Best melee combat of any MMORPG
NOTE: Malaysian server and private servers are now free (North American version, POTE, is closed)
The other games like Guild Wars and WOW have lame, click-and -watch combat.
In RYL, the camera view is from closely behind your character--a must in melee combat so you can see your position and swords or other weapons and the creatures or enemy around you.
Swing your sword and if you're not close to the beast, you don't hit. Move up and you hit the beast, move away and your swinging at air. Position even determines whether you get in a good solid hit or a weak swipe.
The critics of RYL either haven't played it keyboard mode (you have click-and-watch as an option) or have bad graphics and sound systems.
I play on a fast system with an excellent graphics card and turn graphics up full--the grapics and special effects are fantastic, but if you have a slow system, the game automatically loads with graphics turned to lower settings, so maybe that's what the reviewer saw. RYL is a darker and more foreboding world than some of the other games out there, so if you're looking for the cutesy pastels of Guild Wars, you'll be disappointed, but serious gamers will love it.
Sound is also fantastic. Again, I can only assume the reviewer had a bad sound sytem because RYL's battle sounds thunder out of my subwoofer, but I can also detect the footsteps of nearby enemy.
Everyone complains about the grind, but RYL was designed in Korea, and the eastern philosophy of "the greater the struggle, the more precious (and maybe prestigious) is the reward" was the basis for the design of RYL's leveling system. It's hard work to get to a high level in RYL, so if you can only live by the American philosophy of "I want it all, and I want it now," you won't like RYL. Gamers with an open mind and who are up to the challenge will find that the higher levels are far more rewarding BECAUSE they are more difficult to reach. The absolute best in RYL is when you reach levels high enough to be effective in pvp and get into Statue Wars with your guild and everyone is in voice com with Ventrilo, coordinating the combat, with each experienced player performing his particular speciality to the max to win over a similarly skilled enemy.
None of the "professional" reviews of RYL at gaming sites was written by someone who had experienced that, so those reviews are all written by people who haven't even experienced the best of what RYL has to offer.
RYL players play for a long time. Many of us have been playing for a year or more. We're serious gamers, and we try every game out there, but we always come back to RYL because no other game has the adrenaline-pumping, realistic, and skill-demanding combat of RYL, and we'll keep playing RYL until a better one comes along.