Indicative of the free Asian MMO in every way but one. Or maybe three.
It's a wasteland of thousands of hours logged; a land of low-res textures and low resolutions and low hardware requirements but incredible lag; a land inhabited by androgynous male avatars with 80s hairdos and cartoon tarts with angel wings and eyes like lavender dinner plates; a place informed by a strangely slanted view of Western Civilization, its history and culture.
And it has a cash shop.
This wasteland is known as 'The Land of Free Asian MMMOs'.
Atlantica Online, our free MMO in question, is a strange (is that redundant?) MMOJRPG currently in open beta; which is, of course, otherwise known as the 'getting players hooked like a bunch of crack addicts before we start charging them' phase of pre-release development.
Tying all of it together (I'll get to the all part in a moment) is a convoluted and so thankfully totally irrelevant story about Atlantis. You don't actually play in Atlantis despite the title, and despite inchoate ramblings of the deer-antlered and angel-winged anime vixen who awakens you from your "dream" upon character creation.
The gameworld proper is actually a Carmen Sandiego sort of place. A real map of good ol' planet Earth as we know it, one marked with major cities (like London and Moscow and Beijing) and the surrounding lands, replete with region-specific architecture, will serve as the stage for your travels.
Admittedly, this has a kind of weird, if not totally realized, charm.
But enough of the game's rich and compelling backstory.
It's an Asian MMO right? There will be grind. And then some more grind. And then a little more. And some more for good measure. But if you get tired of the grind, you can participate in quests that include buying items from the market or opening up the Game Info tab. Or you can go on crafting quests in which you buy raw materials from the market and then must collect "workload" points to create items. You gain workload points through, you guessed it, grinding.
But here's Atlantica's hook: you have a party.
Or, rather, you are a party.
The game has a bunch of cool classes, melee and magic, shamans and swordsmen, along with about a dozen others. You choose one of these and play the game as yourself (and you will see other players in the world as a single player, just like in any other MMORPG). But as you level up, you can hire mercenaries for your party to fight alongside you.
Entering combat with a monster by clicking on it, the screen (in an incredibly low-rent pre-post-production effect) suddenly slashes itself and falls away to reveal a quasi-isometric camera, exposing your party as well as Atlantica's turn-based heart.
It is in this way, from the top down, like a turn-based strategy game, that you and your mercenaries fight in customizable formations and use their combat skills and create deadly combos to defeat enemies.
This singleplayer-cum-party mechanic is the major feature of the game, and is no doubt the most interesting thing Atlantica has to offer. If it were not present, Atlantica would be virtually indistinguishable from any other of the legions of gratis Asian RPGs (with, perhaps, the exception of two features that I'll talk about in a moment).
But, what am I talking about? It does have it.
And this party combat is, admittedly, pretty darn cool.
PvP is the companion piece to the PvE. There are daily scheduled PvP competitions which take place in Rome's Colosseum, where you can pit yourself and your loadout of mercs against other players and their mercs. There are PvP ranks. There is wagering on matches where huge sums of gold are often won. There are rewards for winning and losing, even in the "Free League".
This PvP element is rightly the game's biggest draw, since it is the most interesting and offers some real complexity, and is fun.
But about those two other features I mentioned.
It's worth noting that the game does a good job encouraging higher level players to interact with lower level ones. A mentor system rewards a higher level player for helping and associating with a lower level player. Similarly, the crafting system allows you to learn skills from others; you must get the experience on your own, but you actually attain the next crafting level from someone who already knows it.
Secondly, the interface. It is very clean, if a little too feature-rich. There's so much going on that it can become confusing, especially for new players. It is also disturbingly utilitarian for a fantasy game. The GUI is basically a Windows XP clone with a gaggle of drop-down menus. The Market, the Bank, the Warehouse, the Crafting Window-- pretty much everything, with the exception of your inventory, is accessible through a small window and a drop-down. This seems to boil down a whole gameworld full of skills and items and monsters to a sort of gigantic laundry list. It's reasonably easy to use, but it doesn't really seem appropriate for a fantasy game.
And yet, perhaps it seems just about right for the endless treadmill of a grind MMO, like a little bit of visual honesty.
Not surprisingly, Atlantica is loaded with hackers and gold sellers.
It is not uncommon to run across parties of bots 10 or 15 strong, all farming the same spot.
If you are a MMO fan, Atlantica is, like lots of other of these "free" MMOs, worth at least checking out, if only to see what it does well and what it doesn't.
But just don't stay too long.