Early saturday morning, the company where I worked at had a meet so that we can have a hand trying out a game. The company was promoting Granado Espada, a MMORPG for use in creative education. The game was mentioned non violent and promoted teamwork.
I met Liling and Mus, a Multimedia Educator for River Valley Primary and together, we tried to get ourselves used to the game.
When you start, there are a number of characters that you can choose from. Among them, I chose a wizard, a fighter and an elementalist. You could play all three characters simultaneously in the game.
You’ll start in a tutorial area where you learn to get used to the interface. After your basic tutorial, you’d be required to do some tasks from the non-player-characters to gain more experience and items.
One of the initial task that I had to do was to deliver lunch for the Queen’s guard. That quest was pretty easy to do. But like all RPG games, the more you complete a quest, the harder the quests that you will be given in time.
Some of the nice things about the game is that it had really nice looking graphics. I like how detailed the characters looked like. And how absolutely lush the environment was. Plus the background music was really nice to listen to as you explore and fight your enemies.
Interestingly, the game reminded me of Ragnarok, another MMORPG that I used to play. It was similar as the range of characters are comparative. The type of monsters in the environment was similar too. The main difference was that Ragnarok was more 2D and that the characters were more cute.
Here I am in Ragnarok. I was a girl magician with a cute little bow in my head fighting with my assasin friend. It was fun to play but I stopped playing after a while when the game started to be subscription based.
To be honest, I am not much of a gamer. Games like these can get quite stressful when I’m required to do a quest and especially when my characters are fighting and nearly dying.
But at the same time RPG’s can get rather mundane after a while and I can get quite bored of the monotony of killing things after a while.
I’m sure that RPG’s are great. Apart from the gameplay, I’ve seen some spectacular machinimas that are created through these type of games.
The sad thing is that games like these can be quite an addiction as one can really get immersed in it. I find myself saying, “I’ll stop when I get to level 13” or “I’ll stop when I finish this quest” and before you know it, you’ve spent quite an amount of time on the game.
That’s why I’m up at this time. Its 3.10 am right now at this point of writing. I should have been in bed hours ago.
Is Diablo2 a MMORPG game? haha if it is, then yes i’ve played one before. I used to be up from morning till night fall just playing the game, completing quest after quest, in a bid to increase my experience points and this gain levels and better equipment hohoho~
I played Dark Age of Camelot a couple of years back. This MMORPG was unique because it featured a realm vs realm rather than simple player vs player gameplay. This creates a sense of belonging to a certain faction with a common goal of attacking and defending the other two realms (it’s a 3 realms battle). In a way, you can have guilds within the realm that hate each other’s guts, but still work together to accomplish the greater goal – that mirrors real life.
I tried Granado Espada but got bored very quickly. I think technical aspect wise (graphics, music, etc) , it has reached the normal standard for an international game, which is admirable, in the sense that most Asian games need to improve in this area.
I’m not sure if GE promotes team work because you start off with a team of 3 and you don’t really have to team up in the beginning. MMORPGs that focus on team work would allow players to focus on one charater, but at the same time, rewards players to form teams, eg. more experience, epic quests that only teams can successfully complete, and most fun of all, competition among other players, where people need to team up to battle with other teams.
I know why Granado Espada reminds you of Ragnarok.
They were both created by the same man, South Korean designer Kim Hakkyu.
Faddy
Diablo 2 is a MMORPG game if only you hook it up to the internet so that you can play with other people in the network. It cant have the “Massively Multiplayer” if you’re on a stand alone computer 🙂 Hehehe.
I remember when I first played Diablo 2 (and Diablo) – Yeah I know what you mean, I hated the feeling of not being able to stop till the next quest or the next level is over.
Stan
Hi, thanks for dropping in my blog 🙂 No, I’ve never played Dark Ages of Camelot before. That sounds interesting, I’ll try to find more information about it. (Wikipedia and Google are wonderful, arent they? Hehehe)
Now that you’ve mentioned it, I’m not sure about teamwork in GE either as so far, I dont really see the need for me to team up with other users as my party seems more than competent enough to handle the quests that we are given.
But of course, I just started playing it, so I still have some learning curve to pass over. There are some functions that I am not sure of – I was told that we can create a hug chain in GE. I wonder how they did that.
NineMoons
Ooh thanks for the information NineMoons! You have to admit that the characters and monsters do look similar to each other, even though one is cutified and the other is eurofied(?)
And thanks for dropping in my blog! Hehehe 🙂