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[Review] Perfect World International: A New Look at the Chinese Veteran
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
At MMORPG.com, we periodically like to re-review games that have shown longevity and continued development despite the years. In our latest re-review, we turn our eyes to Perfect World International. See how the veteran warhorse stands up to today's games and then leave us your thoughts in the comments.
Perfect World International is a fantasy MMORPG that has been around for a while. First published in China in 2006, the game was later brought over to North America and has enjoyed several expansions and upgrades since. It was developed by the Chinese company Perfect World, who also publish the game through their North American publishing arm, Perfect World Entertainment. The game is set in a rich world which draws heavily on Chinese folklore and mythology and features unique races and classes which distinguish it from many of its competitors. Are these unique facets enough to overcome the age of the game? Does it have enough interesting gameplay to live up to the promise of its distinct setting, even seven years after its original launch? Read on and let’s find out together.
Read more of Pete Schwab's Perfect World International: A New Look at the Chinese Veteran.
Comments
Did you mention that it has an outstanding Pet-Class?
Also, this game has better Graphics than WoW and i dont know that you gave WoW such a low score...
It has a refreshing unique style from the traditional western MMO of that time.
The Character Generator is still outstanding with only a few limits (preset Character height).
Also it has Underwater Action and Flying.
The game is a nice distraction from time to time and if levelling/grinding is your motivation this game is for you!
PS: It has also little traps like some Mobs switching into BAF mode.
PPS: Regarding the Hotbar: You use the "Number Keys" as well as the "Function Keys" so you do not lack Hotbar-Slots - you simply need to set them up.
"Torquemada... do not implore him for compassion. Torquemada... do not beg him for forgiveness. Torquemada... do not ask him for mercy. Let's face it, you can't Torquemada anything!"
MWO Music Video - What does the Mech say: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF6HYNqCDLI
Johnny Cash - The Man Comes Around: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0x2iwK0BKM
Yeah, the Hotbar fills over time, that is true.
"Torquemada... do not implore him for compassion. Torquemada... do not beg him for forgiveness. Torquemada... do not ask him for mercy. Let's face it, you can't Torquemada anything!"
MWO Music Video - What does the Mech say: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF6HYNqCDLI
Johnny Cash - The Man Comes Around: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0x2iwK0BKM
Looks like this guy never got past level 11. Here is a little bit to look forward too.
The game QUICkLY becomes a measure of level vs HP vs HP vs The cash shop. Mobs will start to be dealing harder hits. Fighting normal, even as a healer, means you have to take time out to refill MP or and HP. This down time is LONG and literally unplayable (possible, but so is sticking heated torn off parakette beaks to your bare buns...possible, but why?)
So they did this thing, a daily thing, where you purchase rocks from a dealer, and give them to a trader for mass EXP spikes. This becomes the only way to really level properly, but it also gimps you a bit since levels are exceeding cultivation (a reputation system to get skills) levels.
So there is a forced sort of flow and content to fill out. This will end around level 50ish, at least the free hand outs and it is back to the grind. As I said, the wall of MP and HP is hit. You will need 2 things: 1) the gear from dungeons to destroy your enemy ( but requires some one bigger and better then you to run the group through).
2) Or CASH! I easily put in hundreds of dollars for these charm neckalce things. They are charged with about 100 000 charges of HP MP, so if you drop to 50% HP they autofill your health, you basically are invinicible and can push on in hte PvE content normally.
Problem is, it is expensive and then runs out soon. And you will need the dungeons. The dungeons are the biggest drama fest ever. You will need certain groups or items or booted. Some people are cool and will take you in. Others, it is a drama fest. The requirements and timing of dungeons is unecessarily a chore. LEaving you around level 50 completely STUCK.
With nothing to do, you can chat...you are sort of forced to get social. Doing this enters you into weeboo wabboo land of mentally broken players. IF you befriend them, you could even get some to pay for you (these are some of the saddest addicts you will ever meet). OR at least power you up a bit; I went from level 50 to 80 this way. I met a farmer chick from Canada. The government pays her to have unemployment in winter. So all winter she reaps in a 5K check and deposits abour 3K of that in the game. She had extra to help me out. After that, summer kicked in and she went to work and I am left on the 80+ content. It was allot of the same stuff over and over. BEat the cash shop, farm for this. Play with luck for a group.
There is always a promise of this and that later on. Or the % tweakers. Like meth addicts, there are these communities testing out to see if +2%crit will finally kill some one in a duel. And then the wierd drama "YOU LOOK AT MY GIRL WRONG? IM GONNA PvP YOU,!" so boys fight on line for girils (actually men)....and they die in pvp, drop an item (item drop in pvp) and then mass drama commences. KOS (kill on sight) is the rumor for popular guilds....
You see where I am getting at...weebo wabboo QQ social mid end game and a sort of passive mid core game. All being powered and funded by hard core addicts with real life mental problems.
I'd stear far away before you are 2 years in, look around, realize you never really had fun, just obligations and drama and addiciton.
when people say Pay To Win with games now adays they usually have never played this game... This game is by far the worst offender of pay to win and i cannot believe this game is still around! I guess when they sucker a couple of people every year to spend tens of thousands so there assassin can kill a boss in about 2 seconds with the -attack speed gear i guess it just pays for itself for PWI
STAY AWAY FROM THIS GAME
edit:
Okay stay away from pretty much any Perfect World game.. Torchlight seems to be the only thing they haven't tainted
Mh, "Runes of Magic" is the worst...
"Torquemada... do not implore him for compassion. Torquemada... do not beg him for forgiveness. Torquemada... do not ask him for mercy. Let's face it, you can't Torquemada anything!"
MWO Music Video - What does the Mech say: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF6HYNqCDLI
Johnny Cash - The Man Comes Around: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0x2iwK0BKM
The lvl cap is somewhat capped at 105, most ppl dont try to lvl past that.
Tbh I quit this game after their 1 year anniversary, when the cashshop really took over, but the game is good. I'm still playing some of the private servers available, and have been for over 6 years, once you get into it, it's hard to stop :d
Game is not bad, but you really need cash shop items leveling after 70 because it can become a real grind, the quests are few and far between after 60. it was one of the first full flight games and it does have an excellent pet class.
This game is not as much pay--to-win as others. Just depends on how much you want to grind. Pvp is always optional.
Flight class yup, 3 hours later you arrive at your destination...But if you hurry, in the cash shop we have a special deal going on to move your faster for 20 dollars...haha
I retired retroactively..Haha
I have used PWI as a base point for a few of my comments and thoughts I've posted on this site because I've only played 3 MMO's - PWI (5years); Neverwinter and GW2, so I will add a few comments to the review. I will compare PWI to GW2 and leave NW out of it because it offers nothing further.
1 - AESTHETICS - I don't think you're review was thorough enough. I assume not everyone plays games with a top gaming computer so for this reason all games have a sliding scale of options for graphics. I am a low end laptop user. On the lower setting that allow me to play reasonable seamlessly PWI is much more beautiful to be immersed in than GW2. Playing PWI I can experience the full pallet of colours and during boss fights I maintain a high frame rate. During boss fights in GW2 I go down to 2fps and less. For normal play all characters in GW2 are grey. I can take part in the territory wars in PWI with no problem and last I tried WVW in GW2 my computer basically seized up.
VERDICT - for the low end computer user PWI is much much more aesthetically pleasing and offers a much higher frame rate than GW2.
2 - GAMEPLAY - your review focused a lot on skills so I will start there. The skill system in PWI absolutely craps all over GW2. There are many more skills to choose from and they actually make a difference to gameplay. In GW2 during a boss fight you can spam the 1 skill and dodge the red circles if you have to and bingo, job done. You cant do this, to the same degree, in PWI you need to know your skills and use them appropriately and you need to know your bosses because they don't telegraph everything with a nice red circle on the ground. I could write a lot more but I find GW2 to be absolute childs-play compared to PWI.
VERDICT - thorough, varied, requires time and effort to get the skills you want and you get a real sense of achievement getting those skills you've been trying to learn.
You spoke about auto-routing to quest hubs - I didn't understand your criticism sorry. In GW2 you press forward and continually run forward. You can do this in PWI too if you like. In both you'll stop if you hit an obstacle. In PWI you have a huge selection of mounts and flyers - man I miss them in GW2. You say you aren't a fan of auto-routing - so if you feel that way, do it manually. I don't think anyone's a fan of the time it takes getting anywhere in any game so I think this criticism is unfounded. In PWI you teleport mostly near to where you need to be and then run, ride or fly the rest of the way.
VERDICT COMPARED TO GW2 - I like PWI better in this regard.
3 - INNOVATION - the game has a variety of quests, pvp, dungeons and achievements. I think your criticisms of things like gender locked classes was pretty childish honestly. But having said that many of us have requested this to be changed but they said 'no' so that's that. One of the reasons was the basis of Chinese mythology which keeps barbarians as male and venomancers as female apparently. Meh. Im trying to think what is innovative about GW2 - I mean I play GW2 daily and you still do quests/dungeons/events. PWI could do with a lot more random or non-scheduled events to break things up a bit - but this isn't innovation - its just have more stuff (of the same type) to do, like in GW2 there so much to do its madness.
VERDICT - PWI is only considered not innovative because it did it all already.
I should mention the pet system is awesome for venomancers - much better than for the archers in PWI. Crafting is better in PWI than GW2 although it could still be improved upon.
I also thought about gameplay and skills, one thing PWI has that GW2 doesn't is macros, so you can set a series of skills to work in a pattern and same that to a dedicated skill slot. Its awesome.
You also mentioned something about how hard it is to level. Oh man you are so wrong - getting to 101 (at which point you can equip rank 9) is a piece of cake and shouldn't cost you a cent. Playing normally it will still take a few months (and a ton of fun) getting to 101. Getting from 101 -105 is another matter entirely and not required anyway.
4 - POLISH - I agree - its a very polished, complex and thorough game still.
I'm going to jump around the above points and put things in a different order. VALUE FOR MONEY - its free - I will say something more about this below but if you DONT WANT TO PVP then you can play for months and months and it wont cost you a cent.
CASH SHOP - anyone reading the review and some of the comments above would get the wrong impression about GENERAL GAMEPLAY and the cash shop. For normal playing you mentioned above about things like xp boosts, extra bank slots etc. You don't need to add a cent to buy these items - they are easy to gain through normal play.
SOCIAL - no problem at all with the design and useability of the various chat and social systems.
OKAY HERES THE KICKER WHICH MAKES EVERYTHING ABOVE REDUNDANT - P2Win
Prior to the implementation of gears/weapons called rank 9, still to this day I would give PWI 8-9/10 and probably still be playing it but:
Prior to rank 9 you could get high level gear with reasonable effort. Now, just actually playing the game - you basically cant get rank 9 - it would take years, then you need to refine rank 9 to what's called r999 so, the gear refined 3 times......
BUT - if you choose to use real money - for the cheap price of $5000+ you can get top level gear. Now believe it or not a lot of people did this and so all the high end gear became redundant and PVP became redundant overnight for thousands of dedicated players and high level dungeons became inaccessible and random events were owned by the cash players.
I could go on and on about it but rank9 killed the game. Rank 9 caused thousands and thousands of people to quit - which means no high end players to help out low end players which means no new players joined which means the map of PWI became basically uninhabited. You can fly from one end of PWI to the other and be lucky to see 5 people.
If you went in with say 10 friends purely to play amongst yourselves and pve only - you would have an absolute ball - but without that support now - well, enough said, PWI sunk their own flagship.
One thing I like very much about GW2 is the scaling - no one is massively different to anyone else - in PWI before rank 9 - Nirvana gear was about the same as rank 8 - and with my mold gears I could at least compete with them. Now if rank 999 refined to +12 is considered 100% then the gear I was using is about 20% - that's the huge difference in gears strength and yes you can just buy your way there.......so sad.......
It's almost 2014, every game should have better graphics than WOW. MMORPG plays a lot of MMOs and their reviews are always spot on. Perfect World is old and non innovative at this point, they need to focus on bringing something new to the table, they can start by starting from scratch.
Well, I played this game for 4 years and your review is seriously flawed.
1. The Friendship Quest is a joke and doesn't help you level.
2. You don't need much space on your hotbar because you really don't need that many skills to play well.
3. Using the cash shop is the only way that you can stay competitive after your character reaches 100. In my 4 years of playing, I can think of only 1 person that never cashed.
4. And your hugest mistake in the review is the attitude towards leveling. Yes, I'm sure some players told you to learn your character but hyper-leveling is the goal of most people playing the game now. This is what has ruined the game, in my opinion. They put hyper experience stones in the cash shop. People started leveling from 1 to 100 in a week. They no longer wanted to do the basic quests so they never learned to play properly.
PWI WAS a great game. I didn't mind needing to use the cash shop because I have a decent job and view gaming as a hobby. I left PWI because no one really wanted to actually PLAY the game anymore.
The review is moronically incorrect giving that you didn't play the game very much at all aside from maybe getting from lvl1-15 or so in most mmos only takes maybe an hour anymore due to the adhd genre of mmo gamers nowadays. The cash shop is in all honesty one of the worst in most f2p mmos nowadays, best end game gear comes directly from it. Had they left the way to farm that gear and kept it that way there would be maybe a handful of players with it. Now its a requirement for most endgame content because everyone wants to run and finish things in ten minutes. Sure lvling is slow at first but if you want you can always farm up a bit of coin and buy hyper exp stones from another player and then buy a spot in a frost big room which would easily send you from lvl1 to -100 within a week.
There is no way around using the cash shop towards end game unless you want to spend hours farming every day to keep up the game world itself is dead compared to how it was 3 years ago on the american servers used to be easy to get squads for just about everything and there were players at quest hubs everywhere now everyone just power lvls. And absence of gold sellers thats probably cause you can buy gold directly from other players with cash via their gold trading function where one player can either place a set price to buy/sell gold (in game cash currencty once converted from zen 1 gold is equal to 1$) for coins I can go right now spend 20$ on my server and buy 75 mil worth of in game coins and still have a bit of change though there is a minor fee to this its nothing too horrid.
the review is just like the old interview that popped up awhile back about that person that was the first to hit the 105 lvl cap and have the best end game gear without cash shopping. A player which was on my server who used a massive glitch to get to that lvl cap in the first place on top of which was merely an alternate account of a player whom which the server knew was infamous for cash shopping. BTW that best end game gear you can get no where else other than from the cs will run you about 1200$ usd with a 50% off sale add in refines/and socketed gems for best end game gear and you have a nice little price tag of around 3grand to keep up with the majority of whats left on servers nowadays. If you wanna play this game I suggest looking into private servers theres a few that have healthier populations/communities than the original at this point.
this game is great under many points of view even after so many years. it still have the best pet system I've saw in seven years I played mmorpgs (I tested over 80 titles) it have acquatic and air combat, dozen of originals events/dungeons still unmached by others newer titles like dragontemple, jungle temple, wraith city, warsong city, cube, valley of reciprocity. etc . and a great storyline for who care to read it >_<
the thing i like the most is that was hurtfully hardcore to play, with the bar of difficulty set really high, with some op bosses with insane hard mechanics to counter, and in some case the bordeline of impossible (consider there was some bosses where never killed in five years: primeval fear, anger of ice and they where removed at certain point and their istances revamped because they where basically unutilized). the game itself had a feature that with an item you could make vanish 99% of the enemies inside normal dungeon because every corner even with normal mobs could be a party wipe. after lv 60 you start doing real serious dungeon in twilight temple farming for better gear that increase your survivability from hopeless to walking dead, nevermind beat a general wurlord, the first time, the ancient evil the first time was really satisfy. and these boss where also tied with the cultivations quest, that op don't like :P
the sad part is that this game is administrated by some of the biggest whales milking company mmorpg world had even saw and a playerbase ready to spend four digits number of money like nothing. when I was still playing there the game anniversary occurred. I dont remeber it was the first or the second year anniversary, btw they relased in the cash shop for a limited time a pack with had 0,03% or lower chances to drop an item one could exchange with high end gears instead to farming an insane hard dungeon called Lunar Glade. what happened after was unespected even for the company that hosted the game: basically the players went frenzy and bought so many of these packs to reach the point to complain that the limit of money they could charge each day was too low (1000 dollars daily) and they had to make more accounts to inject more money. the limited time packs become permanent eventually and a certain point there were guilds entirely composed by people that wear only these equips. and these equips became "the averages equip a pro should have"
this situation grant gears that opened the way to the, otherwise impossible to make, aspd build, a broken overlystrong build that soon arised and has become the only viable build to go for almost any class. (monobuild is the grave of mmos ihmo) people with this build and gears could clean solo with success istances created for being hard for a party of six. these istances drop endgame materials for gears and where a must to do. mom china didn't like it and had the brillant idea to tweak these istances making them more hard to counter aspd solo cleaner, whitout realize that in this way for people normally geared these istances becamed simply impossible even with a party.
at a certain point they relased new contents and new race with the class assassin, this class was based on rogue archetype. so high dps oriented but thanks of a selfbuff to regain health based on the damage dealt and broken aspd build they where basically wonderfull tanks + a selfbuff that allowed them to avoid a fatal hit by a certain chance + another buff that in case of that fatal hit pass instead of die they will survive that blow with few hp + various debuffs that at skill lv 1 where more efficient that the debuff of the veno class (main support/debuffer class of the game) skills raised at max level + stealth and teleport that where glitched and let the assassin pass dungeons doors and surpass trashmobs invisible to go straight to final boss of the istance.
bum! mass of people simply ragequitted. I didn't wanted to run 1000 and more runs of nirvana palace to make my lv 100 gears and stopped. no idea of the game went after. I don't believe any player could reach any elite position in this game without cs, so is a barrier for high competitive players and the game pve side is very hard (was very hard atleast) to go throught whitout needing a big helps from others in many points. and this is another barrier. searching a guild or a permaparty asap is my suggestion for those who want to try.
pardon the broken english