RF Online First Look

During a recent visit to Codemasters' UK headquarters, we had an opportunity to check out RF Online, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game that the publisher had acquired the European and North American rights to just two hours earlier. Already a huge success in Korea and China, where it launched last year and has attracted over a million players, RF Online blends traditional fantasy RPG elements with a futuristic sci-fi storyline and epic battles between the three player factions that vie for control of the Novus galaxy.

When you create a new character in RF Online, you'll choose to side with the Bellato Union, the Holy Alliance Cora, or the Accretia Empire. The three factions are very different in terms of their appearances and skills, and, having seen some high-level characters in action during our time at Codemasters, we can report that the prospect of playing as any one of them has us pretty excited. If you choose to play as the Bellato Union (RF Online's equivalent to humans), for example, your character will be tech-savvy enough to use powerful weapons and, eventually, to purchase and do battle in a mech that can be upgraded with both melee and ranged armaments. The Holy Alliance Cora, on the other hand, is RF Online's elflike race, and as such, they shun technology in favor of magical techniques and, ultimately, the ability to summon and fight alongside large pets. The evil Accretia Empire is a robotic race (with character designs and locations reminiscent of those in Phantasy Star Online) with access to advanced weapon systems, and although we didn't get to see much of them during our presentation, we were told that their answer to the mechs and summons of their enemies is their ability to transform themselves into powerful gun turrets.

Your RF Online adventure will get under way in your faction's starting area, which is one of three that surround a location known as the core mine. You'll have the freedom to explore vast and incredibly varied locations as you progress through the game, but you'll also be encouraged to participate in daily battles at the core mine; only the winning faction will be allowed to gather resources there each day. How the daily battles are scheduled and how their outcomes are decided isn't clear at this point, but skirmishes between thousands of players simultaneously are purportedly quite commonplace in the territories where the game is already available. With that many players doing battle things could get quite confusing, of course, which is why you'll have the option to view the action from a zoomed-out, top-down perspective at any time, affording you a much better view of your surroundings than the regular third-person camera.

Because many Korean gamers play their online games in Internet cafes with relatively low-spec machines, RF Online was designed with those systems in mind. The game is extremely scaleable, though, so if you're the proud owner of a high-end gaming rig, it won't go to waste. The version of RF Online that we saw--running at less than its maximum resolution of 1600x1200--boasted visuals of a comparable quality to those in World of Warcraft, with incredibly detailed environments and beautiful character models.

RF Online, currently scheduled for release in North America and Europe during the first quarter of 2006, is already around 90 percent localized. We'll bring you more information on the game as soon as it becomes available.