog saved my sanity.  What's left of it, anyway.

Combat never got any more challenging than in the first few levels.  Now yes, I did add some new and exciting tricks to my character's repertoire, and yes, some of the graphics for those attacks were cool, but when I can spam every special attack on one enemy, wait for the cooldowns, and then do it again on the enemy RIGHT NEXT TO THE ONE I JUST KILLED without a major scratch in my armor, it's too easy.

COMMUNITY RELATIONS

Yes, you get to ride goats. No, you don't get to name them Mr. Fluffykinwooodlesmoochie.

My experiences with online gaming have ranged from the positive, supportive fun of finding new friends and allies, to the acidic, simpleton-level, foul mouthed wit of twelve year olds who think that a DSL line gives them enough protection to use language that I would box their ears for (and their parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and second cousins for letting them end up that way), but until I played this game, I had never experienced a solo MMO before.  Seriously, there are other people playing this game? WHERE? The few other players I ran into ignored me like I was a NPC, despite my several attempts to engage them, try to strike up a band of merry men, insult their goats (see pic), etc.  All attempts to interact were ignored, and so I continued on.  After a while though, I realized that the majority of them were ignoring me because they didn't need anyone else to help them along.  Now, maybe the PVP servers are different, maybe there people join together to keep from getting smashed flat by rival teams, but there just was no response from other players on the PVE server I was on.

There you go, a little more of my less-than-humble opinion, expect the final installment of this review soon, but please don't hold your breath.  Blue just isn't your color.  Till then, keep gaming for the stars!

[NoCashReq has left the room.]