Dragon Nest Open Beta Preview: Part 1

I find myself puzzled as I sit down to write this; my method of writing a review or preview is to list out the pros and cons of a game and then begin the writing, and my list of cons for Dragon Nest is easily three times as long as my list of pros. This is puzzling because I’m enjoying the hell out of this game. I meant to have this up days ago, but I’ve been playing Dragon Nest so much I’ve been putting it off and off to get just one more level… one more dungeon… sorry guys! But, here it is. Perhaps as I’m writing this I’ll figure out why I have so many cons despite my complete enjoyment of the game. I’d actually intended to write a comparison between Dragon Nest and Rusty Hearts, but Rusty Hearts gives me eyestrain if I play it more than 10-15 minutes at a time, so I’m sticking with Dragon Nest. I have lots to say about it though!

Getting Started:

Getting started is a breeze. I already had a Nexon account, which I recall being easy to set up, and the download for the game was both easy to find, and quick to finish as far as MMOs go. Once the servers came online, I was up and running with no hassles. There was a few hours delay of beta server launch, but I didn’t have any lag or disconnects. I hope the official launch of the game is as smooth! I’d prefer it if you didn’t have to log into the Nexon website to start the game (why do game companies do that?), but it’s not actually a browser game so you can shut down the website once the game is running.

Character creation:
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There are four classes, that will ultimately branch into 16 classes, and the Korean version recently released a fifth class. Sadly the classes are gender locked; archers and sorceresses are female, warriors and priests are male.  I understand the reasoning for gender locking: you can create more costumes in a limited timeframe if you don’t have to double design for two genders, and the animations for Dragon Nest are actually pretty well done so I suspect they’d have to be doubled as well, but it is still annoying to not be able to play a female priest.  Although that means there won’t be any Raistlins or Legolases running around! Hmmm… maybe I begin to see the benefit after all…

I picked a sorceress so I could fireball my enemies to a burning death instead of my usual healer.  Unfortunately there are limited choices in customization, and you’ll see lots of copies of yourself running around. Presumably more will be introduced in the cash shop after launch – I’ve heard tempting rumors of what’s in the Korean shop, and am not certain I’ll be able to resist spending some serious cash to get them. Cash shops really bug me when they provide things like uber gear or consumable bonuses, but I’ll drop way too much to customize my characters. Currently there’s a few hair colors, skin dyes and eye dyes. No new hairstyles yet though, or costumes.

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But back to the characters. I found the descriptions of classes in the game to be vague at best (inaccurate at worst), so I do recommend doing research before picking a class. The cleric for example – as you can see in the screenshot above, he’s billed as the healing/buffing class, but as a cleric you’ll spend more time flinging around lightning bolts and gigantic crosses to electrocute and otherwise maim your enemies than you will healing your friends. This is open beta, and the level is still low so I can’t speak for higher level play, but in my experience the emphasis is heavily on “action.”  The healers don’t really heal, the controllers don’t really control, it’s mostly about the different flavors of dishing out as much damage as you can.  So I would have to recommend ignoring the class descriptions provided and instead look to the various forums and wikis to see how each class plays. It is especially vital to look up your skills for the class advancement! When I gave the archer a test drive I found I liked the longbow the best so spent 15 levels using it. Then I advanced to the acrobat and found acrobats use shortbows, so suddenly I had no idea how to fight. A friend had a similar experience with the cleric – he liked the mace, then advanced to priest and suddenly had to use the wand. It would have been nice to have had that said somewhere.

UI:

I’m a huge UI nut, and in games I can customize, I will spend hours getting mine just right. I should perhaps say days, weeks, months – I will be fiddling with my UI for as long as I’m playing a game. To give some perspective – I’ve got somewhere around 60 mods on my WoW account and I still fiddle with it on the rare occasions I log in these days. So it’s always a huge disappointment when I find a game I like that doesn’t allow UI customization. Ok – now I know why my list of cons is three times the size of my list of pros – the bulk of my complaints about the game lie with its UI. Dragon Nest does not allow UI customization, and there are annoying features buried within its interface. That said, the Ui is actually pretty clean. Visually, there’s little to complain about. Many games muck up the UI with decorations, which drives me insane. I want to see the game, don’t cover it up with fancy designs! But that’s one thing Dragon Nest does well. I can’t move the UI the way I’d like, but it doesn’t interfere with seeing the game.

My biggest gripe is the chat system. I’ve always found it bizarre how many games manage to screw this one up – a multiplayer game is pretty dependant on its chat system, as it’s how we all communicate to play with each other. Many people use vent, teamspeak or some other voice chat, but what about the random people you meet? Pickup groups? Buying and selling if there’s no auction house? All this needs the ingame chat system. So it’d make sense to actually design one that is easy to use. Dragon Nest’s chat system is almost a pretty good one. Almost. The enter key opens chat, and there are multiple tabs you can click that have preset filters, so if all you want to do is talk to guildies or your group, it’s a simple matter to just hop to the right window. You can click on someone’s name in the chat window to open up a bunch of options like friending them, or inviting them to a group. Very useful, easy to use, and something I am glad to see more games using. Honestly at this point, so far as I’m concerned, not having a click menu like this is a mark against a game. All this leads me to say that on the surface, Dragon Nest’s chat system is very good.

So why did I say almost and on the surface? For two big reasons; blocking users and the filter. It’s a free to play game, and thus far a popular one, so there are gold sellers. Oh boy are there gold spammers. Within minutes of logging in, you’ll be looking for the way to block users. There actually is a way to do it, but it’s so buried in the UI that I didn’t know it was there until someone told me how to do it. It’s not in the context menu that opens when you click someone, it’s in a window off the social tab. So when the spammer is deliberately using a confusing name like many spammers do to prevent being blocked, you have to actually hunt them down to click on their character and save their name so you can then open the block window and paste it in. The spammers are also good at finding out of the way places to hide in, so unless you want to spend half your time hunting them down, you’re just stuck with them. I wish Nexon would actually start banning them, or at least add blocking to the name click context menu.

My second big annoyance is the chat filter. It’s aggressive, and filters out words like ‘title.’ The worst part is if it’s picking out something in a guild name, or a mail, it doesn’t tell you what’s forbidden, it just won’t let you make the guild or send the mail. I have no objections to the concept, but when its blocking is so aggressive that it’s preventing normal words, it’s just plain annoying. And there’s no way to turn it off, which is even more annoying. I’m stuck seeing ***le when I celebrate getting a new title. You also can’t turn off world chat, so are stuck watching the trolls spew profanities no matter which tab you’re on. Cash shop items are required for this however, so this is usually only an intermittent annoyance.

Combat:

The system itself is pretty simple. Left click to attack, right click to power attack, and then you have the usual 1-0 hotkeys for skills and consumables. It can get tricky to move, aim and use skills at the same time, but it is pretty intuitive so it’s just a matter of learning the reflexes. Dragon Nest is set up for the controller, which is what I use, and it works quite well. My biggest problem with the controller is aiming while using skills – the default setup is using the right stick to aim and the buttons for skills. But I’m slowly getting the hang of it, and after fiddling around with customizing the hotkeys I think that setup does work the best. Normally I’d play with the keyboard and mouse as well to provide comparisons between the two, but my current wrist injury prevents me from long-term keyboard use so I’ll just have to leave it at the controller works great.

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Much like other action games, Dragon Nest keeps score as you progress through the dungeon, and the rewards you earn at the end vary based on this score. You earn points by hitting monsters, performing combo attacks, smashing things in the environment and picking up loot, and lose points by being hit. Speed affects your overall score as well, the faster you run through the dungeon the better. Ranks are pretty standard for this genre, ranging from D to SSS. If you die, you can choose to fail, or use a rez (you get 5 a day) to continue. Depending on your score, you’ll receive a choice of 1-4 treasure chests, ranging in value from bronze to gold. These can contain crafting materials or gear, and annoyingly it’s not always gear for your class. But if you can’t use it, you can always sell it or destroy it for materials.

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Community:

Sadly, I don’t have much to say that’s positive about the Dragon Nest social interface. Grouping with strangers is easy – you can pull open the group social tab and it will display all the groups in the area and you can just hop into one. Grouping with friends, however, is an irritating experience. The towns are in different channels, there are multiple channels for each town, and you can’t invite someone to group if they’re in a different channel, in a dungeon, or talking to an NPC. The first two I can somewhat understand – but unable to even see a group invite while vendoring or turning in quests? Seriously?

I often feel very alone when playing Dragon Nest – the dungeons are instanced, mail is limited to 5 times a day, you can only sell 30 items in the auction house a week, and there are so many spammers that general chat in the towns is next to impossible. On top of that, you have the typical trolls who like to spam world chat with racism, obscenities and other off-putting commentary. My suspicion is that once the game launches and the world opens a bit more this will improve somewhat, but it’s difficult to be sure until that happens. Until then, I just click to the guild tab. It cuts out the gold spammers, sadly not the world chat, but it’s the best there is.

Grouping in dungeons is also not as optimal as it could be – the looting system is just plain bad. If the loot is set on round robin, then the loot goes into the inventory of whoever’s turn it is regardless of who picked it up – which means when grouping you will at some point find yourself wanting to throw your groupmates through a wall because you’ve just cleared the dungeon and have one inventory slot left open for the end of the dungeon reward – only to lose it because a team member looted a worthless vendor trash item while the dungeon reward window was loading. I’ve lost very valuable items that way, and I cringe to admit that I’ve cost people items as well. I do my best to avoid picking up loot while the end dungeon screen is loading, but sometimes the heat of battle turns me into a little goblin and all I can think is LOOT! LOOOT! GIVE ME THE LOOOOT!

But since I haven’t lost any loot today, I’ll say it’s not so bad because there are loot bunnies. Who doesn’t love loot bunnies?

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To Be Continued:

And… this is getting pretty long, so I’ll leave on that thought and pick this back up later to to talk about character progression, crafting, befriending NPCs.