Geek Syndicate Issue 5 | Page 74

Geek Syndicate
Image © NCSoft, 2012

starting out I can help out in the lower level areas and not just one-hit kill everything in sight. To the left is an image of my character being ambushed by a group of toy soldiers during the Wintersday Festival, in a level 11 area, it wasn’t going to well, but I managed to fend them out. My scaled down level is shown in the green text in the bottom left corner. Combat, Skills and Traits Combat is largely the same as most MMOs, however rather than having hundreds of skills to mix and match you are limited to five weapon skills which are pre-set with no customisation allowed and five slot skills which are customisable and determined by your profession, race and level. Your slot skills are changeable when out of combat, and range from healing skills (always in slot 6) to summoning extra creatures, such as 7, 9 and 0 in mine (see image at top of next page). As a ranger I also have a secondary smaller set of options for my pet, which I can switch between two different ones in combat and as many as I have collected out of combat. The key to combat in this game is to plan your attacks and use your skills wisely to get maximum effect; button bashing won’t get you very far. There is no status bar telling you

list in the top corner of the screen. The game does this in several ways. The first is that NPCs will run up to you and ask for your help. The next is the “heart quests”. Located throughout the game marked on the map, most of these involved the usual killing a number of beasts but you don’t have to collect them, they just appear when you are in the area the quest pertains to. The final is that an event happening locally appears on your screen, these are usually started by someone talking to an NPC, however these quests then open to everyone in the area and everyone gets the reward depending on how much they helped and the success of the mission. This is how I have spent most of my time, running around doing world missions, while

exploring the massive map. The great thing about this is that you don’t have to find a party to kill something big. I first realised I would really enjoy this game when during the beta I came across about 30 people all battling a massive ice wizard and I just joined in. Players worked as a team, helping and reviving those around them - people they’d probably never met before. It was fun and because everyone got the reward there was no fighting over loot. I still go back to that event spawn point because it is a fun quest to do, which leads me nicely on to another feature: level scaling. Even though I am a level 80 character, the game scales you down to the recommended level of an area which means the beasts can still be a challenge to kill. I love this feature as it means that when I play with people that are just

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