Leave your drugs at home for this one (hint: look a the post icon): Believe me, you won't need any. R.O.S.E. Online(Rush On Seven Episodes is aparently what the acronym stands for) will provide you with a more than intoxicating enough dose of What The Fuck and I Didn't Just See That, Did I? to satisfy any alternative-exploration-prone mind. Is it *fun*? Read on and find out for yourself.
Psychotic Jelly beans, magic Engrish fairies, hypercute character models carrying weapons several times larger than themselves, marauding stuffed animals with chef's knives, Islam Hoods and other clothing, and literally forests of vending machines covering every possible surface that people might look the way of. Sound bizzare? You haven't the faintest idea just how much further it goes... in R.O.S.E. Online, run by the same company who runs Ragnarok Online. Don't judge it just by that, though!
Credit: First claimant to have introduced this game to the particularly virulent clique I am a nominal member of, and therefore trust the opinion of: Our own "rain" on forums. Thanks for Khay Lik It, Rain.
Really, how to explain? It's not something that can easily be put into words, so my impressions are provided more for instruction than for giving you a feel for the game. Most of it you really need to see for yourself.
(*NOTE: Install details follow. If you want game impressions, skip down a few paragraphs.).
Luckily for everyone, it's currently in Open Beta 1 right now, and signing up is simply a matter of filling out a registration form. JavaScript must be available and enabled, but as this worked fine in Firefox, ActiveX is definitely *not* required, a welcome change from many other game betas.
The registration form does some minor checking that your e-mail address and chosen login pseudonym are valid (syntax wise, not active account wise) and that neither have been used before. There's also a 310mb client to download, and you may want to start this before the form if your connection isn't blazingly fast. Incidentaly, don't bother about the confirmation e-mail it claims to send: It's unneccessary, and won't actually show up no matter how long you wait.
In this age of paranoia due to the prevalance of malware seemingly everywhere, a test MMOG client seemed pretty damn suspicious to me at first, but both antivirus software and both ad-detection tools I threw at it, pre and post install, came up with complete and happy blanks. It doesn't even try to screw around with file extensions, another issue prevalent in poorly-programmed software, but a current game issue is that it *will* cause a minor software crash, localized to itself only, while patching the first time. This usually comes into play between 40% and 60% done on patching, but will not cause any issues beyond requiring a restart of the software.
Now you simply login with your chosen (and previously checked) account name and password, and character creation awaits. I won't yet pretend to understand what each starting class does differently, if anything at all as you choose your actual "job" at level 10, but a few guesses based on the class types yield your typical bases, including an overseas favorite, a Trader-type "class" called the Dealer. From here on you'll know as much as I do, so I abandon my role as supplementing the not-in-English manual.
On to the less boring shit: How I fared! (I said less boring, not the most interesting thing in the universe.)
My char select choices were pretty straightforward: Male, Old Guy's head, a mismatched body, randomly-chosen hair, and as for base "class"... whichever one seemed most likely to use a weapon for his or her entire life. I had the benefit of several people in IRC playing along with me, with Boog highest in level and ability and Tortolia more willing to answer my ten thousand stupidest questions. Thx la~_~.
Entering n00b Island, I quickly seized upon the nearest jellybean and started beating the shit out of it. Movement is click-based, attacking was so far a pure autoattack iniated by clicking multiple times to initiate a fight (can also be bound to different number of clicks, F-keys, etc), and the camera is quite possibly invented by Satan himself. The controls I figured out left very little room for manual control, as even though you could reposition the camera at any time via mouse or keyboard, movement will automatically cause it to follow you and create horribly annoying distractions. Begin "It's still in beta" chanting.
Leveling and looting were pretty clear-cut. Hit something, watch numbers pop out of each of you until one's dead, if it's the jellybean, see if an item appeared on the ground and if so click or use the F-key you bound to the "skill" Gather. Loot is locked so that a causal KSer or griefer can't steal drops, and I'll assume that it's based on majority damage dealing. Not perfect at all, and with experience being given almost entirely to the majority damage dealer, Killstealing is a fact of life you will encounter on probably your first fight and many thereafter. Population pressure doesn't help, but the respawn rate I found so far kept things adequate.
After beating up enough jellybeans and asorted critters, I found I'd looted an item. Only a mild intuition into Engrish is required to figure out what's a better or worse item than what you have equipped, or what consumable items heal. Inventory is split into 4 possibly-infinite sections: Equipment, Consumables, Misc. and Parts. Misc items are cash fodder, and presumably also used heavily in crafting given what I was offered for the items I found. Parts I would guess let you upgrade and/or create armor, weapons and other items, but that's still something I have yet to run into.
Adventuring on with my new, even more k-rad equipment, I got under the mistaken impression I would have to hit level 10 before leaving the island. Since it IS an open beta, the population is about as dense as the first five circles of Hell combined, and in any situation that can theoretically be used to grief, it will be. This is no exception. I found out later (level 8.5 to be precise) that I could actually have left the island, possibly at any point though there may be SOME restriction, and once I learned this I conned a floating Fairy near the respawn point into warping me to (the? a?) mainland. Finally, my reign of tyranny over jellybeans could expand!
Unfortunately, it only expanded to killing yet more jellybeans and other critters with only a size increase and slight name change from those on the newbie islands. I was also introduced to the obligatory player-built automats for vending items. From the Shout channel chatter, I'd guess that they can be used for both buying and selling items, with the owner servicing the machine when they can be buggered to and picking up any cash or sold items in the process. Maintenance or decay can't be very bad, as these were spread fairly to extremely liberally around anything looking like a city, along with a decent sprouting along roads between cities. Sorta like SWG or UO-type vendors, those being the only two games I've played with PC-built autovendors.
After having someone scream that "in mmorgs you share monsters" I took it upon myself to assist several players who were obviously in trouble fighting a monster because they couldn't outdamage me over the time it took to kill said monster. Sadly, this too also drew protests, leaving me no choice but to assume that monsters are only considered "shared" by people not actually fighting one, and once a player can see a monster, they consider they have sole rights to kill it.
In other games, that might be a less ludicrous albeit generalized point, but with a spawn rate that created such floods of monsters that there was at almost all times more monsters than players to kill them, I could only conclude there was no point in paying attention to protests in either direction, and now understand quite well why "killstealing" has to be a constant and indeed cherished activity.
Finally, I found a Carooe near MY slime spawn point, and after a bit of verbal abuse that was likely incomprehensible to any of the 30 other players in hearing range, we joined forces to create an unstoppable pre-emptive group, to ensure that by preemptively creating a wasteland we could not possibly be accused of improper behavior by any party. During these glorious days, I learned that I obtained stat points each level and could spend them to upgrade one of 7(?) stats, 4 having stereotypical RPG names while 3 had some of the best single-word Engrishness ever. I upgraded my Freedom, or was that Bravery? Or both Bravery and Courage together. This made me no more effective at killing slimes, so I upped the other stats that made more sense and was rewarded with increased damage and HP.
Still partied up, we headed towards the city we had been told on the Newbie Island and in constant, irrelevant-to-your-current-activity TIP messages popping up onscreen, was where we could pick a job and/or profession at Level 10 or higher. After a brief stopover to destroy flying evil Pumpkins, Big Pumpkins that were smaller than Pumpkins, and Elder Pumpkins that took no visible damage but died nonetheless, I was gifted a polearm from Carooe and had my very own larger-than-life weapon that somehow swung faster than my Short Sword. So it goes, it seems. Finally deciphering the map, my traveling companion bravely navigated barren bits of text and graphics to find us a workable path to the great City, and off we went with a route AND destination in mind.
After each zoning (relatively short time periods, fortunately) we got closer to our goal. Soon, what else would be in our view distance but.. a giant teddybear with a chef's knife rushing towards me. After gutting me, I had enough time to watch it wander off before respawning in the middle of Vendor Hell.
UO megamalls may have been impressive, with dozens and dozens of vendor and character names onscreen at once, but this city was practicaly paved with automated vendor booths. From the respawn point inside the city, there were more than I could even think of counting, much less even finding out what each held by its overhead name or accessible by clicking Inventory.
The rest of the town was no better, and as each group of 75 or more vendotrons blinked into existance, my system let out a graphical groan of slowdown death. With the camera now moving at half the speed of normal, and the minimap entirely coated with helpfully tooltip-named vendotrons, it took me 10 minutes of wandering to find a single NPC. Finding the *right* NPC, the one who could assign me a job (provided I had the correct stats for the job, I know not what stats are for which job), was getting ever more painful. At full speed, I could force the camera into at least allowing me to see over a 2d fence. Now, I was getting stuck against seemingly invisible objects at all times, and without keyboard movement (or movement I was aware of), getting around an obstacle became a difficult challenge.
The movement system didn't aid the camera much: Click-to-go has many advantages over keyboard movement, but almost all of the advantages depend heavily on being able to see a medium to long distance. In this town, and I suspect any other heavily populated town, all advantages were nulled out and the limitations of accidentally clicking on top of a fence your character cannot climb become very readily and painfully apparent.
With the camera actually sitting inside of hills giving me a perfect view up my character's pants (first thoughts: My underwear is white. Second thought: Oh thank god they didn't go for realistic rendering.) actually navigating caused me to become very motion sick very quickly. I readily admit that motion sickness is a weakness of mine, which I somehow acquired in a way startlingly like developing an allergy to Half-Life, but by this time I'd been playing for over two hours without even a hint of it and was feeling glad there was something I could do without resorting to my three cabinets of prescriptions. Alas, it was not to be, and about as I found the job teacher (at the normal, not the respawn, entrance to the city) the progressive system slowdown got to below single frame per second stage, and that was the end of my explorations today.
Shortly prior to writing this I did open up the prescription cupboard for one of my many nausea drugs, one adequately described as dramamine on steroids. I mention this to A. Note that I may have accidentally skipped crucial sections as my judgment is a bit impaired and B. To amend my "leave your drugs at home" statement at the beginning here to include "except for motion sickness pills, if you're inclined that way." Now go download the game and bask in the free, amusing, painfully-camerad yet oddly addictive little Japanese/Korean Engrish game with an acronym name that makes even less sense when you know what the letters stand for.
