MMO Monday: FlyFF (Fly For Fun)
Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
FlyFF, or Fly For Fun, is one of the recent crop of Asian MMOs that have appeared that allow you to play for free while generating income from game store-bought exclusive items, and is published by Aeonsoft. It has a pretty large following worldwide and is available in multiple languages. It’s recently went through quite an extensive rehaul of its skill system (which has upset more than a few people, Mrs. Teh Bagder included), and there’s usually a good number of people playing online at any one time.
All starter characters fall into a particular class called Vagrants, which you can consider unspecialized. When you reach level 15, you can then choose a new career for your character after you complete a particular quest keyed to that class. This allows you to choose between Mercenary (close combat), Magician (spellcaster), Assist (healer) and Acrobat (ranged). At level 60, you can further specialize into one of two other classes for each of these.
The two major innovative elements in the game are the ability to fly when you get to level 20 by buying a broom or a board (allowing you to traverse the world much more easily), and the ability to create macro combo attacks. Like many other MMOs, combat plays a huge part of gameplay, but there are a few quests sprinkled here and there for you to enjoy. Once you gain the ability to fly you can attack flying monsters and up your flying ability and experience at the same time.
You can play on both PK (1 per server cluster) and non-PK servers depending upon what you feel like playing at the time, and you can have up to three characters on each server cluster. This means you can have 3 different characters on the go at any one time, and freely interchange them between the PK/Non-PK servers on that cluster. PK servers use a karma system which increases or decreases upon you attacking or killing other players. If you have negative karma and get killed, you chance losing some items from your inventory. This check and balance works well when you have a bunch of PKers running around killing each other and looting. This karma system is only in place on the PK servers, so if you don’t want to have to fight off other players, play on one of the Non-PK servers.
It’s easy to team up with other players, and there are controls in place to stop other players from stealing drops you get from beating up monsters. In general most people you’ll come into contact are pretty nice, but there is a fair amount of scamming that occurs, especially towards newer players. This is unfortunate, but something common on a lot of MMOs these days. Just be sure that you read trades carefully and you should be okay; that goes without saying in any game, though.
The game is pretty easy to pick up and can be fun to play if you’re in the mood to kill things. It was easy enough for our kids (8 years and 5 years) to be able to play away and enjoy, and they got a kick out of seeing some of the crazy monsters that are in the game, such as the Aibatts and the Lawolfs. You can buy some player-centric versions of these creatures from time to time, which will go around and pick up drops for you, saving you the trouble. Players tend to really like these pets and you’ll see a lot of them around in-game.
Graphics in the game are pretty stylized and there are a number of graphics options you can set. The UI is a little under thought in my opinion, and there are some interesting “engrish” problems with some of the text in-game, which belies its Asian origins. Some are worth a good chuckle, but they don’t detract from the game that much.
The cash shop has a lot of items that you can only get from there, and often there will be unique or limited time items, such as unique pets that you can buy. The shop itself is updated on a regular basis, and you can pay using a credit card or PayPal. Like many stores, you buy a certain number of points (called Gpotatoes) which are the shop currency. What you don’t spend stays in your bank. At times the store will offer a special deal such as extra Gpotatoes when you buy a certain amount, and if you get into this game, it’s worth taking advantage of. This usually requires you to spend $50 at a time, but if you play the game a lot, you’ll get your money’s worth.
The game requires Microsoft Windows, and DirectX 9.0 or above. The client can be downloaded from the FlyFF site and each client is keyed to a particular language/area. Typical download size is around 500mb. Bug fixes and game updates are pretty regular, and the game utilizes Game Guard as an anti-hacking tool.
