Risk Your Life: Path of the Emperor Hands-On

Risking your fictional character's life is part and parcel of playing in online role-playing games, and in particular it's the theme of Risk Your Life: Path of the Emperor, an upcoming, fantasy-based online role-playing game that features both player-versus-player and player-versus-environment combat. Otherwise known as RYL (Risk Your Life, get it?), this is a game that will go up against some heavy hitters when it launches this summer. RYL has been flying under the radar for quite some time now, so we took a close look at it recently to see what it will offer.

RYL is very much a fantasy online role-playing game, but one that eschews some of the conventional fantasy norms, such as going with multiple races like humans, elves, dwarves, and other familiar races. RYL is instead set in a whole new world populated with plenty of strange creatures and two playable races: humans and the Ak'Kan, a demonic race that uses stylized weapons and armor. The game's setting is somewhat evocative of medieval Europe, and the humans outfit themselves with fairly traditional arms and armor, the likes of which you'd see in a museum.

As with other role-playing games, you can create a stable of characters, but you can only play one character at a time. You create a character by choosing a race, appearance, and a basic class, such as fighter, cleric, or mage, and then start off in Pirate's Bluff, a town where you can begin learning the ropes and exploring the world. While you can go it alone in RYL, the focus of the game is on player interaction, so you can form parties and guilds to try to conquer the world. At the heart of RYL is the quest-based system, which features more than 100 missions, with more being added all the time. In standard online role-playing-game style, you'll pick up quests from non-player characters, ranging from the standard "go out and kill X number of monsters" to "talk to a certain NPC for more information."

In terms of combat, there's plenty of player-versus-environment battling to be had outside of any town, as there are a limitless number of monsters to battle. Combat is fairly action intensive, as you have to keep clicking on the left mouse button to attack. There is no automated combat like in other online role-playing games, so the experience is a bit like Diablo. And, like in other online role-playing games, you can heal quickly after a battle by sitting down and resting, by simply eating food, or by having a healer heal you.

Creatures drop plenty of loot in the form of gold, weapons, and equipment. There's a huge assortment of these types of things in the game. The weapons and armor in RYL are very much like those in Diablo. Objects can have multiple modifiers, and each is rated for condition, which means you have to have it repaired before it falls apart on you. You can also upgrade weapons and armor, assuming you find the right components and you can pay the highly skilled smiths to perform the job.

Player-versus-player combat is handled a bit differently. Both players have to agree to duel before it takes place, so it's possible for you to avoid PvP combat altogether if that's not what you're looking for. It's also possible to have guild-versus-guild combat, and it's possible for a guild to own territory to develop. The guild leader, or feudal lord, can then organize his minions into attacking another guild for their territory, and thus attempt to battle his way to emperor status in the game. This means that you can build up fortresses to defend your territory, as well as create siege weapons to tear down rival defenses.

As you level up, your character can choose more specialized classes. For example, the fighter can choose to become a warrior or a defender at level 10. The difference is that the warrior focuses on attack abilities and gets +2 strength and +1 constitution per level; whereas the defender focuses on, well, defending. So the defender gets defensive skills and +1 strength and +2 constitution per level. The game uses both a mouse-driven interface, like the point-and-click interface used in Diablo games, as well as a traditional, action-style WASD interface, where you use a combination of the mouse and keyboard. And getting around the world of RYL mainly involves lots and lots of running, which is fairly typical of the genre.

RYL doesn't seem to break any new ground in terms of the genre, but it will offer players a whole new world to explore. According to the game's official Web site, RYL has gone gold, but it'll take a while before we actually see it officially launch. The online role-playing genre is currently loaded with some cutthroat competition, so we'll have to wait and see how RYL does when it launches this June.