My views on Rappelz

Note: This post turned out to be pretty long for my own reading/writing standards, feel free to take bio breaks while reading. There’s also NO TLDR version.

First of all, credit to whom is due, Rappelz is a game by nFlavor/Gala-Net Inc, and all the graphics and screenshots are of the game and grabbed/taken by one of my best friends (their character names on the screenshots) of the Tortus server.

I’ve started playing a new (for me) mmorpg, Rappelz. I have three friends playing it, specially two of my best friends, and enjoying it, and since it’s free I dediced I’d give it a try.

I’ve not gotten to level my character too high, but I’m working on it and have gotten at least a taste of what the game is. At the moment I have a Gaia Fighter, at level 32, and job level 30 named Deneor in the Tortus server, he’s on the process of being an Archer.

I decided to write this review for a couple of reasons:

1. As feedback to my friends that already play the game, so that they know the awesome things we have on the game they are playing and the things we are missing in it.
2. As feedback for the game developers (see #1).
3. As an overview/introduction for anyone that approaches this game without knowing anyone that plays it.

From Wikipedia:Rappelz:

Rappelz is a free-to-play massively multiplayer online role-playing game. The game is developed by the Korean company nFlavor, and published by the Californian company Gala-Net Inc.

…

Rappelz is set in a medieval fantasy world, dominated by three races: the Deva, who represent light, the Asura, who represent darkness, and the Gaia, humans that possess an affinity with nature.

Before anything else, screenshots, everyone loves screenshots.

I’ll give an overview of the ‘facts’ intertwined with my views of them, if you need more info or raw facts, well, read the wikipedia article cited above.

general notes…

The game has above-par animation and graphics, has a less-than-desired movement system (point to click), customizable and flexible graphics and controls/key-mappings. Has a rather standard party and guild system, as well as a friends/ignore list.

There’s no pluggable UI extensions or scriptable interfaces, there are UI actions that can be done via the “console” with /commands (slash commands). And a rather responsive and spammable button/hotbar oriented interface.

The game has a very high emphasis on pets to complement your character in different situations. It has as a non-instanced dungeon system, as well as a very consumable-intensive gameplay system, in which you use hp/mp recovery potions and scrolls, attack/cast/movement speed potions, resurrection and anti-poison scrolls, stamina potions and stamina savers, food, boost chips, etc.; and a rather interesting pvp system that I haven’t explored yet so I won’t mention anything else in this article, join the “Panthera” server if you want to know more .

on races and classes…

This game has three races, those three races can choose 3 paths and are very similar in the roles they can perform but with their perks and twists to them. And these three paths branch off as shown below:

• Phisical
  • Tanking
  • Damage
• Magical
  • Healing
  • Damage
• Pet
  • Well… Pets…

the top level (Phisical, Magical and Pet) are “general” classes, “Tier 1″ if you want to call it that, and after that you can specialize even more after certain amount of levels to go to a Tier 2 class.

So, having mentioned the twists and perks that each race gives to it’s classes you should know that if you take the “Phisical/Tank” of X race, he may not have the same abilities or effectiveness vs. a certain type of mob or on a certain situation as the “Phisical/Tank” of Y race. And that maybe your “Pet/Pet” of X race focuses more on healing, and on Y race more on thanking. For example instead of the Tanking and Healing roles for Asuras, there are damage roles instead, so that class doesn’t really heal or tank. And Pet classes for the three races are very different in what they do with and to their pets.

on pets…

Another thing that’s important to note is, that all classes and races use pets extensively. And that’s a very interesting aspect of the game and that to my point of view is a GREAT way to promote diversity in the soloing/grouping aspects. This is because pets can fulfill any of the 4 roles mentioned above (that aren’t the “pet” branch, otherwise the same as characters). So you can complement your character with any number of pets you can find, tame, and level up.

Maybe a Healer is not that good at soloing by itself because it can’t deal that much damage or gets hit too hard by mobs, that healer can use a tank or damage pet for soloing situations and a healing pet for grouping purposes and give the final oomph on the healing.

on character progression…

On the game you have two major “experience” type of… hmm… stuff. These two are Job Points (JP from now on) and Experience Points (Exp from now on). Exp is not actively used by the character, it’s just something you earn by quesitng or killing mobs, and once you reach certain amount of it, you level up (or down if you die/lose Exp).

On the other hand, JPs are used actively by the player to “buy” Job levels and progress. Be it to buy “Job Levels” of your current job/class, or to buy skills in your tree. So that’s one of the sweet things in the game, and probably one that makes newcomers some headaches. You don’t “have” skills until you buy them, and you aren’t able to buy them all from the start, so you have to read a bit to decide which skills to buy or not.

Note the “or” in bold in the previous paragraph, you either buy skills or you level up your job, but there are skills that require you to have a certain job level. Because of this small fraction of the progression system I just described, you can infer that maybe two characters of the same race on the same job, may have the same character level, but probably not the same job level; and if they do have the same job level, they might not have the same skills “purchased”.

One of the cool things about the game is the almost countless ways you can improve your character, let me throw a list of the ones I know (including the one described above for completion’s sake):

• Character level with Exp.
• Job level with JP
• Skills with JP
• Pet level with their own Exp.
• Pet skills with their own JP.
• Weapon/Armor (more on this later) levels.
• Weapon/Armor enchantment (pluses)
• Weapon/Armor socket with gems that have different stats.
• Skill enhancement with cards.
• Skill card enchantments (pluses).
• Pet-on-belt bonuses (pets when unsummoned are “cards” that can be put on your belt to give you stats).
• Job transfers to higher tiers, and pet evolution state.
• Pet or Class “overbreed”, that’s when you can change class or evolve your pet to the higher “tier” or evolution but you choose to continue on that tier or evolution for some more levels for extra stats and job points (for pets).
• Getting new pets for other roles or rarer pets.
• Getting more/different decoration pets.
• Getting decorative items like costumes, etc…
• Getting a new or better mount.
• Maybe more…

on grinding and questing…

This game has an awesome thing about armor and abilities and that is the “rank”, armor and weapons usable by the character are determined by its rank. Rank 1 is from character levels 1-20, Rank 2 is from levels 20-50, and so on. Which removes the drag of having to look for X or Y armor item for your new level. If you have a Rank 2 armor, it will last you (unless you break it trying to enchant it) until level 50. So your “rank 2 armor” will go up to for example “+5 rank 2 armor Lvl 10″ and you have to change it for a rank 3 armor.

So, having mentioned the (known to me) ways a character can improve/progress I’d have thought that they’d put a lot of effort to not drag the player into a grinding odyssey, I thought wrong.

I won’t say this game doesn’t have a story, it certainly does, but it isn’t explored enough on quests (at least not as engaging as I’d expect, up to level 32).

The types of quests I’ve seen up to now are four:

• Kill an amount of certain type of mob (creature) and come/go to an NPC.
• Kill a certain type of mob and gather an amount of a certain item they drop and bring them to an NPC.
• Gather an amount of an item that’s on the floor on an area and bring them to an NPC.
• Go talk to certain NPC or take a provided item to them.

So basically you can do two things in this game (at this point in time at least). Either kill mobs (be it alone or in groups of players), or run errands for NPCs (to kill mobs most of the time).

There are no crafting/trade/gathering skills as of yet. There are no rewards for exploring that I have seen, nor do players get a tangible reward for “collections” like getting more decorative pets for example, other than the pets themselves and the warm/fuzzy feeling they give you.

suggestions/feedback for the developers…

1. Explore the main lore/story of the game a lot more with the quests with key items obtainable by questing. And reveal a lot more of the back story, please.
2. Make exploration quests fun (not the “take an item to a certain NPC onan area” without specifying where the NPC is so that the character explores it). Maybe do a scavenger hunt type of quest, or a clue-based quest to find a hidden treasure, or landmark visiting quests.
3. Let a player choose what her character wants to do and make those decisions impact the way the character “sees” the world by creating mutually exclusive quest lines. For example, two rival NPCs request something and helping one would render the quest by the other NPC unsolvable. This makes the players involve themselves a bit more in a story.
4. Create craft/trade/gathering skills, buyable with JP or whatever else you choose, but give players something to do that’s not killing mobs. When you have such a high number of consumables in the game, why not let someone make those, other people make weapons and other people make armor for example? That’d lover the costs in rupees (the currency in the game) of almost all aspects of the game, reduce the grinding for consumables, weapons and armor for example by a LOT, generate an alternate way for players to generate money, and give them something else to do other than grind.