Perfect World Review

Perfect World Review

Rightio, so this is my review of Perfect World. As promised. My mom played it, and I loved watching her do Territory Wars with her faction (Kamikaze) and I even got to use barb buffs on one of them! When I was younger and before I played, of course.

Anyways, now I have my own account and I play pretty often. I’m in a faction called Rivalz, and we are a level three faction with no territory, although I’ve heard rumors that our leader is planning on entering us in one about a year from now. I have a level 62 Venomancer and a level 47 Cleric, as well as a few others I don’t use.

Onto the review.

Character Creation:

Overall, this is good. You’ve got lots of different hairstyles, although there aren’t many that just “pop,” y’know? You can change the shape of your eyes and nose and mouth and head and stuff, and it’s really a lot like the creation thing in The Sims 3 when it comes to editing your character’s looks. You don’t have a bunch of different outfits, just the one armor set. (And fashion (called “fash” in game for short) if you decide to buy out of the cash shop/boutique.) Fash can also be bought from the auction house for in-game coin and from cat shops in major cities like Archosaur and City of the Lost.

The cons of the creation system are a lack of variety, especially for hair. As a girl, I love having kick ass hair on a character. PWI simply doesn’t have that without the cash shop. Also, it’s hard to get your character to look just right. The sliders work fine when editing the body, but you can never find that perfect shape. Another thing, when editing the breast size (on a female character) it changes your character to have broad shoulder (if you go for bigger boobs) and smaller, frail looking shoulders (if you go for smaller boobs). The color picker also isn’t very good. The colors available are not vibrant, at all. You can’t have flame-red hair or silver eyes. It comes out looking washed-out. I think that if they’d add preset colors (i.e. in The Sims’s style designer, you have little squares under a tab with pre-selected colors.) that it would be much easier to find a half-decent color.

Overall: Character creation could be better, but it’s not bad.

Gameplay:

This part of the game is rather boring, in my opinion. You do the same thing on all classes, minus the parts before you go to Archosaur (The main city). Before that, you’re in your home city (i.e. City of the Lost, Tellus City, City of Raging Tides) and you’re getting used to the game by killing mobs and learning how to auto-path and just work the game in general.

After that, you go to Arch (Archosaur) and do quests for General Summer and The Elder of Archosaur and stuff. More or less flying and killing mobs. Honestly, I’d like to escort some npc to safety or something.

The fun part is the dungeons. You need a squad for most of them (Not sure about you lvl 100+ guys) and this is where you have to play a part. I’ve done damage dealer most of the time, and I like it. It’s the least stressful position to be in. You wait for your tank (usually a barbarian) to get the mob attacking him, and then you hit the thing. You, ideally, take no damage, and the whole thing goes smoothly. The cleric is the most stressful position, as you have to keep everyone alive and are probably dead if you take damage. No one expects you to get hit, and if you do, they don’t notice a lot of the time. Also, if anyone dies, you’re immediately blamed for it. If you let the tank die (even if it’s because you’re healing yourself or someone else) your whole party will probably die. Then it’s all your fault.

However, there is always the option of leveling and then helping low level players. You can make money off of that. Power leveling people (plvl) can bring on 500k coin a lot of the time. If you were to plvl six people, you’d get around 3 million coin. That’s enough for cheap fash in the auction house and cat shops. The higher level you are, the easier it seems to get to play. Low level players see you as a force to be reckoned with.

There is also the option to be “Reawakened.” Once you hit level 105, you can choose to start over with all of your skills and items and run yourself back up to 105. You can do this nine times. There are also people who are overpowered (op). These players can one-shot anyone if they choose to do so, and are extremely useful to have on your side. They are lethal as an enemy, especially in PvP things like duels and nation wars and territory wars.

Also, if someone you trust invites you to join a guild, don’t pass up the offer. (OOOH! Get the reference?)
               Seriously. Join a faction if you can. It’ll help with the gameplay (you’re gonna have questions) and you need people to run dungeons. Plus, it gets lonely without one.

Overall: Boring, unless you play with a group. You are also considered a “noob” and basically useless to levels 80 or 90, and even then you may not be useful since they’ve added a Reawakening system.

Graphics and Game Design:

I have a lot to say here, as I dabble in 3D animation and modeling. The PWI designers were what someone might call lazy in designing this, in my opinion (Could also be that when the game came out graphics weren't great?). I don't mean to insult anyone here. I do understand that it is a large world to design (even on the fastest flying mounts it can take ten or fifteen minutes to cross the map from top to bottom), however you would think that they have a fairly large team working on it. I have looked at what was done when it was designed. It is all basically flat shapes with fancy shading. The wooden stairs in City of the Lost? They aren’t warped like they look. That’s shading on the texture map. The railways on Archosaur’s stairs? Also just a flat surface with good shading. All of those little details are just shading on the texture map, from what I can see. The swords and weapons are flat, and not shaped like swords and axes at all really. For example, the magic sword on my venomancer does not come to a point. The handle isn’t round, either. It’s a rectangle too. It looks like a box. Again, I do understand that it is a big world and it does have a lot of work put into it as is, but if you’re going to do an MMO, why not go all the way with the design? Also, like the character creation, the colors are generally washed out. And the mobs look the same for the most part. Like pokemon. You have the same mobs that you have pre-lvl 30 (for the most part), but they look like they’ve just evolved. I think most of them have the same attacks too.

Overall: Pretty, but it lacks detail.

Community:

In all honesty, I love the PWI community. As a lower level, I didn’t know what I was doing and I needed some serious help to learn how to play. I’m a level 62 and 47 now, still technically a low level but I’m working on it, and after a while of being on the game, I feel comfortable asking people for help. There are almost always factions recruiting, and there are usually the same people on World Chat most of the time. So in a way, you become familiar with them and are comfortable asking them questions.

The players are friendly as hell. I have yet to encounter one who is unwilling to help or is rude, and I adore that. I place a lot of importance on the community of a game, and I’d give PWI’s community five out of five stars. I don’t really have anything bad to say here.

Overall: Great. People are nice and always willing to help.

COMPLETE OVERALL REVIEW:
               PWI is fairly boring in gameplay and it takes a long time to level, but it has a pretty world and armor and an amazing community. The PvP events are lots of fun to do, but for it to be fun, you need to play with people. Join a faction or have a small circle of friends you play with on the game.