The Chronicles of Spellborn

Everybody is asking for something different and Spellborn seems to be that game but nobody is talking about it. 10 Days away and probaly going to be the best MMO to come out this year. This is taken from an article from EuroGamer.

There's a fatalistic sense of Daniel and the lion about what Spellborn International is set to do. World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King to one side, Warhammer Online to the other, and a compelling line-up of single-player games flooding the shops, and The Chronicles of Spellborn is out on 27th November. Actually, it's like watching those YouTube videos where a curious mouse runs around a glass tank, but you know there's a tarantula in that hollow log.

Perhaps not. If Chronicles of Spellborn were another WOW clone, we'd have no illusions about its imminent crushing, but it's not. Let's consider some of the headlines. The first thing that strikes you is right on the character-creation screen - where, unusually, you get to select your armour and weapons from a pretty broad range of options. Unusually, you can pick from the same pools of armour and weapons no matter which class archetype you select - Rogue, Warrior or Mage.

This is because armour and weapons don't have statistics associated with them. They're entirely cosmetic - and while you gain access to elaborate and attractive items as you progress, the choice of armour to use rests entirely with your fashion sense. Instead, equipment has slots for Sigils (at present, only weapons and jewelry have these slots, but this will be extended to armour as well), add-ons that affect your character's statistics. These Sigils can be equipped to an item, and easily moved to another if you want to change your look.

Another unusual aspect is the stats involved. Spellborn is missing an entire class of standard MMORPG statistics - specifically, anything to do with hit or dodge ratings. The game's dispensed with behind-the-scenes dice rolls entirely. Taking its cue from action games, it lets players and NPCs alike properly target their attacks instead. If you want to hit an enemy, you need to be targeting him properly; if you want to dodge an attack, you just dive out of the way. It turns combat into a fast-paced and exciting affair, where you need to keep moving around to avoid enemy attacks while positioning yourself to pummel foes. Many attacks (especially on the Rogue archetype, and its three sub-classes) are more powerful delivered to the back, so you spend a lot of time trying to get behind your enemies.

Where this really comes into its own is in the game's assortment of buffs and debuffs. Many attacks deliver an associated debuff - and many of those debuffs affect an enemy's movement speed, which prevents them from dodging or avoiding rear attacks quite so effectively. In player-versus-player combat this becomes crucial, since a target who's unable to move as fast as you is essentially a sitting duck.

The buff and debuff system has also allowed Spellborn to innovate in other ways. For a start, there's the game's atypical approach to healing. While one class does have a direct healing spell, every single class has access to healing of some kind - and it's often by means of a buff or debuff, such as one applied to an enemy which heals the attacker with each successful blow. The result is that groups don't necessarily need a "priest" class in their mix, as long as everyone knows what they're doing with the healing powers available to them. It's another factor that contributes to the pace, with most healing dependent on staying in the thick of battle.

It's also worth mentioning the game's AI. After a few hours of play you notice that Spellborn's foes don't behave like anything else you've seen in an MMORPG. For a start, they dodge and weave to avoid your attacks, which is understandable given the game's decision not to have any dice-roll based avoidance. And there are other, subtler things going on here too. We noticed this first when a wolf started running away even though we'd only hit it a couple of times. Suspecting a bug, we ran after it. We blundered through a bush after the wolf - only to discover ourselves surrounded by four more wolves, to whom the original target had deliberately led us. Clever girl.

Human targets are more intelligent still. They normally come in a group of varied classes - a mage with a handful of melee types, typically - and they adapt intelligently to your strategies as well as to the make-up of your own party. If you stand back and fling arrows and ranged attacks, the melee classes stand in front of the caster to shield him while he returns the favour. Charge in, and they deliberately target your own caster classes to reduce your group's damage output. Leading you away from whatever or whoever they're protecting, and towards more groups of enemies, is also on the cards.

To any fan of an action game, this won't sound revolutionary, but it's an eye-opener in an MMORPG. We've come to expect enemies to behave like demons in the original Doom - they run at you in a straight line and attack, occasionally firing off a special move. Enemies who circle around, try to move the battle to a more advantageous area or physically block your ranged attacks on their allies require a different level of situational awareness.

The final innovation is the Skill Deck. This is the beating heart of Spellborn's combat system, and after several hours, we're unsure whether it's a stroke of absolute genius or madness. It's a skill bar, much as you've seen in every other MMORPG, but it rotates. When you fire off a skill, the bar turns around and reveals the next set of skills to you, and continues doing so until it loops back to the first tier. As a result, the game becomes a delicate exercise in filling out the skills on these tiers so that you align their various abilities. If you want an attack to take advantage of a debuff, the debuff needs to be on a higher tier. Attacks which start a combo need to come before the other parts of the combo... Woe betide you if you manage to fill a tier entirely with skills that are on a cool-down when you rotate around to that face of the cylinder, because you'll stand around like a lemon while you wait for one of them to become available.
 

It actually sounds quite simple when we put it in those terms. It's not. Within a few levels, you've picked up a handful of skills and abilities, and the number of Skill Deck tiers available to you has expanded greatly, leaving you with a lot of juggling, experimentation, and trial-and-error to go through to get your Deck working just so. It's a bizarre kind of customisation, but an extremely interesting one - not least because we don't get the impression there'll be a single "best solution" that everyone copies from a Wiki site within a fortnight. Everyone's Skill Deck will be personalised and filled with combo chains that make sense.

Let's pull back for a moment and look at some of the more superficial stuff. Spellborn is promising to be a heavily quest-oriented game, with grinding really not on the menu - you level up through "Fame" rather than experience points, and Fame comes from completing quests, not killing wolves where nobody can see you. It also promises a hefty dose of PVP, with every zone outside of the starting area being a PVP free-for-all at present. Later, the team is thinking of creating factional PVP based on your alignment to the five Great Houses of Spellborn's world, but it's not likely to happen for launch.

Graphics are mixed. Comments from the developer suggest the engine and the artwork has evolved rapidly in recent months, with entire zones overhauled on a regular basis, and it shows. Some zones are beautiful, with soft lighting and few hard lines in evidence - reminiscent of the art style of Fable more than anything else. We expect (with some measure of optimism, but the pace of improvement really is stunning) all the zones to be up to that standard by launch. We're less excited about the character designs. Character art in the game is exaggerated and cartoony, which is fine, but it's also very low-polygon and rough around the edges compared to the environments themselves. It's a shame, because the first encounter most people have with a game's visuals is the character-creation screen. Throwing a few more polygons (and a lot more options) at the characters would make a big difference here.

Perhaps in recognition of the lion's den that it's walking into this November, the Spellborn team has also come up with a good way of getting the game in front of players: the first section will be entirely free to play. You can create a character, run around and take part in quests and so on, but if you're still enjoying it and want to explore, you'll need to pay a subscription fee. It's a clever approach. Few people are going to walk into a shop looking for Warhammer and walk out with Spellborn instead, but plenty of us will download a game and try out the starting zone for free. If Spellborn's impressive catalogue of innovations pulls together into a compelling experience, we can see this as a cult hit in the making. There's plenty of work still to do, but we'll let you know how things are looking at launch.

TCOS was a game I was really hyped about for a while and then I found Aion and the hype just kinda faded away..I'll probably still try it tho.

This game has peeked my interest. I wasn't paying much attention to it hoping other game would be good but now that I am more interested in games that are different in what ever way, then I give tCoS a whirl.

I find many of the Asian games are getting better then the used to be.

Its not surprising noone talks about the game it has no hype, barely any advertisment, its 10 days away from release and there has been very little news about it on their main site which in reality the majority of their community goes.

Its nice a game for once is not being over hyped but they have been releasing barely any information about the game when it is so close to release. To be honest if it was not for the free trial area they plan to have at launch, which means no open beta, then I probably would not even give this game a chance because despite how different the game sounds and looks I am getting fed up of wasting money to see if a game is any good.

Theres quite alot about spellborn that is questionable, for instance they do not seem to have a clear idea of whether they are a PvE game or a PvP game, you can not be both they just do not mix.

They do not have any death penalty, you can only level through quests, they have mentioned they will have alot of instancing even though they say it is just for the starting zones and dungeons thats still a point that many do not like.

They plan to focus on small group and solo gameplay, which initself is okay but there is a large risk that this will mean the game will feel like a single player have noone talking, and generally will make most wonder why they are paying to play it.

It is very obvious from interviews and previews of the game that they will release with limited content and plan to grow on it from there, that is not a bad idea, but theres a good chance that the majority that pick it up will complete all the content and just get bored and leave never to look back. It has happened to so many mmos I would not be surprised if it happened to spellborn.

I will still try the game since I am not risking anything playing the trial, but it is quite obvious why there is no hype for this game. Spellborn will really have to rely on word of mouth to be a success, because there is a lot about it that put people off instantly.

I dont think anyone has a right to complain about WoW clones or lack of originality though if they do not atleast try the games free trial. Lack of focus of items, skill based combat, potentially great ai, hybrid classes, and so on is about as different as you can get and it is atleast a step in the right direction ie risking being different.

I'm interested in seeing how the skill deck works. Sounds like it could be fun. But the aspect lacking from recent MMOs for me is immersion. The way you can walk the entire world of WoW. Tabula Rasa and WAR both seemed like a series of maps to me rather than an immersive world. Neither had decent crafting either. If TCoS delivers in these areas then I'll give it a go. Don't like the sound of a lot of instancing though.

The buff and debuff system has also allowed Spellborn to innovate in other ways. For a start, there's the game's atypical approach to healing. While one class does have a direct healing spell, every single class has access to healing of some kind - and it's often by means of a buff or debuff, such as one applied to an enemy which heals the attacker with each successful blow. The result is that groups don't necessarily need a "priest" class in their mix, as long as everyone knows what they're doing with the healing powers available to them. It's another factor that contributes to the pace, with most healing dependent on staying in the thick of battle.

that paragraph alone increased my hype tenfold. sounds like guildwars and aoc in some ways, but no healer class with all classes acess to healing is what I have been waiting for. I don't much like the art style but i'm also waiting for a twitch mmo and this might be the one ;)

reckon i'll be playing this until swtor or global agenda.

I hope they do introduce some faction/team based pvp alwell as FFA. FFA  on its own gets boring fast.

PS: I was kind of looking forward to this game coming out a year ago (albiet less than aoc), hope it actually comes out.

Originally posted by Consensus

The buff and debuff system has also allowed Spellborn to innovate in other ways. For a start, there's the game's atypical approach to healing. While one class does have a direct healing spell, every single class has access to healing of some kind - and it's often by means of a buff or debuff, such as one applied to an enemy which heals the attacker with each successful blow. The result is that groups don't necessarily need a "priest" class in their mix, as long as everyone knows what they're doing with the healing powers available to them. It's another factor that contributes to the pace, with most healing dependent on staying in the thick of battle.

 

that paragraph alone increased my hype tenfold. sounds like guildwars and aoc in some ways, but no healer class with all classes acess to healing is what I have been waiting for. I don't much like the art style but i'm also waiting for a twitch mmo and this might be the one ;)

reckon i'll be playing this until swtor or global agenda.

I like that too. I would like to try out this game mechanic and see if it's as fun as it sounds, and also if this succeeds in encouraging grouping, and what the grouping xp is like.

The character customization sounds cool as well. You pick what you want to wear, and the stats you gain later in gear can be transferred to whatever you are wearing, which means everyone isn't wearing the same gear, because it's the best at that level. You might all have similar stats, but you can look different.

However, I don't really get the horse legs look on some of the characters. What's that all about?