Fasaria World-First Impression

Emeraq

This is a game made using the Realm Crafter MMORPG creation Engine. I tried the game out so I could show some support to the RC and game making community.

The original one time price of 39.95 (no monthly fees) was much to steep for the quality of the game and the price has since dropped to 9.95 and for that amount I figured I could justify giving up one lunch or dinner, depending on where you decide to eat, to try this game out.

My first impressions are that this is a good first attempt at a 3D graphical MMORPG, but for me it fails to deliver for numerous reasons.

Graphics: First and foremost  the character graphics and animations are quite aged and in my opinion very ugly. The walking, running and combat animations are very stiff and poor at best. My combat animation with a small dagger was a two handed downward hammeresque motion. IMHO Two handed animations shouldn't be applied to single handed weapons such as a dagger, the animation really should be more of a singlehanded stabbing or lunging motion.

With that said, the battle meditation animation is very well done,and by far the best animation that I experienced, it's a shame the other animations couldn't have been as nice.

Character Experience Systems: I'm really not sure what to call these, as I didn't find that two of them were very well explained  . But you level various systems such as Combat experience, Karma experience, and Labor experience. The labor experience relates to harvesting; what I gathered from this (hehe gathered) is that as you harvest you gain labor points and as you level your labor skill up your harvesting action reaps larger quantities. I'm unclear on what leveling combat experience and karma experience does at this time as they seemed to have a really high experience requirement.. Combat Experience doesn't appear to have leveled once for me as I'm 974/3000 but yet my combat level is already four and I believe that my starting combat experience was 0 of 3000. Likewise my karma is level 1 and my karma experience is 13/1000... I could have very well missed the explanation on these, and if I did it was likely that the conversation wasn't that memorable and really was too vague to recall.

 

Controls: In order to change your keymapping you have to do so before logging into the game with a character, there's no option to change it or any other setting once in game. As for the in game controls, they are very clunky, and I don't know if this is just the RC engine or the programming. But targetting, whether it be for movement, or targetting NPC's/creatures can be very difficult. There were numerous occassions when walking between buildings or walls, while using the point and click to move that the game thought I was clicking on the building or wall when I clearly wasn't.

Targetting NPC's and creatures was often frustrating as the Tab key didn't register half the time,and often times when it did, it tabbed through creatures that I was nowhere near.

Zones and Questing: What I experienced of the zones and quests was that they are both very limiting, and don't offer a broad experience at all.

 The quests within the zones consist of speaking to NPC's to learn the games lore, the importance of harvesting and crafting, and various numbers of kill X number of critter quests. (I even saw several kill 100 of X critters, YIKES!)

The Zone maps are also very limiting. It has no feel of a wide open world at all. It doesn't claim to be a seamless world but the zones don't even hint at a possible wide world  to explore.There are invisible walls plastered all around the zones, yes most games have them on hills/mountains and such, but the walls in Fasaria were always several yards away from said hills/mountains.

Combat within the zones, that I've experienced thus far, also seems limiting, as there are no creatures to kill outside of town in the explorable area. No siree! that explorable area is a safe area! And that safe area is where I got all of my Lore "run here, talk to him, then run back to get your reward and also to pick up your next quest" quests, because for those lore quests God forbid you pick up more than one at a time.. Yep you read right, you can only have the one lore quest at a time, the Quest Pixie  just won't talk to you again until you run and complete the current lore quest first.

With that said,that explorable safe zone had three instances, two were replicas of the safe zone with creatures of varying difficulty, and one was a dungeon, all three zones were instanced, but other players could join your instance (I only saw one other character in a couple of nights of gaming)  These instances were staggered by difficulty too, the first shimmering instance gave you beginner type mobs, and those mobs within the zone were also staggered, IE this block of the zone had level 1 non-aggressive deer, the next block of the zone had level 2 aggressive boars, the next block a higher leveled wolf, etc etc etc. With that said, the third instance I mistakenly went into showed that mobs were level 1 but they whooped my ass in a couple of hits. I'm curious if critter levels have a similar problem as the stacking problem I'll mention that later.

The questing and combat in this game is a big problem, as both areas, to most gamers, account for at least 75% of the gaming experience, and as poorly done as it is here, it's easy to see why the server is dead each time I login.

Leveling up: There's a huge mistake in the programming when assigning attributes after leveling up,if you choose the option to view the next page to see other potential skills to assign attribute points to, you can't get back to the previous page. Soooo, if you discover you really don't want to assign skill points there you can't go back, you have to choose the "leave" option and after doing that you can't go back in and assign those points until your next level up... I looked high and low through all of the menu's and the option just wasn't anywhere to be found.

Crafting: Crafting and harvesting is a joke. You have to kill creatures to earn harvesting attempts. I'm not sure what the equation is but it seemed to be 1 to 1, IE  if you kill 100 creatures you get 100 harvesting attempts..Okay that's fine it's their game they can do what they like! My issue is that the actual method of harvesting and crafting is archaic... You speak with an NPC to harvest and craft.You don't need any equipment to harvest, no mortar and steel, no bottles to make potions, no tongs for pulling ingots out of the fire.. Hell there's no furnace, no anvils, no alchemy table to give any semblance or RP value to crafting.. You don't interract with the stone you are mining, or the plant you are picking, nope you just speak to the NPC assigned to that harvesting or crafting point and as long as you have the either the necessary harvest points available or the materials required for crafting you can harvest or craft via text dialogue.

Persistent Worlds in NwN have better game systems than this!!! Of course you can't charge money for an NwN PW.

 Items and Stacking: Many of the items that drop from critters, or harvested stack. But the problem is that after you hit 99 that stack starts all over back at 1.. So depending on how much you gather, and pay attention to what you are gathering that 1 really could be 1, or it could be 301.

Skill Refresh: The attack skills and Meditation skills supposedly are refreshed after the icon near your HP/MANA stat box disappears, but even this is inconsistent. Many times I would attempt to use a skill after the icon was gone but still got the message that the ability hasn't refreshed. And on the other side of the pillow, I could often times use the ability again while the icon was still up next to my HP/Mana stat box.

I know that I'm still missing some of the things the game has to offer, IE Mounts and property but those two things alone can't solve this games problems.

Harsh words?, Maybe, but you have to give them credit at least they created an MMORPG, most of us just dream about it.

Will I keep playing this game, probably, as they have promised changes to the game in the future (on the Realm Crafter forums). Besides if we don't support independent game makers products, who will.