A relatively new game for me, as I already spend most of my gaming time in Final Fantasy XI, I sometimes need a change of pace, so I look at other games. It mostly depends on how I feel though, wether I play online or solo on consoles or handelds. And this is one of the online ones.
Perfect World International is a free to play MMORPG. How is that possible? Well, there's plenty of them around nowadays, it's a system called Micropayment. Basically, rather than pay a price per month, you can use your money to buy in game items. Those will range from simply cosmetic to adding bonuses you couldn't get otherwise. But essentially, these are absolutely not necessary to playing the game.
Perfect World seems to be based off ancient china for the most part, but in a fantasy setting. The choice for character creation is limited to 3 races, which split into 2 jobs each for a total of 6 jobs available. The bases are there : warrior and tanks, archers and healers, mages and pet masters. Like most of the MMORPGs, the game is split between doing fetch quests that requires you to kill a certain amount of monsters, or killing said monsters. Each increase your experience points, spirit points and money, as well as random equipment drops.
In a Diablo-esque style, equipments can also have added bonuses that may need to be identified by an NPC first for safety. Skills are bought using both currency and spirit points, and their learning rate depends on your levels and progression within your class. Some quests are necessary to upgrade your character toward greater 'divinity', and certain skills cannot be learned until you do.
Also, flying abilities like wings or mounts can be obtained at level 30 for any jobs, but Winged Elves have a basic rather slow flying at level 1. Flying is the way to go to avoid any kind of encounters, but amusing you cna carry out battles while flying, though it eats your MP for every second of combined flying and fighting, while it costs no MP to simply fly around.
What I liked about the game compared to other MMORPGs in the same style is the character creation process. Most of the time free MMORPGs get this very limited creation system, like 2 hears and 3 hair styles or 2 skin colors, not much different in all honesty. Perfect World allows you to upload a picture on screen for you to compare, and modify all finer points, like the size and position of nose and eyes, their rotation, width, color and such. The only thing I felt was missing was the character's height, which ends up being static. Fortunately, your gender is also not enforced by your job or race (I've seen it in other games, yuck).
For those interested there's also controlled PVP possible. Meaning you actually got to set yourself as PVP, and a color system on the characters name tell you if a character is a renowned PKiller. Being killed in PVP gives no exp or item loss, except if you have some reknown, in which case being defeated may result in exp loss and losing pieces of equipment you were wearing. Basically, you can PVP, but at your own risks if you overdo it. Killing normal monsters and completing quests apparently lowers that reknown steadily if you think you accumulated too much of it, so it's also forgiving to a degree.
At any rate, if you feel like trying it out, it's free to play (just a relatively hefty download I suppose, 2.5 gb or so), so take it for a spin. If you want, follow this link, which will give me a referal as well : http://www.perfectworld.com/referral/key/b850bdc39a986536b3cd72e995336486
The info on what referals offer are on the site, but basically it will give me some ZEN to buy some extra items like I talked about earlier. I'm not begging you or anything, as I said before those are not necessary. Just a small bonus to a friend I suppose. If you do join, I have a female Cleric named LifaLockhart on the Sanctuary server (PVE).
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