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We Just Played Dragon Nest (in PVP)

Nexon's cutesy, dungeon-crawling action role-playing game will let you challenge other players, and we have the exclusive hands-on report.

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No Caption Provided Dragon Nest is Nexon's next free-to-play online role-playing game, and it combines the cutesy, big-headed characters and bright color palettes you expect from family-friendly games of this sort with the real-time brawling of Nexon's other 3D online role-playing game, the much more adult-minded Vindictus. We recently had a chance to reacquaint ourselves with the game and try out some new player-versus-environment content, and we also took our first run at the game's competitive player-versus-player combat and have exclusive new details to share.

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The single-player mission we played through took place partway through the game's story-driven quest lines, which paint a picture of a world facing chaos. The realm of Verathea, originally created as a gift for the land's highest god by one of his two daughters--also gods, by the way--now faces the encroachment of magical corruption. It seems that while the one heavenly daughter was delighted that her divine father picked her creation to be made into reality, the second heavenly daughter was so enraged at being passed over that she poisoned her own sister. This dastardly act has begun to wreak havoc on the world itself, and the agents of the evil sister god seek to complete the destruction of the world by recovering ancient artifacts known as "dragon lusters" and installing the items at monolith sites throughout the world to complete their deadly task. As an adventurer in Dragon Nest's world of Verathea, it's your job to find the lusters first and prevent the world from plunging into darkness.

To do this, you have to bash kobolds. Lots and lots of kobolds. These and other angry critters awaited us and our pre-created cleric character in the Valley of Mourning area, which, like in most of Nexon's other games, consists of cordoned-off rooms filled with various enemies and challenges that must be defeated or cleared before you, and any companions joining you, can move forward to the next room. The Valley is, also like most such adventure areas in other Nexon games, an "instance" (meaning it's created dynamically by, and for, any player or players that enter at the same time, and exists only for those players) and can be entered directly from the nearest town. The start of the area is a bright, colorful wooded valley infested by teeny-tiny kobolds (which have a nasty tendency to pop out of hiding in large groups), leading to a cave entrance where magic-using kobold shamans and burly minotaurs awaited us. Luckily for us, none of these enemies were immune to our cleric character's mace, which we could use to repeatedly whack these critters by tapping our left mouse button. In addition, our right mouse button was mapped to Dragon Nest's kick attack (in this case, a standing roundhouse kick that popped our enemies high in the air and let us juggle them for additional hits), and for good measure, our character also had seven or eight other powers mapped to our number keys and to our Q, E, and R keys.

Dragon Nest plays from a third-person, behind-the-back perspective and lets you use the W, A, S, and D keys to move, like most first-person shooters and action games, so we had no trouble reacquainting ourselves with the control scheme and jumping into the fray. Our character had a great variety of different melee special attacks, including spectacular multi-hit swings and the ability to call forth lightning bolts at the end of a series of swings. He also had a variety of magical abilities, including protective wards and even healing spells. But we were too busy hammering on kobolds with our mace to dive deeply into our character's skills. This game, like Nexon's other brawler games, rewards you for continuously dishing out a beating to one or more targets, so the longer you can keep your character pounding on something, the higher your combo counter goes and the higher the experience bonus you receive. Sure, to the untrained eye, it might have looked like we were terrible at the game and just randomly mashing on our keyboard and mouse, but since we were adventuring in a party with experienced Nexon staffers, we're pretty sure they understood the incredible skill and strategy in our tactics.

After doing our part to reduce the kobold population, we jumped into a two-on-two player-versus-player arena match. Dragon Nest will have four different PVP modes: free-for-all deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag, and a respawn mode where the first to eight kills wins. PVP combat may actually end up being added to the game postlaunch, but it will at least make an appearance in the game's wider beta after the Electronic Entertainment Expo. The team-based PVP modes will use a "rubber-band" system to help automatically adjust character levels for the battle so that more players of vastly differing levels can all participate fairly. Similar to City of Heroes' sidekicking system, Dragon Nest's team PVP will temporarily level up characters of lower level to a roughly equal level of other competitors, but will not grant them any higher-level skills or powers.

We played a quick round of team-based deathmatch, with each team equipped with one warrior and one archer. We ended up with our team's warrior, specialized to use the paladin secondary class (the game lets you pick one at level 15). While this character also had several defensive powers and a healing aura, we were too busy fighting for our lives to get really in-depth with the class skills--but to be fair, this was the very first time we'd ever played Dragon Nest in PVP, and the very first time we'd ever played a paladin in the game. Dragon Nest's mobility options (including double-tapping the W, A, S, or D keys to quickly dash in that direction, or double-tapping a movement key while downed in order to have your character tuck and roll in that direction) are even more important in PVP than in standard play, since many of the game's special attacks are positional and either target enemies within a certain area of effect or have a certain, limited range (especially melee attacks). While we scored a couple of lucky kills by barely dodging out of the way of our opponents' attacks (both our opponent's warrior and our paladin were equipped with huge, slow two-handed swords) and layering damage onto the enemy archer, it became clear pretty quickly that long-term success in the game's PVP arenas will come from skill and knowledgeable application of the right abilities at the right time, within the right ranges. Achievement-minded players will be happy to hear that Nexon plans to include a separate type of experience point gain for PVP matches, as well as some sort of ranking system that will let you show off your accomplishments. In addition to having a colorful, family-friendly world to explore, Dragon Nest will have fast-paced, challenging competitive battles. The game is scheduled to launch later this year.

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