Open Beta Preview: Lucent Heart

Lucent Heart is a social MMO with a storyline centered around ancient Greek mythology. It’s a little disappointing that the story is surface color painted onto a standard MMO template, but that’s common enough among MMOs that I won’t complain too much. You play a fabled hero, out to save the world from an angry Hecate who is scattering monsters everywhere. As the storyline progresses you’ll find yourself helping Hermes get out of trouble, aiding Apollo and many other gods, and delivering sundries like stomach medicine and lunch to the normal people who populate the world. Lucent Heart is an odd combination of interesting and outdated, novel and boring.

I’ve often heard game designers say that you can have graphics or gameplay, and Lucent Heart is a good illustration of that principal. My attention was initially drawn by the game’s horoscope system, and as I looked further I saw that it had other unusual systems in place as well. It boasts a system of bonuses that accrue based on combat events like critical hits or misses, so you’ll gain even when getting beaten up, and a fortune system that grants daily bonuses to drop rates and combat effectiveness. In contrast, the game just looks dated, with areas often resembling empty plains containing monsters doing nothing more than sitting and waiting to be killed. I can appreciate cutting edge graphics, but I’ve always been more interested in how a game plays than how it looks, so I decided to give it a further try despite its sushi platter newbie zone.

Account Creation: But let’s back up for a moment, and I’ll start at the very beginning. The first thing that I use to judge a game is account creation and web navigation. Is it easy to set up and play? Can I find all the information I want from its official page? Ideally, I don’t think this should be worth mentioning; when trying a game, I want to just set up my account and start the download. Lucent Heart, however, lost a lot of points when I had several problems setting up my account. Like just about every other game company out there, beanfun sends an email to the address you give them for the purposes of verifying a functional email. At least, it should. You can’t log into the game to play until you click the link they send you – but it wasn’t until my fourth attempt that I actually received this email. Each attempt required the creation of an entirely new account, with an entirely new email address, as the account system remembers account names and emails even if they aren’t verified. To add to the frustration, you can’t contact support unless you have an account and are logged in. So if you’re not receiving the verification email, you either have to find an email address that “works” or you just can’t play. And strangely, it doesn’t seem to be a matter of domain – I was able to set up an account using a gmail address, but a friend of mine wasn’t. I will note that it’s now been several days and we still haven’t received verification emails at those initial account attempts so I am assuming they’re just never going to arrive.

Presuming you get past this hurdle and have opened your account, the next frustration comes from the patcher – it won’t run if you have an open web browser. Any open web browser (I tried explorer, opera, and firefox) will cause the patcher to spit errors at you until you shut the browser down. I’m a chronic alt tabber, so this nearly caused me to uninstall the game immediately, but I persevered due to stubbornness from the sheer effort it had taken to get an account open, and I discovered that this only matters when the patcher is running. Once the game is open you can call up your browser again. One confusing oddity is that once the patching is complete you have to create another account. It seems the initial account is like an umbrella that works for all beanfun’s games, then each game runs on its own mini-account. This is easy to set up, however, all you need to do is create another name. You can do it right in the patcher and then run the game.

Character Creation: Character creation is quick and easy. You have a choice of several faces and hairs, although I wish you could choose skin color and height, and of course, your horoscope. You can choose any birthday, including birth year, although the year doesn’t seem to matter. Each horoscope comes with different bonuses, which sadly aren’t provided in character generation. Now that the game is running, however, you can open a browser and go to the web site to see them. There’s no class choice, all characters enter the game as a beginner class, and all characters are human. There are ultimately 8 character classes to choose from; 2 melee, 2 ranged gunners, 2 arcane casters and 2 priests. You can also choose blood type, although I’m not sure if that has any bonuses or is simply cosmetic.

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Progression: Once you get into the game, you’re presented with plains of monsters, dancing around as though they have nothing better to do than wait to be killed. There are bottle-neck quests, where you’ll spend more time being frustrated by the cut-throat camping than actually killing things. Sadly some of the crafting quests are among these, so if you want to progress as a crafter this is unavoidable. Dungeons actually do require groups, and are well worth looking into. You ‘create’ dungeons, using items that are called star cores, which can be bought at the magic shop or found by killing monsters. There are three types of these, treasure, scene, and monster, with one of each required to create a dungeon, but this allows for a fun mix and match that prevents some of the boredom of running the same level X dungeon over and over again. It’s interesting, and keeps dungeons ‘fresh’ – when I want to run a dungeon all I need to do is gather some buddies and create one that suits our tastes.

Progression is quest-based, and there are more than enough to keep you busy. I’ve generally got at least 15 quests at any given time, and I usually end up abandoning several every few levels as I outlevel questhubs. Many of them are generic ‘kill x’ or ‘collect y’ types, but I do find myself chuckling at them often enough that I continue to read the storylines. The only things I love more than games are ancient history and mythology, so helping Hermes get out of trouble after playing pranks is just plain fun.

Getting Emotional: And now for the good stuff, or, what has thus far kept me playing. As I mentioned previously, Lucent Heart has several interesting systems that I’ve found fun to play around with. The first one of these that I encountered upon logging in was the emotion system. There were 4 skills on my hotbar, two positive emotions and two negative emotions, with meters attached to each. As I hit the enemy or am critically hit by the enemy, I become happier (While I don’t understand why being critically hit is a good thing, who doesn’t like hitting monsters?). When I miss an attack or my health drops, my negative emotion increases. When the meter fills, I can use these skills to either heal myself or call up combat bonuses. The best part is there’s no cooldown, at times the meter has filled so quickly I’ve been able to chain these. And of course, there are potions and other items that will fill the meter which can be found via questing or as drops. When an emotional skill is ready to use, it will flash on the hotbar if it’s still there, and on your character portrait. A thought bubble will also pop up over your head to let you know you’ve hit the pinnacle of emotion.

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What’s Your Sign: The main focus and draw of the game is its horoscope system, and it’s pretty robust. Each horoscope sign has quested armor, sets of bonuses to choose from, skills and a chat channel. When you reach level 10, you begin a quest that grants access to the ‘astrolabe,’ the portion of the UI where horoscope skills are assigned and used. Most of these provide passive stat gains that boost regen rates, max health and mana, or core stats, as well as an active skill that will heal health and mana. These skills can be used every 5 minutes and have saved me on multiple occasions. Every 5 levels allows the choice of another skill.

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My Lucky Day: Daily fortunes provide varying bonuses to combat, drop luck, crafting and love. You can see these fortunes in the form of stars at the character login screen – the more stars, the higher your luck in that particular category for the day. These fortunes can be boosted through the use of items in game, I’ve already gotten several via questing and killing. One touch that I really like is that you can offer other people fortune buffs by praying for them. I always make sure to do this when I’m going afk; it not only helps out whoever I’m praying for, but gives me xp and random items. I’m all for methods that encourage community, especially ones that reward you for doing so! Thus far I’ve gotten crafting materials, cards that can be exchanged for fun items and pets, rare crafting recipes and the special coins that are used to gamble for rare gear.

Soulmates: Perhaps the most amusing element of Lucent Heart is Cupid and matchmaking. At level 8, you can go sign up with Cupid to be matched with a soulmate. You answer a few questions, indicating if you like to travel, or to cook, and if you want you can put in requirements – a nice inclusion is the timezone requirement so Cupid doesn’t match you with someone you’ll never actually see. It’d be nice if they’d add the ability to choose your own soulmate for people playing with friends or spouses, although with the judicious use of requirements it’s possible to get matched with someone specific eventually. I haven’t played around with it much, but I’ve seen enough conversations on the global chat channels to know that people do manage it. Like the other systems in the game, grouping with your soulmate grants various bonuses like extra experience, special emotes, and items.

Crafting: I’ve always been a big crafter in MMOs, and so I pay a lot of attention to how crafting functions in any game I play. Lucent Heart is no different. A common pitfall that many games fall into is managing the crafting economy – I dislike the standard MMO method of creating items to level as it ends up flooding the economy with worthless items and placing raw materials as more valuable than the actual crafted goods. This is not the case with Lucent Heart. Crafting materials are easily obtained, and there are merchants in every crafting station who will sell you the materials you need if you haven’t managed to scrounge up enough. Crafting is tied to your adventuring level, which I normally find annoying, but in Lucent Heart all you need to do to progress your craft is complete a quest every 5 levels so this doesn’t bother me. I can’t focus on crafting, but I also don’t have to create a thousand worthless items to progress. It’s a tradeoff I’m happy to accept. The biggest problem I’ve found so far is that you gain free items as you level, and in the early levels this includes the best gear, so certain professions are literally useless until you’ve gotten to around level 30. But again, I don’t have to pump out a thousand items to progress during that slump, so I can just hoard materials until later on when I’ll need them.

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Community: And now for the very best thing about Lucent Heart – its community. The heart of any MMO is its community, especially games that advertise themselves as social MMOs, and Lucent Heart doesn’t disappoint. I am perfectly comfortable saying that the GMs in this game are the most active and friendly GMs I have ever seen, bar none. There is always at least one logged in, they are quick to step in when there are problems, and they’re conversational on the chat channels when there aren’t. I’ve had a few issues already, and have gotten replies within seconds each time. Even customer support tickets are handled quickly, when I sent one in my issue was solved within 12 hours. There are tons of events, run by both the GMs and the players, and I’m happy to say that there are events for everyone. So far I have participated in crafting, social and combat events, and the GMs will even provide teleports to players who are far distant from the event locations. You don’t have to be max level and well-geared to participate, I’ve jumped into events with characters fresh out of character creation and had fun.

In Short: My ultimate conclusion about Lucent Heart is that if you’re looking for cutting edge graphics, a high degree of polish, or exciting combat, you’re better off looking elsewhere. But if you’re looking for a welcoming community, and a game that rewards interactions with other players, then you might want to give it a look.