It is a warm morning, the sea appears calm... The merchant ship is being loaded with cargo and the adventurers are getting ready to set sail. The anchor lifts and the ship is off toward the horizon, destination?- Auroria. Minutes tick by, with the calm sea surrounding the ship accompanied by the splashing sound of the ship cutting its way through the water; yet the air us uneasy, the adventurers appear on edge.
Suddenly the silence gets broken by a barrage of glider bombs dropping onto the ship, cannonballs connecting with the hull setting the ship ablaze; pirates are attacking. Together as one the adventurers spring into action, securing their goods to the ship and steadying themselves for defense against the attackers.
That is just one of the little things you might do in Archeage; with a player-driven economy, mechanics like player-owned housing and farming plots - there are a lot of things to do besides the standard MMO "click boss, press buttons, take loot" formula.
Character Customization:
Immediately upon entering the game, the players get to pick one of four races: Nuian, Elves or Firran and Harani. Nuian and Elves are the opposing faction to Firran and Harani.Character customization is rather extensive and allows you to adjust even the most minute details of your character; however if one chooses to play as soon as possible, there are nine presets available for a quick skip of the customization. After the customization the player is asked to pick one of six available skillsets, an example of a couple of spells is displayed each time the player clicks on a skillset and a brief description is given.
However, the character is not locked to the chosen skills; each character may have up to three active skillsets at any one time, every combination of skillsets has a name; I personally ended up playing as an Argent (a large sword-wielding, healy, tanky person). The player may also reset their skillsets and change them at any point in time; the only downside being is that the spells ranks will be reset to 1, making them weak and forcing the player to go practice before taking on any serious combat again.
Player Housing and Resource Collection:
Players are able to use spaces in the world for their needs such as building houses, farms or animal pens; however the spaces are limited and for every property the player owns they have to pay taxes (to put into perspective how expensive it is: paying for three properties would be quite hard). Doing anything from opening farmers purses to chopping trees requires Labor, which serves as the main "action" resource; this resource refills over time and is used to pay taxes. However it doesn't end there, if players run out of space to plant their crops, trees or animals - they can plant them anywhere in the world with the downside that another player could steal their precious plants/animals; the downside for the offender is that they may leave footprints which can cause their infamy to increase if the footprints are found.
Crime and Punishment:
Infamy system in the game works as a way to deter players from simply taking anything and everything; if a player accrues really high infamy, they may be taken to a trial where other players will play the jury, witnesses and the offender will be the defendant. Once a decision is made the player may be sentenced accordingly (usually ranging from 1 minute to 2-3 hours; maybe even more, who knows?), once sentenced this player goes to a prison, from which it is possible to escape according to some accounts.
Crafting and Skills:
The crafting system in this game is everything one might want from an MMO, it is large, very extensive and quite fun. Every player starts with all of the skills immediately with no need to visit trainers to learn things. Every skill is capped at 10000 until the player chooses to make this skill their proficiency, allowing them to move up to 50000 (it may sound like a lot, but in reality you gain like 5 skill points per creation and creations never stop yielding skill points). There are also skills not displayed here such as Larceny and Gathering; those skills are largely passive and account for things like not leaving footprints and gathering more materials.
Getting around:
Getting around in this game is actually very interesting; every character starts out with a Dash ability which can be activated by double-tapping w or the Up arrow... However the player doesn't have to run around for long, as very shortly after starting out they will be able to help a stable-master grow an animal which the player then receives as a mount/pet (when you summon mounts, they become pets that follow you, with the option to hop onto the saddle or hop off). There are multiple ways to travel on Archeage such as: Walking, Gliding, Riding, Rowing and Sailing.
Gliders make the exploration and getting around more interesting, activating your glider, even if standing in the middle of the field can give you good 5 - 15 seconds of air time. There is also publicly available transport, such as Zeppelins and carts.
Leveling:
In theory leveling is this games strongest and weakest points, which mainly has to do with how the two methods of leveling are handled. The first method of leveling is quests, these are literally as standard as they get; you go to an NPC with an exclamation mark over their head, pick it up and off you go. There are a few neat twists to the quests, you can hand it in early for lesser exp reward or you can hand it in late (called over-achieving) to get extra exp.
The other method of leveling is creating things, cutting things and picking things. If someone has gathered 1000 wood, chances are they'd have got a lot of experience out of that (as everything you do rewards experience), they can then process this wood into planks which would yield another layer of experience... And eventually this adds up to a significant number and is probably the more interesting way to level.
Working for Coin:
There is also a delivery system in the game; to make extra gold you can create packs that you carry on your back which are full of handy resources, this pack drastically slows down your character, your objective is to deliver this pack to the gold merchant in another zone, who will reward you depending on how far from there this pack was created. There are things you can do to speed this carrying process up; donkeys are mounts specialized in carrying trade packs... Players are also able to create vehicles and carts to help them deliver more packs at the same time.
Player vs Player and Endgame:
Ultimately it all comes to PVP, and there's plenty of it here... Auroria, the top island on the map is a PVP oriented zone, with castles, battlefields and places for players to set up sieges. At the time of launch this island is closed, however it appears promising with a very Guild Wars 2-style World vs World type battles. However, I was able to get a taste of what it is like to be ambushed by pirates in the middle of an ocean; these pirates are other players, with their own ships and items, attacking our boat to take our trade packs!
Bosses and Dungeons:
Aside from these large areas, there are dungeons - usually run in groups of three or five people using the holy trinity of Healer/Tank/DPS; these dungeons are interesting and thematically distinct; they also come with a Mentor system, where a higher level player can become the mentor, increasing the difficulty of the dungeon and the loot obtained within it. If one is fan of open spaces instead:- there are boss monsters scattered through-out the world which require a lot of players to group together to take these beasts down.
Performance:
The game is based on Cryengine 3 which allows for some impressive visuals and will ensure that the game utilizes future systems as much as it does current ones. On my rig (GTX 680 2GB, AMD FX-8350, 12GB RAM) I was able to run the game at maxed out settings; the only issue that I ran into was my graphics cards available memory (2gb) being 100% utilized at all times, disabling reflections fixed the issue but somewhat reduced the quality of the water in the game. Other than that, the game runs at a steady 60++ FPS.
Conclusion:
From myself personally - I had great fun with this game, I still AM having great fun with this game; it fills a gap in my gaming library which I've been seeking to fill for a while now. Once you start playing this game, it might feel like another bog-standard MMORPG, but as you delve deeper you realize you're doing something that you may have never done in an MMORPG before... You are roleplaying! You will find yourself being the innocent merchant crossing the seas trying to make fair coin or you may find yourself being the pirate, plundering every merchant ship that crosses your part of the sea... And if danger isn't your thing, you might become an illegal farmer! Hiding your trees and flowers in every secret location you can think of.
It is absolutely amazing once you see the bigger picture, all of the mechanics tie together to create a real MMORPG where players play out their chosen roles without realizing. That to me, is a sign of a great game and one that I will be sticking with.
Note*: Only patron-status players may obtain a farm plot or a land for a house. This is a subscription-type system that gives you the priority in server queues, gives you available lands and allows you to enjoy the game to its full potential.