Spiral Knights is a new free MMO developed by "Three Rings", and somehow, Sega's involved in this project, although how exactly, i do not know.
Me, Zach and our friends Shigoto and Pizzacat were in the closed beta. as of earlier this week, the game is live and open to the public. Seeing as i enjoy the game, I'm thinking about making a series of posts detailing aspects of the game for those who are interested in it.
The plot
This game has a particularly original setting:
The race of spiral knights land on the alien world called cradle, and are stranded on it. They have to fend for themselves and so setup an HQ in an old mining outpost.
They soon detect that the core of the planet has an immense energy source, and spiral knights run on energy, thus it's extremely valuable to them.
To access the core, they must make their way into the clockworks, which is a giant subterranean complex, ever changing, that houses bits of different worlds, creatures and treasures.
To enter the clockworks, they create gates that lead into them, powered by crystals found into the clockworks themselves. as a gate is explored, all spiral knights extract the crystals to feed it to a new gate.
The gameplay
The game is almost always compared to "The legend of Zelda: Four swords adventures", and with good reason. Quite often you'll hear people say "Just like in Zelda" when they describe the gameplay, and more.
However, using a keyboard and mouse, the gameplay is more polished. So much in fact, nothing really seems wrong with it at all.
The game is very easy to pick up, mechanics are simple and enjoyable, and off you go.
The monster AI is rather interesting, but perhaps I'll get to that in a later post.
Lag can be of an issue sometimes, but normally it's not. There's rare moments where it's rather heavy and affects gameplay, but i think that's cause they're messing with the servers still.
The one obvious issue
In a word: Energy.
As I mentioned in the plot, These being require energy to operate, and that's also reflected ingame: If your knight has no energy, you cannot go into the clockworks.
That effectively means you can't really play, oh sure, u can hang in town and talk to people, but that's not playing now is it?
So how does one get energy? Excluding buying it with real money, there's a single global auction house where, player who bough energy with real money can sell it in exchange for the ingame currency, which is crowns.
Interesting concept, but almost anyone can see how this could royally fuck up rather quickly.
Even if you haven't played, you're probably thinking it right now: What happens if the players who bought energy with real money sell it high, so high that other players cannot earn crowns to buy energy at a good enough rate to simply keep playing the game? The answer is simple, they can't play.
In the industry it's called "You've fucked it up".
During the closed beta, the price of energy was high, very very high, so high that we could not play the game more than 1 hour a day. even if literally all that you earned went towards buying energy, you couldn't afford it and couldn't play.
Just before the game went live, we who were in the closed beta had early access, and the cost of energy then was wonderful, it was 1200 crowns. We were delighted, we played all day and loved it.
3 days later, Game went live, it rose to 1400-1500 crowns, still very reasonable. As of now, the game has been live for 3 days, and the cost of energy has drastically rose up to 2600+ crowns.
New players already cannot make enough crowns to keep playing and have to wait for energy to regenerate the next day.
It's a really nice game, but they just had to fuck up somewhere.
Me, Zach and our friends Shigoto and Pizzacat were in the closed beta. as of earlier this week, the game is live and open to the public. Seeing as i enjoy the game, I'm thinking about making a series of posts detailing aspects of the game for those who are interested in it.
The plot
This game has a particularly original setting:
The race of spiral knights land on the alien world called cradle, and are stranded on it. They have to fend for themselves and so setup an HQ in an old mining outpost.
They soon detect that the core of the planet has an immense energy source, and spiral knights run on energy, thus it's extremely valuable to them.
To access the core, they must make their way into the clockworks, which is a giant subterranean complex, ever changing, that houses bits of different worlds, creatures and treasures.
To enter the clockworks, they create gates that lead into them, powered by crystals found into the clockworks themselves. as a gate is explored, all spiral knights extract the crystals to feed it to a new gate.
The gameplay
The game is almost always compared to "The legend of Zelda: Four swords adventures", and with good reason. Quite often you'll hear people say "Just like in Zelda" when they describe the gameplay, and more.
However, using a keyboard and mouse, the gameplay is more polished. So much in fact, nothing really seems wrong with it at all.
The game is very easy to pick up, mechanics are simple and enjoyable, and off you go.
The monster AI is rather interesting, but perhaps I'll get to that in a later post.
Lag can be of an issue sometimes, but normally it's not. There's rare moments where it's rather heavy and affects gameplay, but i think that's cause they're messing with the servers still.
The one obvious issue
In a word: Energy.
As I mentioned in the plot, These being require energy to operate, and that's also reflected ingame: If your knight has no energy, you cannot go into the clockworks.
That effectively means you can't really play, oh sure, u can hang in town and talk to people, but that's not playing now is it?
So how does one get energy? Excluding buying it with real money, there's a single global auction house where, player who bough energy with real money can sell it in exchange for the ingame currency, which is crowns.
Interesting concept, but almost anyone can see how this could royally fuck up rather quickly.
Even if you haven't played, you're probably thinking it right now: What happens if the players who bought energy with real money sell it high, so high that other players cannot earn crowns to buy energy at a good enough rate to simply keep playing the game? The answer is simple, they can't play.
In the industry it's called "You've fucked it up".
During the closed beta, the price of energy was high, very very high, so high that we could not play the game more than 1 hour a day. even if literally all that you earned went towards buying energy, you couldn't afford it and couldn't play.
Just before the game went live, we who were in the closed beta had early access, and the cost of energy then was wonderful, it was 1200 crowns. We were delighted, we played all day and loved it.
3 days later, Game went live, it rose to 1400-1500 crowns, still very reasonable. As of now, the game has been live for 3 days, and the cost of energy has drastically rose up to 2600+ crowns.
New players already cannot make enough crowns to keep playing and have to wait for energy to regenerate the next day.
It's a really nice game, but they just had to fuck up somewhere.
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