No need to panic! I somehow managed to break the previous stylesheet, and anyway thought it was time for a change. This new scheme is a little more olive than I’d like, but does have some nifty user-controls up top, letting you folks decide the layout of the site for yourselves!

On with the blogging:

Sword of the New World: Granado Espada

Another free-to-play title, presumably supported via item-shop purchases later on in life. It’s quite big, at 4.1GB, and I had to go to FilePlanet in the end to find it. Ptttht!

Against a backdrop of fierce national conflict, two explorers from the war-torn and foundering Opoluto embark on a dangerous expedition to circumnavigate the world and find new trade routes, free of foreign tariffs. Instead, Ferrucio Espada and Gilbert Granado discover an entirely new land; a New World. As the old rivalries, conflicts and diplomacies take their toll, Opoluto cedes to the nation of Vespanola, and the queen of this victorious nation seizes on an opportunity to turn the tide against her enemies. Under the new Reconquista Policy, adventurous Vespanolian families are granted great opportunity to conquer, tame and exploit this New World. You are one such family and start life aboard ship, headed for Granado Espada, the New World, to seek your fortune…

Three Good Things:

• Stylish:
  The game exudes a certain sense of style that I’d not seen in many other places, and definitely not in the Free To Play market. From the grandiose character select/creation screen, through the world design and music, to the character tailoring, the whole thing comes across as very lavish indeed. Very impressed with the overall look-and-feel, and level of polish, certainly in the newbie areas and starting towns I’d seen in my fortnight. I guess I’d developed a set of sneering low expectations from the F2P genre in general, but this title shows that it needn’t always be the case.
• Pacy:
  The nearest comparisons I was able to make for actual gameplay were Dungeon Siege meets Diablo meets Guild Wars, and playing through SotNW is almost entirely unlike the turgid trading of methodical wood-chopping sword-blows found in the majority of the existing fantasy MMO genre. Combat is hectic, fast and although most monsters die in one hit, the rate they come at you more than keeps you interested, making gameplay more about considered advances than hotkey timers. Characters do have hotkeys, but these seemed much less important than elsewhere. At last, default attacks that are worth a damn! You play as a squad of three characters, instead of one, making it almost a tactical RTS of sorts, which I found very refreshing in an MMO.
• Novel:
  The whole setting and time period also go a long way toward creating an MMO experience almost entirely unlike any other I’d tried to date. Set in a kind of parallel 1700s, with a parallel Spain colonising and conquering a kind of parallel South America, but with magic and monsters thrown in too, the world I found myself in was a real breath of fresh air. No quasi-Camelot (Stormwind, Qeynos, Altdorf, et al.) here; instead the towns and cities are passable imaginings of stately colonial Spanish styles, with a level of technology to match. Probably not ‘steampunk’ per se (which is a very abused term anyway), but a far cry from The Usual. This extends to the characters too, and the class list features Musketeers and Scouts, as well as the Wizards and Elementalists. It all fits and seems to make for an extremely unique and well thought out game world.

Three Bad Things:

• Family:
  The game is played with an interchangeable team of three family members, meaning that you aren’t really playing as ‘you’, but a squad instead. This differs from Guild Wars in that there, you at least have one key person that is meant to be you, and the rest are hirelings. SotNW places equal emphasis on all of the 15 or so characters you can initially create, each of whom have to be levelled up separately, divorcing the player from the avatars a bit. The level of customisation available to these characters is shockingly bereft also, with each class being available in a single male or female version, all with one set face, hairstyle and outfit, making them hard to identify with particularly, and relegating them to functional game pieces far more than in other MMOs. I expect roleplaying is possible, but difficult when the other team of three that you are chatting to look identical to you.
• Classes:
  While the MCC (Multi Character Control) system is indeed novel and well-implemented, the freedom it offers you seems mostly the freedom to get it wrong, and a bit of dabbling with different party makeups soon showed that the Holy Trinity is alive and well, only here, you have to be all three yourself! A team of three melee characters (Fighter, Scout with Dagger, UPC Soldier Bloke) got driven out of the first zone because they couldn’t do anything at all about flying mobs. A team of three ranged (Musketeer, Wizard, Elementalist) did fairly well, but kept wiping when attacked by larger groups simply because they were too squishy. The winning team seems to be precisely: Fighter (Melee combat, high armour and ‘provoke’ AoE Taunt), Scout (Unarmed, they act as healer), plus a Musketeer/Wizard/Elementalist (Just anyone who can do damage, and hit flying things – DPS). This was all very well and extremely familiar, but somewhat disappointing given how innovative everything else seemed, and much of the team selection options seemed like red herrings. Perhaps as a member of a larger squad (multiple players/families), different people could experiment more with the more obscure roles; Scout as Melee DPS, Wizard as Debuffer, and so on, but solo, the lack of workable options seemed a shame.
• AFK Play:
  I mocked this a lot on the podcast but yes, I did manage to level my team up from 13 to 15 each, while taking a bath, by the simple expedient of pressing the space bar (Defend Mode) and walking away from the PC. I didn’t spend any time at all working out a special place to do this and it seems more a function of the general game design, than any particular exploit. Perhaps this was just the early zones being easy on me, and that further in, things get a lot more fraught, and the various hotkey special attacks become necessary; no idea. I’d think that this was intentional and a way to compensate for being unable to pause the game, as you can do in similar sorts of single-player game, but the in-game help (which is well done itself) seems to suggest that botting is a no-no. It seems like botting is actually quite unnecessary in this game, when mashing space will do. Actually making progress through the various zones still seems to require a hands-on approach though, mostly due to the insane crazy spawn rate the thing has by design.

The whole thing was quite a change from the sort of MMO I’m used to, and I found myself really quite charmed by its novel world and fresh basic gameplay. As ever, I have no idea about the Long Term in these games, and perhaps the relentless monster-mashing will get stale eventually, but I definitely caught a whiff of that certain indefinable something that makes Diablo II so unaccountably popular; a rare moment in an MMO where I was enjoying the moment-to-moment gameplay instead of putting up with the basic gameplay in order to get somewhere else or unlock something else. Slaughtering my way through the early zones was fun in and of itself.

Final Verdict: Well worth two weeks of any MMO gamer’s time, simply to see a different kind of world and a different kind of gameplay.

Personally, I think this one is a keeper, and I look forward to playing it in a bit more depth and properly, when time allows, as it seems to fit the ‘Fifteen minutes, what shall I play?’ category that I don’t have a lot to fill with at present.

Next up is one that I’ve decided to pick for myself, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes; one of those core MMOs that I just missed entirely, but feel I ought to have played…

Saturday is the West Dean Chili Fiesta, which we’ll be podcasting from. If you are going and want to meet us and be on the podcast, the best bet is probably to coordinate via Twitter Direct Messages to @jonshute as the Cohost tends to start violently trembling if he is more than fifteen feet away from the Internet, and I’m a luddite without one of those fancy iPhones!