This is an Ongoing Work. I will expand it and put in more details.

At first I was planning to write a good review about this game (and it totally deserves it! if only something very bad didn't happen). An Impression will have to do for now.

For some who do not know, Allods Online is a new MMORPG, developed by Russian company Astrum Nival, and for North America version (Europe as well) hosted by Gpotato (Gala-net). The game is Free to Play (F2P), meaning you don't have to buy the game to make an account, and you don't have to pay the monthly subscription fee. However, you can buy ‘extra’ stuff through Item Mall or Cash Shop (will be referred to as CS Item) with real cash to enhance your gameplay. The popular CS Items among F2P games as follow; are items which grant you Statistic Bonus for a period of time, items which grant you to gain more Experience Point for a period of time, items which remove Debuffs from your character, items which make your character move/travel faster (Mount), items which make your character’s appearance cooler, items which increase chance of success of action performed by your character, and so on. Comparing the prices, generally players don’t spend more than $15/month on F2P ($15 as the standard price for monthly subscription fee) though many hardcore players do exceed the number.

However, Allods has gone too much further than that.

First, the Character Inventory Bag. Players start with a normal bag that has 18 slots, able to contain 18 stacks of different items. There’s a CS Item, a bag, with 24 slots, selling for $20. Even though you can also obtain this bag from in-game by doing a long and hard, and boring, and frustrating quest (I already finished it) it still is outrageous. 20 dollars is more expansive than a month worth of Pay 2 Play MMORPG. The bag’s price (NA server) is also 10 times that of the bag’s price on Russian server.

Still, you don’t necessary need a bigger bag to play a game, do you? It just makes your gaming experience more enjoyable. (Well, that is very important though.) Anyway, let’s move on.

Second, is the Fear of Death debuff. For those who don’t know, starting at level 15, whenever your character dies, you will have this FoD debuff after your character respawn. The debuff makes your character much weaker for a period of time. Its duration increases greatly as your character’s level goes up, though. As of this moment, a level 40 character will suffer 40 minute of FoD debuff. During which time, it is impossible to participate in Raid, PvP, or Dungeon at all. However, the Russian developer has just released a new patch, that would increase the duration of the debuff, so that a level 40 would suffer it for 2 hours instead. And logout doesn’t help either. The only way to remove the debuff, is to pay (CS Item; Perfume), obviously. Also, the patch has changes so that a character resurrected by another player will also suffer from the same debuff, making players (Priest, Summoner, i.e.) don’t want to learn Resurrection skill. Can you imagine how many times your character usually get killed in other games, while doing Raid, PvP, or Dungeons? If nothing changes soon, you are going to go Away From Keyboard for 2 hours every time death occurs.

http://allods.gpotato.com/news/2010/02/19/reflecting-on-the-allods-open-...

Gpotato had addressed the community, regarding the overpriced Cash Shop items: "Over the next several weeks we will continue to evaluate the details of our item shop and we will begin to introduce new items to help assist you throughout your Allods experience. We wanted to make clear that beyond the introduction of the item shop nothing has changed in Allods that wouldn’t allow you to enjoy the game just as much as you did during closed beta. You can still enjoy the entire game without ever having to spend a single cent. Additionally, many of the items available in the item shop are tradable in-game, appear through a number of quests, and can be auctioned off by other players."

They have clearly said that they would evaluate, not would fix, the pricing of the Cash Shop. So that means they have planned to make the CS Items overpriced from the beginning, and now they just try to figure why it doesn't work as planned. Gpotato also has said that one can still enjoy the entire game without spending any cash at all. Makes you wonder if the PR Person, or the Lead Community Manager or whoever addressing the community knows the upcoming changes from Russian version or not, or if they consider being stuck with a FoD Debuff for 2 hours every death at end-game, among other things, is enjoyable.

http://allods.gpotato.com/news/2010/02/22/developer-rumors-and-item-shop...

Gpotato had again addressed the community; "We want to make clear that this is something we are not taking lightly. We are not sitting and waiting just to see how many dollars we’re going to make over the next four weeks. It is very clear to us that players are already disgruntled with the situation and we are actively working on new pricing options to accommodate the masses. However, we ask the Allods community to please be patient with the situation! Adjustments like this cannot happen overnight."

Now, is it only just me who think that they are doing just that; sitting and waiting to see how many dollars they are going to make over the next four weeks? Remember, they said they would re-evaluate the pricing, and look for more options. They have not promised they will lower the price. In fact, the Cash Shop is still open and available. They are HOPING some people would buy their current overpriced items, otherwise they would have temporary closed it already.

There are more examples of this over pricing cash shop issue, and I will write more about it later.

Heroes don't change weapons or armors. That's right. Superman will always wear his underwear outside, and Spiderman will never wear a cloak either. These appearances make each Hero unique. And thus players of City of Heroes have oh-so-many options to create their Characters. There are many faces, hair styles, and Details (glasses, Rebreather, Gas Mask, ear pieces, and many more) to choose from, so that your character won't run into his or her clone. You also have the freedom to choose the clothing of your character. You want a jacket? A high school shirt? Skirt or Shorts? Very long or very tight pants? All these are possibilities of making your character appealing to you. You can even make a naked Hero, if you want to... Apart from all clothing options, you can also set the Scale of the body parts too: short or long legs; small or wide shoulders and hips; flat or huge chest/breasts; and the height of character (Be warned though, many times you fight enemies in small areas. Controlling a tall character in a small cave = bad camera angle/movement).

But the process of character creation doesn't just involve appearance, it also determines what kind of Powers your character are going to have. There are a few Archetypes to choose from, and each has access to different kind of Powersets. Tanker and Scrapper focus on Defense and Melee powers, while Blaster, Defender and Controller focus on Range, Support, Buff powers and such. Each powerset also offer many possibilities. For example, Melee powerset lets you choose what kind of weapon your character is going to use: Dual Wield swords, Great Sword, Katana, Dark or Fiery Melee (fists and punches). Defense powerset allows you to pick what kind of defense power you want, such as Fiery Aura, Stone Armor, Ice Armor, Dark Armor and such. Later on, as you advance in levels, you will be able to learn new power from your powersets you choose. (From Fiery Aura powerset; Fire Shield increases resistance, Fire Blaze deals small damage to all enemies nearby, while Healing Flame recovers your Health Points. i.e.)

At level 6 and higher, your character also has access to new powerpool. These are universal to all Archetypes. These new powerpools also give the path to Travel Powers, available at level 14: Superspeed, Superjump, Teleport, Fly and so on. Some of these powerpools give additional attack powers, or increase Regeneration or Recovery rate. To simply put, a player can try out lots of Archetypes and builds just for fun, or to learn how other classes play. Replayability has never been better.

Most quests (called Missions, or mish) are carried out in Instances, which are scaled by your level when you pick them up, by number of players in the team, and by Difficulty Rate which you can change in-game. Usually the team leader picks a mission from Contacts (mission givers) or from radio (main stream of missions) and everyone will share the same mission. Many missions involve killing all enemies in the instance, in many cases you have to retrieve objects, escort an NPC, or defeat a boss.

Now that I mention Mission, it's only fair for me to talk about the Architect Entertainment. To simply put, AE is the User-Generated Content (missions) from players to players for players. You can now design your own missions and story that comes with it. The bad? It seems many AE missions are a spoil to players. Fewer and fewer players do the real missions these days. Everyone just hang around in the Architect Entertainment building, and do those AE missions instead. Imagine you play a game that you don't have to run around and explore the world and get to learn each town name. You instead just stay in an instance created for your team, and just keep killing monsters that keep coming. You level fast in this game if you have good team and team members. But you can't get good team if everyone else isn't interested in doing normal missions with you.

There are many servers for this game. But unfortunately most are left with about 1/3 players of the server capability, with only a few that have about 2/3 players before the server is full. Merging low population servers together might be a good idea. That way players can easier find players to team up with, for both AE and normal missions.

Apart from all else, City of Heroes has auction system, crafting system (for power upgrades, costumes, and such), homebase for Supergroup (guild) and more.

Reviewed Jun 09

RATING