After starting with the basics in the first article yesterday for Fantasy Frontier, I am going to touch more on combat (which is still basics actually) and some other stuff in Part 2 of the article. Fantasy Frontier will be launched as Aura Kingdom by Aeria Games soon.
Character progression – Quests
As you would have guessed, the core experience points come from completing the many quests. Some are hunt X of this and X of that, others will allow you to become NPCs in special maps (similar to mini-games), some are purely for new titles with no experience points.
The story quests and quests dungeons are a good break from the standard killing chores, although some may have over extended their cut-scenes. Still, pretty basic stuff.
Exploring the world
Being an open world game from X-Legend, players from games such as Spirit Tales or Eden Eternal should be familiar with world bosses. They spawn randomly, drop awesome loot and the item drop upon death can be captured and traded for even more stuff with specific NPCs.
There are several items spread across the world with yellow names, which can be right-clicked. Some give useless items, some trigger special quests few others know. Being the straight-forward farming and leveling player, I only manged to open up a small number of them.
Combat
Here comes the main show, combat. Let me touch on movement first, something I am a little disappointed about. You see, the awesome Blade & Soul-style gliding feature can only be used in the open world, not instanced dungeons 🙁 It would have added another level of depth if allowed…
As the monsters get tougher and higher level, most of them will gain skills rather than normal attack. These skills, before being cast, will have the targeted area (straight line, cone etc) lighted up. Yeah, somewhat like League of Legends.
This is the part where players have to really dodge. The radius for skills can be pretty amazingly large near the current end-level bosses. That said, Fantasy Frontier is not an action game, hence double-tapping on WASD will not give an immediate dodge skill.
Instanced dungeons
I am always grateful whenever there is a nice party finder system in any online games, and Fantasy Frontier did not disappoint. Together with the ability to teleport every party member to the dungeon’s entrance, life was really made easy. Oh yes, party EXP boosts as well~
Majority of the dungeons have a limit of how many times they can be entered, even for solo ones. There are currently 3 different modes, being a Solo (normal), Party and Solo (Hell). Solo (Hell) is basically a super-hard version and partying is recommended. I tried it alone, the experience did not end well…
Most of the powerful gears are from dungeons, although mobs in the open world may drop great stuff and item chests from time to time. I definitely think there is too much loot being dropped, but I understand the company needing players to purchase inventory expansion slots 🙂
Conclusion
To continue from yesterday’s article, I have now seen head costumes drop from dungeons. I will not be touching on all features, but common ones such as auction house, daily quests etc are there as well. The PvP and ranking systems are currently still not available.
Fantasy Frontier definitely did not break any barriers in terms of innovation, but it is a good-enough game for me to play throughout the weekend. No hassle, user-friendly, gamers looking for more sophisticated games need not try this one out 🙂
I am currently level 49 after 4 days of gameplay, which I was told is pretty fast. The cap is 52 now if I am right. Seen below is 1 of the costumes obtained from the randomized boxes from the cash shop. Pretty awesome eh? The headgear is a loot drop 🙂
