Perfect World Review

by Neilie Johnson - IGN.com | 29 January 2009 12:00
 
Perfect? No. Beautiful and well-made? Yes.
 
Welcome to your tour of Perfect World International. To your left is the City of Plume, to your right, the Lake of Worries. Watch your step; the Cactopods are extremely prevalent this year and—yow. Curse those winged elves. They know this is a no-fly zone. Ahem...this beautiful place is called Perfect World, a free-to-play online fantasy realm developed and published by a Chinese company called—go figure—Perfect World Entertainment. PWE specializes in creating online MMO's for the Asian market and is well on the way to capturing a significant chunk of the North American market as well.
 
Everything in Perfect World from the races and storyline to the artwork and character development is based on Chinese mythology. The story goes like this. Pan Gu, the first god of the universe, got sick of his solitary omnipotence and created a world out of his own essential elements: fire, metal, wood, earth, and water. His first attempt was an abject failure and was overrun by hideous wraiths. He scrapped that world and tried again, this time creating a world full of Humans, Winged Elves and a feral race called the Untamed. The new land was immediately beset by faction wars and worse yet, attacked by shadowy wraiths leftover from the old one. We join our program already in progress, when the three good races have forged an uneasy alliance in the interest of preserving this "Perfect" World.
 

Seriously, what is happening here?

Your part in the conflict begins when you create a character. Humans and Elves are fairly standard fantasy issue but the Untamed are an unusual race of half-animal humanoids. Males are actually more than half animal and can't be customized much; they're like tigers, wolves, pandas and lions on two legs. The females are mostly human but have animal tails and ears. As expected, a perfect world is full of perfect characters and Perfect World has some of the most attractive characters out there. That said, the first thing I did after imagining an entire world full of Brads and Angelinas was use the considerable customization options to make the ugliest character possible. What's great is that you can. With so many facial feature, color and hair choices (even a whole slew of advanced settings that adjust every angle of the face) you can create extremely distinct-looking characters.
 
Along with the nice character models come attractive environmental visuals. Each starting city has its own distinct style and is surrounded by woods, lakes, deserts; every kind of terrain you can imagine is there and all of it's beautiful. The colorful, cartoonish style is reminiscent of World of Warcraft but has a unique style of its own based on Chinese aesthetics. I really enjoyed the visual effects as well, from the sparkly effect surrounding the Winged Elves as they fly to the churning venom pool generated by my magic attacks, they're impressive. And the beauty isn't just visual. The sound plays a strong role in the gaming experience as well. The music, with its distinctly Chinese flavor is the perfect complement to the visuals. If only the sound effects were as good as the music. Many of them sound strangely inappropriate, most obviously the wood floor sound your character's footsteps make when running on any kind of terrain.
 
Perfect World has six playable classes and although that's fewer than in many other MMOs, the main archetypes are well-represented. Class selection is limited by race and that may turn some players off. Humans can only be Blademasters or Wizards, Winged Elves can only be Clerics or Archers and Untamed can only be Barbarians or Venomancers. The first five classes play very much as you'd expect them to while Venomancers, with their use of poisons, talent for taming pets and the ability to take on animal forms play something like a Warlock, Hunter and Shaman all rolled into one.
 
Every race has its own home city. For Humans it's the mountain city of Etherblade, for Elves it's the woodland City of Plume and for Untamed, the desolate City of the Lost. All areas function in the same way so don't worry about missing something if you choose one race over another. Having tried them all, I found the starting quests for all the races to be nearly identical. For the most part, the starting quests do a good job of acquainting you with the game's mechanics. As mentioned before, the fiction in Perfect World is based on Chinese myth and legend and those of you who take the time to read the quest text will enjoy it. Unfortunately, this rich literary tradition isn't used imaginatively enough and an annoyingly high percentage of quests are of the "kill thirty of this, kill twenty of that" variety. Perhaps end game quests are better but through level 20 the quests are uncomfortably grindy. What's worse is that the quests are often not grouped in the interest of efficiency. Actually, since they're often given piecemeal and in sequence they seem designed to run your legs off. Who likes running for five minutes, spending twenty minutes killing thirty of something then running for five minutes back to the quest NPC only to be told that you have to run back to the same area again and kill thirty of something else? It's lazy quest design and worst of all, rewards for this brand of quest are seemingly arbitrary and you often get no experience for doing them. Well, you get a little. But that much tedium deserves better than a 1% XP gain.
 

For a monster getting hit with a sword, that guy seems way too happy.

The only good thing about the constant mob harvesting is the variety of strange and sometimes disturbing creatures you'll face. You'll see the usual wolves, minotaurs and harpies but I'm still having nightmares about the hulking monstrosities, the cacti that look like prickly mammaries and the supernatural flame beings that cackle at you like Satan himself. Monsters vary in that even within the same creature type they can have different attributes. This allows you to pick off the weak ones or prepare before taking on the ones with added defense or an increased attack. The differences are many but what the various mobs do have in common is a strange reluctance to aggro. You can attack and kill one creature right next to another and 90% of the time, the untargeted one won't bat an eye. It's convenient, especially if you're soloing, but it's also unrealistic.
 
Speaking of soloing, at least until level 20, Perfect World is very solo-friendly. And for once, soloing might be an advantage because the Perfect World design team chose to adopt a very old-school attitude toward tagging kills—you can't. Anyone can attack anything at any time and whoever does the most damage to the creature gets to loot it. That's not so much fun when some fathead decides to muscle in on your area. Then again, players in Perfect World are pretty cavalier about loot and leave it lying everywhere. No matter where I went, abandoned items and piles of gold were free for the taking.
 
Combat in Perfect World fun and well designed except for a few bothersome imbalances and one piece of outright cheese. One of the coolest things about combat is that once you've targeted something, you'll auto-pivot and keep attacking no matter where it goes. Another cool thing is that if you're a Winged Elf, you can attack while flying. There's something really nifty about hovering above your enemy and firing arrows like an avenging angel. The bothersome aspects of combat as I saw them were problems with casters and archers. Unless casters carry a bag full of pricey potions or spend some real-life money on mana-replenishing charms from the online boutique, the high mana cost of healing and damage spells will force them to spend a lot of time waiting for their mana to tick back up. Archers are at a bit of a disadvantage as well if only because they depend so heavily on the tanking classes. Archers' damage is reduced significantly at close range and since they don't learn the skills necessary to counter that issue until level 19, if they generate enough threat, they're toast. And my biggest peeve—every single monster, no matter what it is, will get one last hit on you right before (or even after) it dies. Picture this. Your health is low but manageable, you empty the mob's health bar with one last impressive flourish, it hits the ground and...you're killed by an apparently-queued-up-but-obviously-post-mortem blow. Tell me that wouldn't tick you off? And even if it doesn't kill you, that last cheap shot is irritating.
 

Some characters can fly.

As far as class dependencies go, you won't really feel them until you do your first dungeon. Cave of the Vicious happens at level 19 and the difficulty spike is quite a shock. You'll barely get a foot in the door before you'll be clobbered by level 19 mobs that have several times the hit points and damage than anything of the same level you've previously encountered. You won't want to miss the dungeons though because they look really cool and offer a much-needed grind break. In talking to other players I found there are two schools of thought on running the dungeons in Perfect World. You'll either need a highly-skilled caster, healer and tank a couple of levels higher than the dungeon or a group of 4-6 average players who are 10-20 levels higher than you are and XP-hungry enough to take you through. (The latter notion explains why so many suspiciously generous level 40s kept begging to help me.) Perfect World's dungeons are known for being challenging but since raid groups remain small at six players max, everyone has to know his job well. In addition to the usual boss-centric instances, higher level dungeons like the Cube throw an interesting variant into the mix where successfully completing the dungeon depends on solving a series of puzzles.
 
Of course, the main reason people run dungeons at all is for cool drops but in Perfect World not all the cool items are drops. In fact, the team at Perfect World made it possible for the non-raid-inclined to have some of the coolest stuff in the game. If you're wondering how a company can sustain a game that's completely free to play, I have one hyphenated word for you; micro-payments. The people at Perfect World are like drug dealers or those people giving out food samples at Costco. They'll give you a free taste, knowing you'll get hooked and need more. There's a boutique button on your mini-map that opens a shop full of useful upgrades and vanity items like clothing, fireworks and flaming dragon mounts. You buy these items by going on the Perfect World website and adding gold to your wallet via PayPal or with a credit card. It's insidious how easily you can get hooked on the boutique and spend too much but hey, it's totally optional. If you want, you can play Perfect World forever without spending a dime.
 
In between dungeons, shopping and stints in the field getting pimp slapped by dead monsters you'll be hanging out in cities training, buying and selling things and crafting. In Perfect World, leveling and skill development is dependent not only on combat experience but on spiritual cultivation as well. To gain access to the most powerful spells and more interesting content, you walk the Celestial path. This sounds ultra-mystical but what it boils down to is earning a different kind of XP called "Spirit" by acting as a gofer for guys like MangMang the Taoist. You can also earn Spirit by doing regular quests, harvesting and fighting mobs. Unfortunately, you don't earn Spirit at the same rate as regular XP. You level up and run excitedly back to the city to train, only to have your enthusiasm squashed when you realize you haven't earned enough Spirit to buy all your cool new skills. Maybe other MMO players are OK with that but the prospect of grinding four extra hours per skill level to earn the Spirit necessary to upgrade is not my idea of fun.
 

Lots of tweaks for avatar appearance...for better or worse.

What is my idea of a fun is commerce. I'm addicted to selling stuff in MMOs and love browsing the auction house posts looking for deals. I'm not keen on the auction house in Perfect World though for a couple of reasons. First, the auction house must be run by the Mafia because the selling fees are excessive for lower end items. Second, the search isn't very user-friendly. The filter window disallows you from seeing item information in your inventory which makes search and comparison something of a chore.
 
Actually, that brings up problems with the UI in general. The sheer glut of UI in your average MMO demands that it be built for efficiency and readability. The UI in Perfect World fails—not completely, but significantly—on both these counts. Both the skill training pane and the crafting pane show everything you can learn (or craft) in one window with no differentiation between what you have or don't have, can or can't do. Nothing's grayed out. For new players the confusion is furthered by the class trainer window which is likely to be full of empty skill slots if you don't currently qualify for anything rather than showing you what you can learn and when. On top of poorly communicated information, there are many little buggy things like how your inventory intermittently refuses to open in conjunction with another window. These are small things that become a big annoyance over time and with frequent usage.
 
But I digress. We were talking about the auction house. If the clunky auction house UI and fees are OK with you, go crazy. To me, a better idea is to open a Consignment store. The Consignment option lets you temporarily turn your character into a cute little cat icon which functions as a storefront for anything you might want to sell. These catty convenience stores are everywhere and sell just about anything, including player-crafted items.
 
Crafting in Perfect World is handled much like it is in World of Warcraft. You gather the ingredients, hit the button and voila! Where it differs is in the lack of restrictions. Anyone can harvest any material and can simultaneously learn all four crafting professions: Blacksmith, Jeweler, Tailor and Apothecary. All four of the professions are fun and make useful things but somehow the Apothecary got the short end of the pestle. Leveling Apothecary is no joke because every potion takes such a large number of herbs (fifteen of this, ten of that) you're likely to spend all your money buying mats or all your time searching for plants. I'd leave the Apothecary stuff to the guys with lots of time on their hands and buy my potions from them. Isn't that what other players are for?
 

The interface could use some improvements.

Speaking of other players, Perfect World has a fairly comprehensive system for managing player interaction. There's the usual grouping mechanics, friends list and chat system with World, Trade, Whisper, Squad and Common chat as well as the option to create or join private chat rooms. The Emote system is also extensive and includes some hilarious animations like Embrace, which lets you target, pick up and cuddle nearby characters. Since you can also marry another player in game by running a special matrimonial quest, you should probably use that emote often. Guilds in Perfect World are called Factions and as long as these factions have the 500,000 to 2 million gold needed to declare war on one another, their time is spent wrangling over any one of forty-four territories. PvP is also represented in the form of arena fighting and regular ol' "anywhere PK-ing" once you hit level 30. In general though, you really have to go looking for PvP because even playing on a PvP server, I was never forced to fight anyone.
 
Supplied by IGN.com