62 hours and 130 Levels (on my main character) into Tree of Savior I can say that I'm probably enjoying the game a little too much by now. It combines some of my favourite elements from Ragnarok Online and - fuck you, I'm totally going there - Path of Exile.
You may strongly disagree with the latter, to which I say that you know nothing.
The part I'm comparing to PoE is, of course, character development. My main character is a mounted knight, who rides into battle with a nasty charge attack and impales baddies with his lance. He then proceeds to slam the impaled monster into other monsters (i.e. hitting a motherfucker with another motherfucker), while the victim remains attached to the lance. Then there's a quick weapon swap to dual one-handed weapons, chopping up the leftovers while the mount turns into a battle pet, dealing its share of the damage. I'll wait here while you name another MMO where you get to do all that on a single character.
And what an awesome mount it is! Also, someone's itchy, I think.
Tree of Savior calls these Mount/Battle Pet creatures companions. They gain levels and can be trained to tank for you or deal a lot of damage. And all of your characters get to share them. The other night I felt like trying a new character, so I rolled an archer and took my level 67 companion with him. I didn't really have to do anything, because my pet murdered all the bad guys for me. What's better, I can level up the archer to become a beastmaster of sorts, who makes the companion perform all sorts of special attacks, making him even more powerful. It's pretty amazing stuff, really.
And while I was already at it I decided to create a cleric. I don't usually play healers in MMOs, because I simply don't like (healing) people. But they're ridiculously fun to play in ToS. Casting the basic heal spell creates a bunch of magical healing fields on the ground. If you or a party member steps on them they'll restore your health. However, if a baddie steps on one, they'll deal massive amounts of damage. I've spent the rest of the day "healing" monsters until they exploded into tiny pieces. Which they literally do.
All your characters share a room and their pets.
I'm currently playing my Cleric like some sort of murder-tank, who wipes out entire dungeon floors with ground-targeted healing magic. I've added some lightning-flavoured elemental spells to the mix and I have yet to encounter a boss who survives for even ten seconds. Sure, it seems a bit broken and overpowered, but in a game, which is designed for people to gain some 450 or so levels, what's a few boss-oneshots in the mid 20s?
I'll slap a few paladin levels in there for good measure (they get to convert enemies into allies after all), as well as a dash of voodoo to summon hordes of zombies. That's a crazy, massive amount of fun abilities and skills and a really enjoyable play style. For comparison, Claire's cleric is aiming to become a shape-shifting druid in the long run, able to transform into any plant, beast or monster she chooses to become. Getting that perfect character does require a bit of planning ahead with a skill simulator, but it's not the huge pain in the ass a certain other game wants to be.
I love Path of Exile, but this is fucking stupid.
Playing multiple characters provides certain benefits on top of the shared companions. The relative strength of your characters will raise your team level, which results in passive bonuses. Completing collections hidden throughout the game provides stat-boosts, which are shared between all characters. There's also a shared stash, which lets you trade items between characters if you're a premium member. And at the time of this entry it's impossible to actually dump a few pennies into said premium membership, which sucks. Apparently, non-premium players also don't get to sell more than a single item on the marketplace (read: auction house) at a time, which sucks even harder.
Apart from that, I don't feel like I'm overly limited as a free player. I'd throw my money at them if they let me. According to the website, they're working on implementing payment options within the month. Let's just hope they won't go over the top. Because with games like Warframe and Path of Exile being perfectly enjoyable for free, ToS can't afford to rip people off.
The first MMORPG I've ever paid subscription fees for was the (somewhat) English beta of Ragnarok Online ("RO"), which would eventually become iRO. I've probably created my first ever PayPal account back then, just so I could play this game. That was before WoW or even Final Fantasy XI and you know what they say about your first love - they'll always have a special place in your heart and you'll never forget them. If you've never heard of Ragnarok Online, then you're a maggot and you don't deserve to read this blog. Basically (and I'm grossly simplifying here), the game played a little bit like certain 16bit RPGs such as Secret of Mana, but in a ridiculously massive MMO world with thousands of players everywhere. And since we didn't have fancy-shmancy broadband back then, everything was 2D sprites on 3D backgrounds.
My childhood kicks your childhood's ass. Fucking millenial!
Ragnarok Online eventually split into kRO, iRO and euRO, as well as a bunch of pirate servers, a version for the Philippines and probably a few more I can't even think of right now. Then came WoW and the already divided community thinned out some more and... well, fast-forward a few years past RO's release and suddenly there was a lot of talk about Ragnarok Online 2. Early footage looked a lot like a mix between RO and WoW - same game world, visual style and everything, but in third person 3D. And people got pretty hyped. Except the game didn't actually come out for roughly a decade.
Classes, gameplay mechanics, new races and tons of other stuff were created, removed, the entire game got scrapped and remade... by the time people actually got to play RO2, it ended up feeling like yet another cheap, awful WoW clone, completely devoid of Ragnarok's charm and soul. Failed attempts to create a more modern version of RO also spawned weird games such as ROSE Online, which was originally introduced as "Ragnarok Online Second Edition", only to be rebranded to "Rush On Seven Episodes".
It really wasn't all that great.
Today you can still play Ragnarok Online on Steam. Most of the RO2 servers were shut down, though the NA version refuses to die for some reason. Let's just say that anyone hoping for a worthy sequel has been massively disappointed and most of us have since moved on. And then Tree of Savior ("ToS") had its Free2Play launch a short while ago. It's a new MMO created by Kim Hakkyu, who also developed Ragnarok Online. Could this be the decent successor RO fans have been waiting for? Well... yes and no.
It sure looks like a modern RO!
RO had no quests to speak of, especially in the early days. You'd wander off into the world, literally kill thousands of monsters and level up that way. It was the ultimate grinder. There were no pointers, there was no real story, nothing to give you directions. If you wandered into the wrong area you'd get instagibbed by monsters, which were way out of your league. The only way to tell whether or not you could realistically defeat a baddie you've never encountered before was by attacking it, which would often result in your untimely death. Fun times.
ToS does no such thing. Instead, the game immediately gives you quests, highlights directions and leads you through a story with tons of (written) dialogue, cutscenes and boss fights. Fully exploring every area and talking to every NPC provided me with enough quests to conveniently level up and become strong enough for the next area. I never even had to buy any gear, because monsters usually drop all the stuff I need. In the 70 or so levels I've played as a swordsman, difficulty was nowhere near RO. I haven't died a single time and soloed absolutely everything, apart from one instanced dungeon, which provides you with a handy LFG tool. Cool stuff! Most dungeons in RO were impossibly difficult and had hilariously overpowered bosses, which were usually camped and farmed by powerful guilds, leaving no opportunity for casual players to defeat them and get their hands on their juicy loot. ToS seems to be on the other side of the spectrum, where absolutely everybody gets to be awesome. It's not a very difficult game so far.
Bosses get some beautiful artwork, though.
Character creation and growth in ToS is fairly similar to RO. Where RO had you starting off as a novice, who would eventually choose a basic newbie class, ToS has you choose from four noob classes (swordsman, archer, wizard, cleric). There's a tiny selection of haircuts per gender and no dyes, so 14 year old RO actually offered more options than ToS does in its current state. However, ToS shines when it comes to character development. My swordsman would eventually turn into a greatsword-wielding highlander until I upgraded him to a fierce barbarian. From there I'm gonna turn into knight of sorts, who gets to mount the battle pet I've adopted along the way. After that I'll focus on the corsair class and start dual-wielding. There's a total of 80 classes, which allow for some 200 combinations to make your character truly unique.
ToS also lets you distribute points into stats such as strength, intelligence or dexterity, so you get to decide how tough, smart or agile your character is. There doesn't seem to be any non-premium possibility to respec these points, so there's a realistic chance for fuck-ups. Same goes for class choices. Don't like the new class you've picked after several dozen hours of play? Well, too bad. Stick with it or roll a new character. Korean MMOs, yo.
Steve shall become my noble steed.
The one part where ToS absolutely fucks up (apart from stopping bots, goldsellers, killstealers and spammers, because again, Korean MMO) is the social aspect of the game. The strictly linear quest line, phasing, being able to solo absolutely everything reduces the need for cooperative play to almost zero. Sure, you can join grinding parties or sign up for the aforementioned instanced dungeons, but that's pretty much all there is to the multiplayer portion of this game. When my friends start playing ToS, I'll be miles and miles ahead and even if I weren't - why would they need me in a game where you can solo just about everything? Maybe stuff gets more difficult in the post level 70 areas, but I'm not getting my hopes up.
I won't lie. Other people are the main reason why I don't really play MMOs anymore. I don't want to depend on others, have my fun ruined by random assholes, have strangers constantly effect my gameplay experience. But I'm not sure ToS is doing it right. If you've ever played RO, then you'll know how fun it was to just sit outside Prontera, meet random strangers, have a chat or simply enjoy the cheesy music.
You had to be there.
Another unwelcome "feature" that makes its return is the lag. Granted, things never got as bad for me on ToS as they used to get on RO, but certain quests can become a huge pain in the ass to complete when there's a 1-2 second delay after every click. In one instance I had to activate four clickies within a short amount of time, which took me dozens of attempts, because there was a massive delay between clicking the item and my character actually using it. Another quest required me to dodge magic orbs, which caused me to instantly fail the quest if I touched one of them. I failed countless times, because the orbs were never really in the spot my screen displayed them at. Most of these problems can be fixed with a quick relog, but they're inconvenient all the same.
Production values are all over the place in ToS. Most of the music is in every was as fantastic as the tracks from RO (same composers and everything), but then you get tracks, which went through all levels of compression hell and literally snap, crackle and pop as a result. The character and monster sprites look fantastic and are really well-animated, but then you get graphical glitches, disappearing geometry, messy textures and visuals, which would have been outdated half a decade ago. The English ingame text isn't as bad as the game's awkward title suggests, but grammar and spelling is just as inconsistent as everything else in the game.
I'm pretty sure a human head is not supposed to spin this way.
ToS is the closest thing to a new RO we're gonna get anytime soon. Much more so than the abortion which is RO2. ToS gives you directions, tells you where to go and lets you grow and level up without constantly depending on the help of others. In doing so, it kills off the social aspect which made RO so fun back in the day. Sure, you could play with friends - but why would you?
On the other hand, you actually get to kill a bunch of bosses and you're no longer forced to sit around and watch while only the top guilds have all the fun. Everybody is powerful, everyone can be a hero - it's not as challenging as RO, at the cost of the sense of reward and achievement you may have felt on RO when you finally scored that MVP award or unlocked your final class.
Fortunately, ToS is free to play. There are some premium features, hairstyles, costumes, but nothing essential. I haven't spent anything to play this game and so far I haven't felt restricted in any way. And at a price of zero, what's there to lose, apart from a little bit of your time? And if you're curious, here's what the game looks like in motion:
