Enjoying the game

I am well aware that the game is still in Beta, but as I beta 'test' the game (if you can even really call it that. It was more of a party that was first come, first serve), I have to say I am really liking the game. Not because it is particularly revolutionary or anything, but because it is close to the source material. 

Gameplay wise, it seems to be typical free to play WoW style. You choose a starting weapon (which acts like a class), do quests, get gear and level up. And to most players, after the first hour of that they left. 

What is making the game interesting is how the game portrays the Romance of Three Kingdoms era. You may have a quest that requires you to kill a certain number of bandits, but you might also have a quest that requires you to speak to different individuals and then tell someone what they had said by answering questions. I am currently in a quest chain that I have been working on for 8 levels that requires you to travel all over the province, speaking to different individuals and learning famous stories from them. No combat, just locating the people and listening to whatever story they have to tell. In other words, the game has good 'fluff' to occupy the time for those people who like that kind of thing. To those who don't, the quest may just be a "Go here and kill 20 Yellow Turban Bandits". 

Another change to make the game more interesting is that there seems to be random events happening all the time. During my gameplay, I received several notices that an army of NPCs was attacking a certain area or a famous criminal needed to be hunted down. There are also massive lists of events on the calendar of different things happening. While most of these require higher levels, it at least appears that there will be more to do than just 'grind'.

There are also two interesting social groups in HOTK. Clans are a 2-14 groups of people that work like a Corps in EVE online. Once the head of the clan reaches lvl 40, his Clan can join a Legion, which act like Alliances from EVE. Also, while I do not know for certain, it looks as if these different legions will be able to fight over and take cities for their faction. 

So far during my play, we haven't seen any faction play and it has been mentioned that you do not officially choose between Liu Bei's Shu, Cao Cao's Wei or Sun Ce's Wu until level 40. However, you operate and do quests for other factions, such as different smaller factions (Such as Yuan Shao and Lu Bu), which (according to the website) will supposedly oppose each other and doing quests for one will make enemies of the other (and assumably the players as well). 

The mechanics of the game are decent. The combat works just like any other point and click game. The special abilities you obtain as you level start off rather lame, but begin to look cooler and more interesting later on and while some of the abilities are pretty much the same as other MMO's, there are a few cool and interesting ones that I personally have been enjoying. 

There are 18 different 'classes' in the game. Each weapon operates as a class and give a pretty straightforward idea of what they do in character creation (You pick a weapon and you tells you how your stats will evolve over time). While not all of the weapons are available right now (such as the Halberd), a majority of them are. Eventually, you unlock the ability to pick up the other weapons as a secondary job, kind of like FFXI. 

Something that is setting the game apart is that you have three different ways to use your EXP. The most straight forward is to just use it to level up, which increases your stats. Upon reaching level 10, you will be able to increase your Weapon Class, which will grant you more abilities and better use of your weapon (eventually, you can also do this for a second job as well). You also may spend EXP to level up different weapons, which grant them additional abilities and better stats.

Character creation is fairly simple. I was disappointed that after you choose a gender, you choose a face, hair and a body size (small, medium and large). However, the equipment looks very cool and you can get ingame items that allow you to customize your look. 

While the market place hasn't been opened up for cash items yet, the game allows players to obtain special items via two ways. The first is to purchase Taels with RL money. The other is to follow different in game quests. By level 10 I already have 250 taels and players can have a max of 1000. (I can only assume that if people purchase Taels with real money, they can have more than 1000.) You can also go to daily events to obtain more. 

I am excited to continue playing the game and I hope that people won't get turned away by some of the nay sayers. The game isn't perfect, not by a long shot. But it is personally one of my favorite f2p games already and I am happy, both as a fan of the 'Romance of Three Kingdoms' book, video games and movies and as a gamer.