Perfect World is one of the best free-to-play MMORPG's out, just don't be surprised if you get bored in the long run.
Perfect World offers new and unique classes as well as some of the traditional ones MMO players will recognize. Other than our usual tank, we have our warlock-esque class known as the Venomancer, a class dedicated to debuffing enemies and having pets. There is also our typical Wizard, our physical damage-dealer known as the Blademaster, the Archer, and the Cleric as the healer. Some players may feel more than limited when its discovered that some classes are not only for certain races, but genders as well. The typical tank known as the Barbarian can only be played by an Untamed male, same with Venomancers who can only be played by an Untamed female. However, this limitation is only for the Untamed race, and nothing to truly fuss over. Since there are three races, there are three cities dedicated to each race and the main city, Archosaur. Each starting area, while having different landscapes and terrain, all generally give you the same gaming experience as a starting character no matter if you choose to be an Untamed, Human, or Winged Elf. Each race has their own unique characteristics as the Untamed can shape-shift into tigers and foxes while Winged Elves are given the ability to fly right from the get-go at level 1. While the Untamed may have their fair share of complaints with running around back and forth on land as the Winged Elves soar high above trees and mountains, they do get to shape-shift into their animal forms from level 9 which slightly increases their movement speed. It seems, however, that humans were left with the short end of the stick, having to wait to level 30 to fly like the Untamed, except with no unique spells or forms of any kind to help with the constant running around.
The gaming controls can be quite difficult to figure out to a new player. There is no tutorial for a new player, only a few tool tips that pop up to give you some direction. Things like tracking quests, learning auto-pathing, and using coordinates can almost go completely ignored for quite some time to the player if they don't take the time to play around with the interface. What's worse is these things are usually components that are absolutely critical to making your game play experience more efficient, faster, and easier. While these simple things are usually tossed aside for quite some time before players discover them on their own, it's surprising at how helpful they are to leveling and to just playing the game in general. Tracking your quests enables you to virtually track your quests on your interface to see if you've killed or collected the amount of mobs or drops needed to complete your quest. Auto-pathing is both a gift and a nightmare to some, depending on how you do it and what race you are. If you're a Winged Elf, auto-pathing is a blessing. You get on your wings, fly high into the sky and using your quest log to click on the quest giver/receiver or on the mob or item you need to kill or collect and you'll be auto-pathed straight to it, flying high over trees or any obstacles. As an Untamed or Human, auto-pathing can be quite a pain (at least when you're under level 30). Perfect World International hasn't exactly "perfected" auto-pathing yet, so your character won't automatically run around that tree but instead run straight into it. This isn't the pathing you would expect where you can just click and wait till you reach your destination, it's mostly used as a guide as you dodge anything in your path. It's things like this that the Untamed and Humans can really envy the Winged Elves for, so it's an understatement to say that the Winged Elves have it a bit easier than the other races. The coordinate system is great if you can't find a specific NPC in any area or a large city by clicking the green button on your mini-map and selecting the person you're looking for and then following the blue arrow on your screen to their location. This coordinate system is also useful for finding specific locations and players as well, which came in handy as a priest to resurrect those begging to be revived to significantly reduce the experience loss caused by their death. Needless to say, the game is extremely user-friendly with the useful tools mentioned.
When a player creates a character the extent to which one can customize their character is incredible. The customizations are endless, and the character models are really quite pretty. Those who are fearful or lazy to deal with the phenomenal amount of customizations can choose presets for their character and change simple things like hair, eye, or skin colors to the player's desires. Once you enter the world, it gives you quite the first impression. On high settings the graphics are incredible, and sadly you won't really appreciate it until you start flying, the sight-seeing is amazing. The water shines off the light brilliantly, the trees sway, the grass move in the wind, Perfect World contains some serious eye-candy, but with a price. The game can be awfully hefty on your computer's resources depending on your computer's specifications, and big cities like Archosaur are a complete disaster to explore with the lag. Luckily, there is a tool where can click which instantly ensures the highest performance which turns down all your graphics and rids of the crowds of people around you that might be causing you to lag. Another click on the button and your graphic settings are instantly turned back on. This tool is quiet convenient and shockingly thoughtful. Though it's easy to say that this is the type of game that delivers tons of eye-pleasing graphics and no real content or game play, it's not entirely true.
Perfect World tries to really stand out and be unique as a free-to-play MMO and for a while it does just that with no problem. It seems Beijing Perfect World learned from other developing companies who made the mortal mistake of allowing players to buy over-powered and high end weapons and armor using real currency. Beijing Perfect World did just the opposite, they had a cash shop as well, but only contained fun and cute items to mostly decorate your character or even items to make game play a bit more convenient, but not easier. You'll notice wearing clothes from the cash shop is a huge trend in Perfect World, accompany that with charms you can equip to slightly increase your damage or automatically replenish health or mana when it reaches a certain percent, the cash shop is quite successful on its own. What's incredible is that you can buy items from the cash shop using in game currency as well, but don't expect it to be cheap. Cash shop items are bought using gold, which you can buy with the Perfect World currency "coins" or by purchasing Zen with your real money, which is then exchanged into gold. The most notable thing about the cash shop is the fact that none of the items have limitations (except for a smiley face set you can use in chat), so once you buy them its yours forever. However, with the except of a few items, almost all of items are good to trade with other characters, so either way you can almost always get your money back once you've had enough of the same outfit or item (in game or not).
One small complaint I have about the cash shop is how the game gives you a little sample of the goodies they have in the shop in your lower levels knowing well you'll be screaming for more. In your first few levels, they'll give you a resurrection scroll (which instantly resurrects you at your location with no 5% of total experience lost penalty), and weapon, health, and mana charms. Charms. Are. Addicting. They can either give you higher damage with your attacks/spells, or restore your health or mana to full once it reaches below a certain percent. When you're questing, these charms are like heaven as they completely erase any need for down time or "meditation", which requires you sit down and wait till your health and mana slow-ly regenerate. Once you've run out of charms, meditation is almost painful. As a cleric, I used up a lot of mana for my spells coupling with healing myself constantly because two hits from a mob would cause my health to be rather low. This meant that meditation was almost ridiculously frequent and long that I took the liberty of timing it. Two. Bloody. Minutes. It got so bad at one point that I didn't want to just sit there and stare at the screen that I started reading during meditation downtime, it was absurd. Health and mana potions are extremely expensive and not worth buying since coin is hard to come by.
Though despite all that, the first few levels are a good experience, the game seemingly revolves heavily on questing to gain experience in order to level. Killing monsters alone won't net you as many experience as quickly as if you had spent that time completing quests. Coupling quests with the auto-pathing, tracking quests, and coordinate system at your disposal, questing is almost made stupid easy that its hard to believe you don't have to grind. Yet. Don't be fooled, like every other MMO, Perfect World does have a grind. If its not made completely obvious to you when you have to continually kill 25 of this and 35 of that, you'll be hit hard with a reality check when you reach the high 30's. Reaching that range is like hitting a brick wall, hitting a dead end without any clue whatsoever where the hell it came from. You'll be digging to find even half the amount of quests you were usually flooded with in the beginning, and then you get dragged into the whole dragon quest scheme. At first hearing of doing a dragon quest sounded exciting, thinking there would be a dungeon crawl to some big dungeon boss. It turns out that the "dragon quest" is nothing more than asking you to grind out mobs for a certain number of drops, travel halfway across the map to talk to an NPC and do it over again. And again. And again. And again. And again. You do this almost endlessly, supposedly this long quest line showers you with tons of experience at the end but this horribly repetitive excuse of a unique quest is enough to bore anyone to death. In the end, it's all just a grind.
Though its easy to find yourself killing a number of the same monster for a quest, the good thing about Perfect World is that, chances are, you won't be killing that mob again. Every monster you kill in every quest is almost completely unique and different, and many of them will be memorable for their unique sounds. One in particular is the Corpse Candle, which is a freakish looking head that jumps around with a huge evil smile on its face and laughs at you while you wail on it. The variety of monsters you'll encounter as well as the places you visit once and never again really helps with getting immersed into Perfect World's world, as small as it is. The soundtrack really helps with this immersion as well, as the music is very calm and soothing, fitting the mood of a Chinese MMO perfectly, though like most things, can get monotonous quickly.
Beijing Perfect World tried to give players a bit of a break from questing and later on in the levels, grinding, by requiring you to kill a final boss in a dungeon every nine levels once you reach level 10. At first, the idea of a dungeon is quite exciting, and offers some variety for a break well deserved with the idea of teaming up with some of your squad members to go in a dungeon and really feel your class role. However, the dungeons, while unique, are quite the ultimate disappointment. Most of the dungeons cannot be completed without the help of squad members who are significantly higher level than you. Somewhere between thirty to forty levels higher than you, it makes you wonder why they offer it to players of your level if its so difficult in the first place…
The interface seems small, is quite dull, and just all out sucks. Undoubtedly, the chat box is one of the worst I've ever seen in any free-to-play MMO. In order to type in either common chat, squad chat, faction chat, world chat, or in a private channel, you have to click on the itsy-bitsy-teeny-tiny little icons right above where you type your message. All the icons are virtually indistinguishable, and if you don't want to be bothered with that, you can just type the following in front of your messages:
Message Here –> Common Chat
!!Message Here –> Squad Chat
!~Message Here –> For Faction Chat
What's with the "!!" and the "!~ in front of the messages? They're more confusing than they are necessary. I'm unsure as to why Beijing Perfect World couldn't stick to the /squad and /faction. Anyhow, the skill bars aren't fantastical either. If you want to add more additional bars to add more skills, you click the little square icon in green and then you click the little radio button next to your new bar to "activate" it. Whether this button is pressed or not makes no difference, every time you log back into Perfect World you have to click the little green box again to make the additional bars appear again. Thankfully the skills you placed in them are still there, but it's still a small annoyance.
Oh yes, let's not forget about the new implementation of genies in the new expansion, Age of Spirits. The verdict is simple, genie's are rendered entirely useless to a player unless you take the time to level it up which either costs you lots of money to buy genie experience cubes, or even giving your own experience to the genie instead. It isn't worth it, instead you'll just have a little fairy following you around pretending like it's making itself useful. A stupid addition in my opinion, genies are just a terrible gimmick.
All in all, Perfect World is definitely up there in terms of one of the best free-to-play MMORPG's out there right now. You'll have fun right from the start, and it really does have a lot to offer no matter what type of player you are, just don't be surprised if you get bored in the long run.
PROS:
# Beautiful, breath-taking graphics, especially for a free-to-play game.
# Monster variety, not something commonly seen in free-to-play games.
# Very heavily quest-based, at least in the beginning.
# Same classes as most MMO's, but does well to be truly unique.
# Incredible in-depth character customization.
# Very handy in-game tools that makes Perfect World very user-friendly.
# The cash shop is a huge success and should be a model to other free-to-play games.
# Various dungeons within each level range.
# 60 vs 60 Territory Wars that unleashes a whole new, refreshing, and exciting pace to PvP.
CONS:
# Interface isn't aesthetically pleasing, nor is it easy to navigate.
# Questing pace slows down significantly and the grind shows up all too quickly.
# Dungeons are pointless because of their insane difficult for the player's level when its given.
# Downtime between killing mobs is quite long.
# Lack of any tutorial or enough tool tips to familiarize new players.
# Dragon Quests are tedious and very long and offer nothing new or exciting.
# Genies are more gimmicky then they are useful.
# Quests are uncreative and repetitive.