Friday, August 10, 2007

QUESTION OF QUESTS


If anything, the most checked screen in PW when you are playing should be the quest log. A Role can have a maximum of 20 ongoing quests at any one time. I tend to maximize the amount of available quests. Meaning, I constantly check if there are any quests available by clicking the Find Quest button in the window.

I found out later in the game that this is a great way of not having to go back and forth between the towns and cities and getting two birds with one stone. As usually the quests require you to a)become a delivery guy/gofer/stevedore b)kill a certain number of creatures and/or b)find items within or on the corpses of those same monsters. Many a time have I had just killed 20 foul Soulless only to be told by another townie "Oh, you wouldn't have on the off-chance killed a few gigantic, poisonous, Enhanced HP scorpions out there have you? No? Oh, you have? You wouldn't have saved some of their stingers have you? Because I'd be willing to part with this Yuan and this ton of XP points if you could get me 20 of those, right? You okay? You look pale."

At this point, I wish I could attack NPCs--but noooo! You can't. Poor me, poor you. So it is a great idea, no, you should write this on a piece of paper and stick it near your monitor: Check for crossed quests.

The best source of crossed quests as I like to call them can be had by the Lone Wolf Quests that are given by the town guards. These are the quests that ask you to kill 20 monsters of so-so type and level in exchange for an immortal stone fragment. Not much on the XP but at least you get something extra for your effort. Also finding quests that involve other Soulless in the same area makes wholesale slaughter more profitable.

This is a good thing because even the high level players will tell you that the quests given to you always involve Soulless that are very near your current level. So the amount of effort is always equal, if not harder as you go higher. It doesn't get any easier after those plants and bugs you start out with.

But then again if you are the type of player who likes to spend hours bashing the same monsters again and again for an infinitesimal amount of XP, then be my guest. It's your time.

Tuesday, August 7, 2007

ImPerfect World

My luck with this game is that when I began playing it, I had a veteran MMORPG player by my side and literally and virtually holding my hand.

This is a boon because I now see the dilemma of those who do not have the background and the on-hand consultant when playing Perfect World. It can get confusing. Its because of the very, very bad translations. The game obviously came from China, because the English translation sucks. Bigtime. I'm sure the Mandarin is impeccable.

If it wasn't for the fantastic graphics, friendly gameplay, intriguing quests, the company, and the free play, I would really be pissed off with the language in the NPC (non-player character) dialogue. But I kept an open mind as I promised my friend when I began this game, and well I sorta expected the bad grammar and faulty spelling, thus I wasn't that shocked.

So more often than not, after reading the Quest story and the instructions, I had to stop, look out the window and exclaim..."What?"
But after a while I got used to the bad english and got on with my gaming life. It got so that I actually understood the Quests pretty well by the time I got to the third village.

But one had to go through reversed directions (East became West in the intructions of one of the quests) and almost ending up in the middle of nowhere (wrong coordinates for an NPC).

There are a lot of imperfections in the game. This is what disturbs me while I'm having all this fun. What if the reason I'm getting mugged by this little monster is because of a stray zero in its hit points counter? What if I am not getting any XP (experience) points for this? What if my name means "pwned" in the international server? What if?

But that's the beauty of an online game. It's online. So? So it can update and patch and fix itself everytime before you play. Eventually all the bugs will get ironed out in time and the game will only get better, and harder and tougher. That is the way of the online world. Everything will be patched. Just shut up and play.
 
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