Voyage Century
This is the first game review I’ve done in quite a while on the blog. The most recent one was the digital “toy” MyBrute. Today I’m going to talk about a free MMORPG called Voyage Century, which may be the best FMMO I’ve ever played. And I really like FMMOs.
The model is pretty basic. You have a character that represents yourself within the context of the game. This characer is the captain of a ship in mediteranean in the 16th century. You can be a merchant or a treasure hunter or a pirate or a privateer, and each of these classes is fundamentally different in how in they gain experience, behave in relation to their ships, and the types of activities they are uniquely suited for. Myself, I play a merchant.
The game is free-to-play, pay-for-awesome. By this, I mean it follows the Korean model of FMMO play in which you are allowed to play the game for free for as long as you like without any strange restrictions. However, if you want to, you can purchase skill advancements, pets, gear, or the materials required to make certain gear from their cash shop. I’ve never felt the need to buy any of these things.
Character creation is very simple. You select a body model from a group of four, two women and two men. None of them are minotaurs or elves or any such thing. You can change the face and hair of your chosen model, but nothing else. Attribute and skill advancement come through playing the game more than choices made a character creation.
Once you have entered the game, you can do a few quick quests (the first is to choose your job, which rewards you with some money and a weapon suitable to your job), buy some gear, provision and crew your ship and set off into the wild seas. Depending on what it is you’d like to do in the game, there are some skills you may want to train up first. For instance, if you’re going to be a pirate, you should probably brush up on some combat skills.
Now, I’d like to take a moment to talk about the idea of jobs in an MMO, something that this game has done incredibly well. One of the things that originally inspired me to play Mabinogi was the idea that I could specialize in a trade or a skill and advance through that rather than through the normal method of kill-everything-you-see. I expected that leveling through professions and part-time-jobs would be inherently slower than leveling through instances and grinding, but I expected that, should I wish to become a master tailor, I would not have to deal with instances or grinding at all. Sadly, in Mabinogi, this is simply not the case. Every profession involves resource gathering to some extent (even tailoring, which is what I went into the game wishing to do), which means you have to go out and get stuff from monster drops. For someone who wants to excell at a game in ways that don’t usually involve combat, this sucks.
In Voyage Century, if you want to be a trader, you can do that. Without combat. If you want to harvest resources, you can do that. If you want to sew, and then sell the things you’ve sewn, you can do that. And all of the materials can be bought in shops, meaning you can completely bypass combat if you’d like to. In the entire time I’ve been playing the game (about a week now) I’ve been involved in a total of three ship-to-ship combat scenarios. Pirates have attacked me, trying to steal my cargo. Each time, I’ve run away. Then I sell my cargo, make a fortune, and gain experience. It’s enough that I’m levelling. Slower than the pirates might, sure, but I’m getting better at my job, and I’m getting better at the game as I go about it. The game does not punish me for not wanting to be involved in combat very often.
The economy system is quite amazing, involving purchase of goods from one location and transport of those goods to the next location. The farther you travel, the more money you make for each item. I’ve been making regular runs from London to Reykjavik with insane financial success (the area has no pirates, very few players and the distance is enough to make beef sell for three times my buying price).
All in all, I’m loving the game and would heartilly suggest anyone who likes a good non-combat-focused MMO give it a try.
