Risk Your Life - For a Million Bucks
Risk Your Life is an online role-playing game that's just
moved to being pay-to-play with the release of Risk Your
Life: Path of the Emperor. There are a lot of fantasy MMORPGs
around right now, and while there's a lot more variety than
there used to be, the market is still pretty much dominated
by EverQuest 2 and World of Warcraft. In a stunning marketing
move, Planetwide Games has declared that Risk Your Life
will offer a prize to its players, running a qualifying
tournament from July '05 through April '06, then a final
tournament in May '06, where the winner will walk away with
US$1 million. This is exactly the sort of publicity you
CAN buy, which leaves us with one big question: is the game
itself worth playing?
Apart from its marketing cahones, only a couple of minor
things really set RYL apart from other fantasy RPGs, but
they're things it does well. The first thing you're going
to notice is the quality of the graphics: well on a par
with World of Warcraft. Back in February, they were stunning
for a free game. Now you're shelling out to play, they're
still pretty damn good. Resolution pushes right up to 1600
x 1200. Even notoriously tricky things like water come out
well. If you were going to nitpick, the textures for grass
are a bit too plain, but you'd really have to be desperate
or a huge fan of WoW to get that petty. Some of the monsters
take up half the screen and give you a real feeling of scale,
especially when your head only comes up to its knee and
your best chance appears to be biting a demon in the ankle.
You start off choosing between two races; human, and Ak'kan,
who look pretty much like orcs. At first glance, the class
system seems pretty simple, but it quickly gets fiendishly
complicated. A human can be a Soldier, Rogue, Mage, or Acolyte.
Ak'kan can choose between Combatant or Officiator, though
oddly this choice determines your sex: Combatants (dumb
grunts) are all male, Officiators (smart wily magic-users)
are all female. Draw your own conclusions. All these initial
classes branch after level 10. Where things get tricky is
in assigning your skill points when you go up a level. Skills
are class-specific, and each skill breaks down into five
different components depending on how they activate and
how long they last for. Spells count as skills. So exactly
where you put your skill points can be pretty crucial and
hard to get your head around to start with, but it means
you can really customise your character once you work out
where you're going.
The weapon system is also kind of unusual. Instead of running
round killing everything in sight hoping to chance on the
perfect kick-ass claymore, you can upgrade the weapons you've
got. There's a slot system like in Diablo, as well as gems,
blacksmith upgrades, and the ability to meld two weapons
together and average out their stats.
There are hundreds of quests through the game and a heavily-emphasised
guild system. There was a lot of PvP even before the developers
put out the bounty, so if you don't want to get smacked
around, this probably isn't the game for you. From level
30 you can join in guild battles, and with the combat system
being fast and more interactive than most, large-scale warfare
is stunning.
The game does have a couple of weak points. There's little
variety in character creation, both in the lack of different
races, and the few choices in terms of your appearance.
The game's ambient sound and background music is also minimal
and repetitive. Those aren't the sort of things that are
going to drive someone away from a game, however.
The real test for RYL is still to come. How is the game
community going to respond to the prize money? Will it lead
to a gentler, fairer, more supportive player base? Not likely.
Planetwide Games better hope their anti-hacking measures
stack up, and in a couple of months the eBay marketplace
should really start to kick in. Still, RYL is a good game,
and a million bucks is a million bucks.
Overall Rating: 8.5/10
(subject to griefing, ganking, kill-stealing,
flaming, corpse-camping, etc)
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