We Just Played Dragon Nest

We find ourselves in a crowded San Francisco convention hall at the 2010 Game Developers Conference. What do we do? Rather than rolling the dice to see if we're getting drunk, we try out the free-to-play hack-and-slash online role-playing game Dragon Nest from Nexon. This is a hybrid game that takes the brawling mechanics of a third-person action game and adds persistent RPG advancement and a colorful, cartoon-like decor, and it seems like something that could be fun for the whole family, assuming all your family members have their own computers.

Dragon Nest works like a lot of free-to-play hack-and-slash games. It lets you create a character from a specific class (such as warrior, wizard, archer, or priest) and then sally forth into instanced combat areas to beat the living heck out of various cutesy monsters by repeatedly clicking your mouse button to swing your weapon or occasionally using various hotkeyed abilities. Instanced areas are divided into short, combat-heavy segments bounded by doors that unlock only when all monsters are destroyed, but these shorter segments make it easier for impromptu parties to stick together until they can take on the boss and eventually complete the instance and either move on to the next instance or return to a shared-space town to socialize with other players or purchase items from the in-game cash-op (which lets you spend real money in microtransactions in exchange for in-game items).

In our session, we ended up playing as a warhammer-wielding warrior in a four-player party with a wizard, an archer, and a healer. We had to tackle an outdoor instance that appeared to be an abandoned temple overgrown by bright green jungle. We found the controls to be easy to pick up--you use W, A, S, and D to move, like in a first-person shooter, and your number keys to access any hotkeyed special abilities or items. You left-click to attack and right-click to perform a secondary attack (in the warrior's case, a standing kick that has a chance of stunning an enemy). You can also double-tap your W, A, S, or D key to perform a quick evasive tuck-and-roll in that direction.

Our warrior character's special-ability hotkeys were loaded up with various additional melee attacks beyond our standard ones, such as an upward strike that set up a juggle attack and a shock-wave attack that stunned all enemies in front of us. The warrior seems like a very easy class to play (not much more involved then running up close and unloading on the nearest enemy), and none of the enemies that attacked us, such as roly-poly goblins and super-deformed dark elf girls in bikinis, lasted long against our ferocious, caffeine-fueled button-mashing. In each case, we dispatched the current group of enemies, then activated a pair of crystal panels in the world to open the next door until we found the boss, a large floating critter with glowing tentacles, who was flanked by goblins and elves. Since all four members of our party zeroed in on it, the boss didn't last long, and before we knew it, we were done with the instance.

Dragon Nest seems like it's an accessible hack-and-slash game with a colorful anime art style and very intuitive controls. It's scheduled to launch in North America next year.