Dragon Nest Open Beta Preview: Part 2

I’m back for the conclusion of my Dragon Nest beta preview! The meat of my review was in Part 1, but there were a few things I didn’t have room to discuss, and a few thoughts I wanted to add.

Quests, quests, quests…

I’ve played a lot of MMOs over the years. Free to play, pay to play, large ones, small ones, pvp focused, pve focused; you name it, I’ve either played it or something similar. When it comes to earning XP, I tend to dislike story/quest-focused progression. I know a lot of people like to gain their XP from quests, but I prefer to go out into the wilds of a game, find myself a quiet little spot, and kill, kill, and kill some more for my xp. I like getting to know my class,  I like the random encounters with people that occur when the world is a large open place, and I like leveling to be something you earn. I like Dragon Nest, but it isn’t that sort of game. Everything outside of the towns is instanced. You get your quest, go to the dungeon, and cut your way through to the boss at the end.

But the quest writing for Dragon Nest is actually good. It’s the same old kill X number of Y monster, collect X number of drops from Y monster, go beat up the boss type questing that is seen everywhere else, but I actually find myself laughing as I talk to the NPCs and fulfill their weird whims. From the loincloth obsessed scholar, to the invisible peeping Tom thief and to the storage keeper who hates what people keep in his vault, the game is filled with colorful NPCs and their humor-tinged requests. It’s easily the best written game I’ve come across to date, and I look forward to reading each new quest as it’s handed to me. There’s one large blot on my enjoyment of the quests, however – the main storyline. The excellent writing is overshadowed by a questline that turns you from hero to zero; rather than feeling accomplished as I run through the game’s story, I feel like a trumped up member of the audience, here for nothing more than to watch the amazing NPCs show off their cool moves. Each step of the way is marred by cut scenes depicting me being one-shot knocked out, or simply brushed aside as another NPC runs up to defeat the boss I was just fighting. That can be a nice tool if used in moderation, but so far, there’s only been one fight that I’ve actually won myself. I know there are lots of fans of the Dragon Nest storyline, but I am not one of them.

Character Progression:

It’s a level and skill-based game; you obtain xp from killing monsters, completing dungeons, and doing quests, and each level provides skill points that can be freely spent among the class skills. Nothing new here. And as I said in Part 1, it’s vital to do research on the class you want, since the in game documentation is so limited and it is easy to screw up your character build. You do get a skill reset scroll upon completing your character advancement quest at level 15, but it must be used within 1 week, and I’m not sure if it’s just a promotional item for the beta or if it will continue to be given out after launch.

Gear is an important part of character progression as well, and I’m usually a huge gear hound, but I’ve found that gear acquisition in Dragon Nest is pretty boring. Items do have a certain amount of randomness on stats, and you’ll find that some gear of the same level and quality is more valuable than others, but by and large the enhancements put on the gear is of more importance than anything else. Since you can’t enhance quest gear, this unfortunately means that quest gear is usually rubbish by the time you’ve acquired it. I have yet to complete a quest and actually use the item reward – it always ends up deleted since you can’t even vendor or destroy quest items for crafting materials. And on top of that, gear is visually uninteresting, with very little to differentiate the sets. As I’ve said before, I’m a vain gamer, and will often choose gear based on looks rather than stats – but thus far, there’s no reason to look at anything but the stats on an item.

Crafting:

There isn’t a lot to say about crafting, it’s simply collecting drops in the dungeons and bringing them to the NPC. You can craft armor, weapons, jewelry, gifts for the NPCs, and crests that improve your skills and abilities by walking up to the NPC crafter and clicking ‘craft’ on the crafting interface. There are no level requirements; I can craft items I can’t actually use, although I hear that there will be items that require certain levels of NPC friendship in the towns that aren’t open yet. My limited inventory is full of random items that are needed for crafting, but I don’t find the crafting in Dragon Nest to be of any real interest. It has nothing to offer a dedicated artisan, and crafters out there will most likely want to pass on this game. But at least the economy isn’t flooded with a thousand items crafters have to make to level their craft.

NPC Friendship:

One thing I do find interesting in Dragon Nest is befriending the NPCs. It’s a very simple system, you get gift drops in dungeons, which you can give to the NPCs once certain milestones are met, and increase their liking for you. As you do so, they’ll send you random gifts in the mail – thus far I’ve gotten vendor trash and some nice crafting items. Each gift comes with a bit of text, and I have to say I look forward to the notes more than the gifts they send me, some of them actually make me laugh. The NPCs in this game really have personality, which is something that many games lack. There are different levels of gifts, dungeon drops are usually the lowest tier, but if you collect the right kinds you can craft them into higher tiered gifts which cause the NPCs to like you more. I’m a large fan of fun additions like this, and it’s well worth checking out. I have heard that in later towns, you’ll have to earn enough NPC trust to use the higher tiers of crafting, but there’s no indication as to when that content will hit the NA Dragon Nest.

Customer Service:

This is where Dragon Nest loses a lot of points. It’s more about Nexon than the game, but it doesn’t matter how great a game is if I can’t trust the publisher behind it. And unfortunately, with this one, Nexon has lost my trust. The events started out sounding great – they had events such as giving Scales for their cash shop for logging in during the beta, giving wings for meeting certain play milestones, and random items for leveling up or guilding. But Nexon has been unable to fulfil those promised rewards, offering nothing more than apologies for these failures. I logged in enough that I obtained the maximum amount of Scales – but the one item I wanted to buy with them was bugged such that it couldn’t be purchased. I met all of the requirements for obtaining the Loyal Dragon Wings for 2 characters – but I haven’t received them yet. I’ve seen people running around with them in game, but neither I nor any of my friends have gotten them. Nexon advertised a hat with the R2G logo to promote guilding, but it wasn’t given out until most of the beta had passed (I say most counting the actual scheduled length of beta – it’s been extended since then). There were several advertised live events with GMs, but when I logged on for a few of them, there were no GMs to be found, and I was unable to learn anything about how to participate.

Nexon did change the rules of the Wing event after they had several extended maintanences that prevented a lot of people from being able to meet the requirements for the Wings, but that’s the only good thing I can say about my experience with Nexon customer service during my play time in the Dragon Nest open beta. Empty apologies do not make up for a continuing string of failures to deliver on their promises, and from the pages and pages of complaint threads on their forums, I can see that I’m far from the only person who met the goals set by Nexon without receiving the promised rewards. I may continue to play Dragon Nest, but unless they turn their act around on this, I won’t be supporting Nexon at all. All in all, I rank Dragon Nest’s customer service as a failure.

Conclusion:

Do I enjoy playing Dragon Nest? Yes, I do, and I will probably continue playing it for a while. But ultimately, I won’t be spending money on it, and I can’t recommend it to anyone. The graphics are cute, and the action is fun, but it doesn’t offer enough in terms of gameplay to make up for Nexon’s failures. Gold spammers run rampant, ruining any attempts to build community by spamming the chat channels, and are utterly destroying the economy. The game events sound interesting, but they were executed so poorly that I won’t even be trying to participate in any in the future. At the end of the day, my take on Dragon Nest is that it’s a potentially interesting game that has been let down by its publisher. Perhaps that will change over time, but right now, Dragon Nest NA has very little to offer to make up for its major failings, and unless Nexon has an abrupt turn around on customer service, or provides a massive content update, I have to say this is one game to avoid for now.

If you are interested in checking this game out, you can find the official page here.