We heard about this great looking Korean-made MMO a few days ago, and wanted to share with you what we found. As with Blade & Soul, this game comes with tons of cool looking features and gameplay, and is basically a massive sandbox game with PvP (100+ people), castle sieges, naval battles, horseback fighting, ship construction, housing, town and castle creation.
It’s still early days in terms of actual gameplay, but this game is one of the most ambitions games we’ve seen in development (where it’s been since 2006), and we’re very interested in seeing how it’s received. Check out the trailers and some gameplay videos below.
Archeage is a new MMORPG in a classic style of fantasy, being developed by XLGames.
You can see open world PvP in Archeage, each player can attack any other player, regardless of their faction. Players will be able to have their own houses, manage the furniture and other useful tools. Guilds can base their own cities and castles, as well as fight for them on sieges. For that, Archeage has a wide variety of siege weapons.
Trailers
Features, Classes and Races:
There will be 3 races in ArcheAge;
- Ferres
- A nomadic race that never stays in one place for long. They are excellent hunters and wield both swords and bows with equal skill. Each member of the tribe owns a tamed snow lion that serves as a mount, a valuable asset, and a lifelong companion. The Ferres will fight for survival at any cost, sometimes even by abandoning their comrades when threatened enough. Still, tales tell of others who have risked their lives for honour. It is this conviction that emboldens them to continue wandering the world, searching for an untouched land to worship and call their own.
- Elves
- Elves live a secluded life in the forest, meditating on the history carved in artifacts they find there. They are envied across the world for their beauty, yet feared for their enigmatic activities. Some Elves wander dangerous lands in search of battle and a glorious death, while others wish only to recover their long lost traditions.
- Nuians
- The progeny of the Goddess Nui, the Nuians seek to preserve and follow their honored traditions. They revere nature and natural beauty and value harmony above all else, but fight fearlessly to protect their beliefs. Some day they hope to see the revival of their collapsing kingdom.
The class system
is based on ten ability sets rather than your standard pre-made classes. Your ‘class’ or more correctly, your role in ArcheAge is based upon the 3 abilities you can pick per character. As an example a Fighter class could be composed of the abilities Combat, Fortification and Will, whilst a Healer could have Will, Devotion and Artistry. Each set of abilities determine which skills you will have access to whilst making your way through the game.
The ten abilities you can chose from are these:
- Combat - focuses on destructive attack skills that can crush many foes at once.
- Conjury - does not deal direct magic damage to enemies, but instead weakens and debilitates them.
- Fortification - boosts your health and defense, allowing you to better protect yourself and your allies.
- Will – is the ability to inflict severe magic damage to your enemies or prevent magic damage to your allies.
- Death - summons the power of the dead to deal strong magic damage to enemies and enables you to cross the border between life and death at will.
- Wild - allows you to chase and kill your enemies with deadly ranged attacks.
- Magic - grants you powerful, traditional magic spells with great versatility.
- Calling - enables you to approach enemies quietly and deal fatal damage through Calling techniques. Calling is very effective in one-to-one combat.
- Artistry - boosts your combat performance by increasing movement speed or recovery speed.
- Devotion - increases the viability of your allies by healing and reviving them.
Ship building and some Naval combat:
House building
Horseback fighting
Castle construction:
Battlegrounds PVP
Skip to 1:05 for the video.
Words
ArcheAge looks and feels like your standard medieval fantasy MMO, and in terms of gameplay it doesn’t bring many new features. What it does do however is a fantasy MMO experience on a massive scale, and actually brings forward an ever-changing world for players to explore and change through PvP, crafting, housing, town and castle building – reminiscent of Shadowbane and Darkfall. The developers promise a community like that of Ultima Online, PvE comparable to World of Warcraft and PvP taken from Lineage 2
The Sieges and Naval battles also look very promising – and the ship construction? Amazing. We do get the feeling that this game is made for a huge player-base however, and we can’t even start imagining how many man-hours each ship and castle will need to build. The game is looking for a release date some time in 2012.
Check out the official site for more information, and check out this great article at mmorpg.com for an impression article from Closed Beta 3 in May. Also check out archeagesource for FAQs and similar. Definitely an MMO we’ll keep an eye on. Let us know what you think in the comments!
