How to train your Dragon - A first look at Dragon's Prophet

The above video is based on the first ~2 hours of gameplay - read this entry if you want a little more detail.

Claire's family has picked up the rather unusual hobby of horsery and horse-related competition in some MMO targeted at little girls and the creeps who stalk them: Star Stables. I'm not even kidding. Her mother, grandmother, aunts, sister, everybody is racing horses on the internet now. To be fair, it is pretty amazing how online gaming can help the whole family stay in touch, allowing them to play and chat across three generations. Glorious, modern times, indeed.

The only kind of horse I care about comes with baked potatoes and steak sauce, but there's a different kind of animal, the feeding and care of which the bear and I have picked up: Dragons. According to the story of the game Dragon's Prophet (DP),  the noble elder dragons have created the entire world and everything in it, apparently for the sake of boning the shit out of everything. I might be paraphrasing a bit here, but the basic idea is that dragons have mixed with just about every kind of animal you can imagine, so you'll find wolf dragons and bird dragons and crocodile dragons and so forth. Most of them are friendly, they're all incredibly smart and powerful and you can force them to be your friend by sitting on them until you break their will and they stop trying to throw you off. The game refers to this process as taming. Uh-huh, sure.

Taming and training said dragons is what DP is all about. Every player, no matter what class and skills they have, gets to tame dragons. "Where's the fun in that?" you might ask, seeing as you're not really all that special if everyone around you has their own dragon. Well, the idea is to make your dragon unique, to teach him the perfect set of skills to match your needs and play style or, better yet, the perfect tag-team of dragons to help you through every situation. Picture it like creating your ultimate Pokémon team, an analogy I hate, because I find Pokémon utterly annoying and stupid, but the comparison is still valid.

You see, when I started the game, the good people at Infernum were nice enough to sponsor me Whisperwind, a cool-looking, scaly green dragon:

I take a shot of Vodka whenever I see a player, who named their dragon Toothless.

His primary attribute is strength and he comes with a whole lot of kickass melee abilities. And since I'm playing a melee character with a big sword and a heavy armor, I figured that Whisperwind would complement my character perfectly and that he'd become my 'main' dragon.

So I played for a while, ran a few generic errants for various NPCs until I came across my first dungeon and found a little rock drake thingie. I don't remember its exact name, but it's basically a mix between a peacock and a dragon, which came with a unique, rocky texture as opposed to his more colourful friends. So I sat on him until he agreed to like me, I had him fight by my side for a bit ANDHOLYSHITITSHOOTSLIGHTNINGANDFIREANDOMFGWOW!1

I looked at his stats and he was the exact opposite of Whisperind - a complete nerd! His primary stat was intelligence and he had a lot more ability slots than Whisperwind, who presumably excels at sports, guzzling beer and beating up smaller dragons for their lunch money. And he came with his own assortment of devastating spells, which quickly made him the strongest dragon in my humble collection. Oh yeah, you'll want at least two or three dragons to accompany you at any given time for various reasons:

- Dragons may get injured in battle or simply get exhausted and need a little break, so you'll want a tag-team partner to take over

- Some dragons might be excellent tanks and/or healers, but cannot fly or swim. Some dragons might be mediocre fighters but grant amazing buffs. Different situations require different dragons

- I've run out of bullet points and I think I was convincing enough, but the list looks better when I mention at least three things

Not all dragons sport wings or the ability to swim, but they may be really fast runners.

So now I had this tag-team of dragons, one of which used nothing but melee attacks, much like myself. The other one was a genius with devastating magic attacks. Sweet Jesus! But those dragons are much more than mere WoW-style hunter pets or, worse, Neverwintan companions. They're your tanks, your healers, your scale-clad army of one, when you can't be arsed to play with random strangers. Because who the fuck does that in MMOs anymore?

You see, the four classes in DP are damage dealers. Yes, one of them is called a guardian, but he doesn't get an innate taunting ability and there is no dedicated healer class, so he's pretty fucked without a properly skilled dragon. The ranger relies on bows and gunblades, there's a ninja-style oracle and some spellcasting fellow and that's about it. They're all pretty fast-paced and devastating, they can hold their own in a fight if they have to, but the moment you're surrounded or facing a boss, it's your dragon who runs the show. Dragons tank. Dragons hold off the enemy so you can get away and save your ass. Dragons fucking rule.

And they allow you to travel in style.

Dragons come with random skills, random amounts of skill slots and random attributes. You may tame a dragon, who comes with nothing but crafting passives, which help you gather more resources if you're into that sort of thing, but it also means they're useless in a fight. I ended up with such a dragon, a complete waste of space - except he knew how to heal. So I sent him and Mr. Nerd to training until the nerdy one had learned the healing spell from the newest addition to our lair - whom I've immediately released back into the wild when he was done teaching my other dragon. "We'll call you!" Yeah. We won't. His resume went into the shredder, he's not even in our system anymore. But our employee of the month took his healing magic. Hurray!

The amazing thing is that nerdy magic dragon turned into an amazing healer right off the bat! The moment my health drops to anything below 90%, he puts regenerative goodness on my character and battles have become infinitely easier. This dragon dishes out insane amounts of spell-based damage, tanks bosses for me and keeps me alive all at the same time. I don't have to give him orders, there's no need to set up an AI, the dragon just knows what to do! Considering how incredibly brain-dead and useless AI-companions in most other MMOs are, the dragons in DP are pretty damn impressive.

And when you fight bosses like this ugly fucker, you'll WANT someone else to tank!

In the long run, I may have to specialize one dragon in buffs and healing, another one in magic damage and have a third one to taunt and tank and they should excel at running, flying and swimming, respectively. Or maybe have three jacks of all trades and switch them in and out as they need breaks. I'm not entirely sure how much customization and fine-tuning will be requicked as difficulty increases towards the higher levels. The first 20 levels went by rather smoothly.

What's less fun is how tedious it can be to teach one dragon's skills to another dragon. As you send them to field training, your dragon might not learn any new skills at all or pick up a useless crafting ability you didn't want, forcing you to shell out some small amount of RL cash (or daily quest currency) in order to unlearn the unwanted new talent and have another training attempt. Patience (or endless amounts of money) is key.

What's great, though, is how you can put armors, saddles and other goodies on your dragons to make them stronger and sexier:

Shiny metal armlets and butt covers!! Whee!

DP has its flaws. The possibility to solo dungeons with your dragon (or team up with a loved one, like I do) is awesome. Nuking zombies with pumpkin bombs is hilarious. Fighting boars, bears, wolves, goblins, bandits and cultists is... meh. The game world is full of generic kill and fetch quests, generic creatures... in fact, dragons aside, the whole game world is dull and generic. I love the dragons, the taming, the training and everything that goes with it, but the world doesn't suck me in. To many of us, Azeroth is (or at least used to be) our "happy place". It's cartoony, sure, but it feels alive and immersive and there's a lot to see and to do. It's a charming, believable world. And I don't feel that when I play DP. No quirky, lovable characters or fantasy races, nothing to make me feel like it could be my virtual "home" of sorts. I don't enjoy Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn much and I'm glad I don't have to play it for work anymore, but Eorzea immediately drew me in. You can love or hate FF 14, but its amazing world is what draws over a million paying customers into the game right now.

DP? Not so much. It looks really nice and I'm sure I'll encounter some stunning, unique landmarks as I level up and explore, but those green fields and lush trees and lakes and mountains could be part of any game. Allods, Runes of Magic, any random Korea grinder - I've seen these exact same landscapes dozens of times, in dozens of games and I see nothing new, nothing that speaks to me, that stands out. This is probably not going to be a problem for most of you, unless you happen to MMO-hop like I do, but it makes me sad. I love the gameplay, I'm actually looking forward to taming and training more dragons tomorrow, but I'd be twice as excited if I could be fully immersed in the world. That said, my first impression is still really good and, some annoying technical (Nvidia-related) issues aside, I'm having a great time.

Water dragon or not - how am I not drowning?

-Cat