Priston Tale was one of the first free MMOs that I really got into. Mrs Teh Bagder and I would play for hours together with a bunch of guys that I worked with at a company that made baskets and that shall remain nameless but hinted at. We stopped playing once it came out of beta and they capped all free accounts at level 20. If you wanted to go higher than level 20, you had to pay a subscription fee. It seems that didn’t work out so well and they’ve got rid of the subscription fee and moved to a cash item store like most other Asian MMOs, although the rumors of Priston Tale 2 being inbound might also have something to do with this. Time for me to crack out the game again and recommend it.
There are two major races that exist in the game. The Morion are heavily geared towards magic use, while the Tempskrons are more geared towards technology. Each race has 4 base professions that you can choose from. For the Morion, you can play a Knight, Atalanta, Priestess or Magician. Tempskrons get to be Mechanician, Fighter, Pikeman or Archers. Once you’ve selected your base character you’re ready to play.
Depending on which you choose will determine where you start on the map. I’ve always played Morion Magicians in the game before, and they’re lots of fun. Each profession is centered around a couple of stats, so you need to be sure to bump up only the ones that really will boost your skills and damage. These are:
- Archer: Agility
- Atalanta: Strength, Health
- Fighter: Strength
- Knight: Strength
- Magician: Spirit
- Mechanician: Talent
- Pikeman: Strength
- Priestess: Spirit
You’ll start the game with only a few items, and a newly introduced and annoying sprite that hangs around you to help you get used to the game. It will eventually go away. You’ll spend the first few levels building up a small cash reserve and getting some experience beating up monsters in the Noob Corner of each starter town. Once you’ve got enough, you can make your way back to town and start to buy Skills.
Each profession has four Skill Classes, each with four skills that you can get. To get new skills, you need to have enough money and experience to pay someone to teach you the skill. Once you do, you’ll be able to activate it and load it into your skill bar and use it further. Some skills are keyed to other skills in a sequence, so you’ll need to get certain ones first before you can get others. The skills start off weak, but as you start to use them more and more, they’ll power up. Once they’re at full power, they can be quite devastating. To move through the Skill Classes, you’ll need to perform a quest, which usually entails bringing back some hard to get items. The first time you’ll need to do this is at Level 20, when you can apply to get the second class of skills.
Like many other Asian games, there’s a focus on being able to upgrade equipment by grafting magical items to them in the form of a crafting system. Using items called sheltoms, you’ll mix them together to try and apply them to an item. It may work, or it may not. If it doesn’t the item is unaffected, but the sheltoms are lost and you’ll have to get more before you can try again. It’s an interesting take on standard crafting systems, and there’s often a lot of large trading going on for the rarer items.
There are a large number of monsters in the game, and each of them have mutant versions, and others are just plain strange like the BeeDogs. As the maximum level in the game is 100, you can easily ensure that you can handle taking on a monster, although it’s always much better to do in a group. Sometimes you’ll just get swarmed and it’s bye-bye time. What will help are Monster Crystals. These are special crystals that have a monster embedded in them, and by shattering them, you’ll drop the monster next to you and it’ll help you out. You need to be careful not to drop one next to another dropped monster or they’ll start slugging it out. I found that out the hard way.
Travel between major locations is performed by using large game portals called Worfgates. I know. Don’t ask me. These allow for quick movement, although for some later locations, you need to be able to pay for keys (called wings) to use them, as well as pay per use. If you die then you have the choice of heading back to town with zero XP loss, or to regenerate in the local area with a small experience loss. There will be times you’ll choose one over the other, but if you’re dying a lot, it’ll hit your experience quite heavily. You can also cheat when traveling by paying certain NPCs to teleport you directly. This voids the need to Worfgate keys.
As with other games there’s a vibrant trading system and a warehouse. You’ll find many players just hanging around traders and the warehouse areas in town locations. It’s a good place to hook up with others and go into groups.
When in a group, you can bridge players of different levels. Normally higher level characters can’t play with lower level characters, and there’s a loss of XP when there’s too much difference, but with some clever manipulation you can negate this. The group level is determined as an average of all party members current levels, so a middle-level character can create a group and bring in lower and upper level characters. This keeps the group level centralized and allows you to get your maximum XP.
Overall, this is a very fun multiplayer game. If you can get into a group of players, you’ll love just moving around and smashing the living daylights out of things. There’s really not much more to the game than that. There are no real quests, just a grind to get up higher and higher, and a number of missions that you’ll perform to allow you to level up. Normally I hate those kind of games, but I really loved playing this game in the past, and I’m sure I will again. It’s a particularly kid-friendly game, so if you’ve got a kid that’s looking to play an online MMO, this might be a good start for them. It’s not overly complicated and it’s easy to pick up and play.
As with most MMOs, this is Windows PC only. The game doesn’t need that much to run. 128MB of RAM and a 16MB video card will do it. At least a 300 Mhz Celeron will work, but you’ll want at least 700Mhz to really play it. The software download is 800MB in size, and you can get the English version via FTP here.
Links
Technorati Tags: bagder, free, free, mmo, mmo, priston tale, priston tale
Tags: MMO Monday, Online Gaming by Teh Bagder
No Comments »
