Perfect World

Welcome to the oriental side of the MMO world, where Chinese-made games outmatch brains and brawn against their Korean and Western predecessors. One of which is Wan Mei (Perfect World Co. Ltd.) and one of their grandest opus, Perfect World. Wan Mei’s masterpiece unfolds in a grandiose way, an MMORPG that offers a touch of everything from intimate social interaction to vengeful yet sweet wars. In its grandiosity, the game tries to attain perfection by taking bits and pieces of ideas from different MMOs and mixing them together in an oriental blend, with a dash of their homemade sweetener. And there you were, just yesterday, assuming that the last Chinese myth-based MMO had just washed its cup off of the tea leaves from its last serving.

Perfect Tea Blend

To sum up the story, the god Pan Gu had a vision of creating a perfect world and its inhabitants able to cultivate the perfect land. Thus, he used his powers to cleanse out the forces of evil and formed the land exactly as he had foreseen. In this land, three dominant races emerged, the humans, winged elves and the beast kind. Pan Gu gave these three races the great responsibility of cultivating and caring for the land. But of course, this responsibility isn’t without trouble, for the forces of evil are afoot once again…

And so the story continues as you write your history in the land of Pan Gu. How you set out as the hero depends on how you tread the path of cultivation. With much glee, most of the quests given to you, the hero, contains a bit of the lore and how you play a part in protecting the perfect world. As you become stronger, you will soon come to realize that the land is far more infested by evil than you expected. Pack your bags, shine your weapon, the journey to a Perfect World is within your reach.

Picture Perfect

Perfect World’s realm consists of nothing but an astounding amount of detail. Opulent in nature-inspired colors and oriental design, each area of the map is craftily connected to each other seamlessly. The world seems like it can allow you to travel as far as the eye can see, with the only thing stopping you is an invisible wall on dead ends. Every region consists of something to feast your eyes with, from sheer white snow, to barren sandy wastelands to lush greens and sparkling waters. The sky is also a stunning piece of art, ever changing with the time. Night and day effects are clearly defined, shifting hues of dawn, mid-morning, afternoon, and dusk around the land setting overtones of different moods in different sceneries. Even at the lowest end of the graphics spectrum, you will still find the land of Pan Gu pleasing to the eye.

For NPCs, the opposite can be said though. You can find the almost the same NPC from one town to the next, only renamed to provide adequate distinction from one another. The same model for blacksmiths, guards, teleporters and bankers (the list goes on) is used in every town or major city. Other handful of NPCs are unique for each race or those that give out special quests or part of the story, like the general located in Dragon (Archosaur) City.

The same idea from the NPCs can be applied for monsters. For the most of your trek in the perfect world, you’ll usually fight repaints or resized models of the same mammal, insect, sea creature, elemental or undead. The dungeons have repainted and miniaturized versions of low-level bosses from the field map running around as your elite mobs. You can find a number of unique monster models though, from elite bosses to high-level normal mobs usually located in the extreme sides of the main map, in some dungeons, or in Heaven / Hell.

The realm of Pan Gu is a huge world map, with areas seamlessly connected together. The edges of realm are bordered with an invisible wall. Having presented the land this way paves a great possibility of a map expansion in the future. The map could’ve been bigger though, since it only takes you a short while to traverse one end of the map to the other using a slowest flight item. There are numerous instanced dungeons that are an optional run or a requirement in cultivation. These dungeons have huge maps and still retain the lush and detailed environment that the field map has. However, most of the dungeons compel you to wipe out almost every single monster inside, either because of the monsters’ aggressiveness or because of their placement in the narrow areas of the dungeon. This is hard to do when you’re low on the curative items or when you just want a quick run of the dungeon to finish a quest. 

Sounds complement the perfect world. Calm oriental tones blend in perfectly (no pun intended) with the ambient sounds of nature. The music changes as you constantly move from one area to the next. Gloomy tones entice the ears as you reach the darker depths of the land, and mixes along with rumbles and peals of the earth or the eerie hallowed feeling of a decrepit area. Oftentimes, the calm tones get too repetitive and might sound inappropriate during heavy battles. On some occasions, the music falls silent, especially in dungeons (Dusk Palace being an exception, having one of the most amazing BGMs in-game). There’s no shortage of sound effects either. Your ears will ring from each skill having its own individual sound effect, with only a select few skills having a reused or remixed sound (usually heard in the buff skills). 

Looking Perfect

An amazing feature that Perfect World boasts is the extremely detailed character customization feature. Every aspect of the face and body can be customized to your tastes with the use of the scroll bars that change depth, distance and size of a certain part of the face or body.  You can choose from over 60 hairstyles and hundreds of color possibilities for the skin, eyes, hair and lips. This makes you really unique from one another, and a possible twin in-game is one in a thousand. You can even upload a bitmap image of a face, change the opacity of the picture and recreate an almost exact character clone using the extensive customization features. Of course, there’s the off-chance that you get tired of customizing and instead choose one of the pre-made characters, in which chances of a twin rises up to a high percentage. Sadly, the customizable features are extremely limited when you choose to be a male of the beast race. You’re only given a preset of wolf, panda, tiger, and lion with customizable body sizes and eye colors. In addition to this, the beast race’s animal forms do not actually complement the character’s looks. Even if you’re a male wolf or a deer-bred female beastkind, your animal forms stay as a white tiger or a dazzling fox.

Adding more taste in the customizability of your character is the armor, weapon and fashion looks. Armors and weapons in the game are intricately designed, depending on your tastes and your character build. The chrome aspects of the armor and weapon shine with the light and the appearance becomes more ornate as you progress through higher leveled sets. Weapons have their own distinct design per level too. Also, armors and weapons glow depending on the rarity and the number of stones you socket in it. But, if you think your armor is looking stale, then fashion clothing is the way to go. There are quite a number of fashion articles in the market and the item mall. You can choose a top, a pair of pants, and a pair of shoes (some bracers or wristlets too) to style your character with. Plus, you can search for the colors you want or dye your own clothes to mix and match a vast number of possibilities. 

In Perfect Harmony

Controlling your character can come from the keyboard or the mouse. The game offers WASD movement and/or point-click feature to get your character moving from one place to the next. The game also offers a jump button using the space in the keyboard. Press space twice, you’re your character will perform a double jump, a rare control feature seen in MMORPGs. There’s no autorun button assigned on the keyboard. Alternatively, you can click the horizon and your character will move in a straight line in that direction. It will eventually stop when you stumble upon an obstacle or wall, though there are instances where your character is still perpetually running despite being blocked by a wall or tree.

Flying and swimming is a key movement feature in Perfect World, and controlling your flying or swimming character is as easy as running on solid ground. You can change your direction using the keyboard (Z and Space for diving and rising) or by holding right-click of the mouse. For eye candy, there are individual swimming motions for each race (like frog strokes for the humans). Somehow, the developers forgot to add in the penalty of dying when falling from a high altitude or from drowning, but that’s a good thing. Also, even if you aren’t buying flights from the item mall, you’ll eventually encounter a quest that will give you your free flight item. On the other hand, elves are gifted with wings from the very beginning; though flying is at the cost of MP (other flight items won’t cost you MP anymore).

Shortcuts are available from F1 to F8 and numbers 1 to 6. You can store up to three preset shortcuts and are easily interchangeable. Alternatively, you can expand the shortcuts bar to view all the presets for an easy combination of mouse-clicks and keyboard-presses during combat. You can queue up to three skills / items from the shortcut bar. Sometimes, there’s a lack of response from the game when you start skill spamming. Thankfully, you can macro a group of skills and even set it to loop infinitely until your target dies, you lose MP or your skill’s cooldown is still ticking away.

Learning skills entails money and soul points. You approach a job master and select the skills available for you, paying some money and an extravagant amount of soul points. It doesn’t come cheap, and seems like a discouragement for players who don’t have the time to farm money and soul, or just don’t have enough capabilities to earn enough. Often, you might misinterpret the game as requiring you to become wealthy at an early level just to gain access to the better skills (applies to items and equipments as well). To unlock skills, you need to achieve higher cultivation levels, given as a quest every ten levels or so. Once unlocked, the skills will be ready for purchase at your nearest job master. Other skills might require a certain level or a certain prerequisite skill learned.

To earn your gold, you can turn to the auction house and sell your wares there. You can also bid or buyout items up for sale. The auction house has a search function, by filtering according to a specific type or by the ID number of an item. An option of typing the item name isn’t present, thus forcing you to rely on the filter function, which gets tedious. Alternatively, you can sell your items by setting up your own player shop. A nice touch to the shop is the “buying” section, where you post items you’re willing to buy from other players. This eliminates the tedious process of searching and manually trading others when an offer comes up.

Your inventory shows a simple interface. The upper half shows a window of your equipped armors and weapon, plus a tab of the fashion items you’re currently wearing. The lower half shows two tabs, one for the general loot, and one dedicated purely for quest items. Your bank also shows a simple inventory interface and can store money as well. The inventory and bank slots are expandable by purchasing an expansion slot in the item mall or undertaking a repeatable quest from the nearby banker, a welcome sight for non-paying players.

Trade skills are an important feature in Perfect World. The game offers you blacksmithing, tailoring, pharmacy and ornament-crafting. You can freely learn all these, and are available quests during your early levels. You attain higher levels by crafting a certain number of items per level. Some time later, a quest will appear to further advance your tradeskills. Eventually, you will have the ability to craft holy, dusk or frost palace items. However, harvesting the necessary materials is a tough task. Materials are scattered sparsely throughout the land, and searching for them is a real chore. Others may opt to buy from other players or from the item mall. Other materials or the molds for rare items are dropped at a very low rate from elite mobs and bosses inside dungeons. Along with crafting, you can also upgrade or refine your equipment to attain bonus stats, and also socket them with soul stones, depending on the number of slots available. Just be sure you’re inserting the right stone, because removal entails the loss of the all the stones socketed in the weapon.

Attaining Perfection

Your character build is dependent on the stats you distribute. You are given 5 status points per level to distribute among 4 different stats. All of the equips have a required level and certain points spent on a stat. Some stats are underrated or overestimated. The probabilities and increase bonuses can sometimes be too low or too high and thus your character must rely on stat bonuses provided by the gear you’re wearing.

On the lighter side, interaction with other players is a breeze. You have your own messenger to privately chat with friends, know their current location and level, and even leave offline messages for them. Chat emoticons are aplenty, and there are a set of character actions to perform as well, keeping you entertained. Your friends will also be visible as separately-colored dots on the minimap, to keep track of their whereabouts. Makes you wonder why that tracking function isn’t available for guildmates too?

For the romantic ones, males can “snuggle” or carry a lady in his arms, or ride a white tiger’s back with the lady’s permission. Intimacy goes up a notch with a function to passionately kiss the lady you carry. For the ultimate love experience, a couple (of opposite genders only) can marry. The bonus is a title above your name, revealing who you’re wed with. Bonus mall items can provide rewards such as fame, an added quest or money. Still makes you think why the tracking function isn’t available for your spouse as well?

For those who love PvP, have no fear. The game has an activateable PK function, and is automatically turned on once you hit level 30 (this one-time system-activated PK mode can be immediately turned off; the manual PK activation requires 10 hours in PK mode before the “off” function is enabled). The PK function is not without penalties, take note. For those avoiding penalties, you can challenge players to a duel by right-clicking their name or enter the city arena for some open PvP action and reap rewards from the treasure boxes that might spawn. There are also scheduled territory wars, to settle the score for a clan’s ownership of a certain land. To gain the right to participate, your clan has to bid for that chance. Sad to say, in clan wars, the richest gains the upper hand in bids. If your clan wins ownership, the taxes are yours to earn plus a few more added benefits like high-level potions, higher success rates of upgrading and so on.

To cultivate the perfect hero, quests are an integral part of your journey. NPCs will continually provide you with quests per level, and are visible with a gold-silver-gold marker above them. The quest-givers are also shown on the minimap as a differently-colored dot. The quests comprise killing monsters, gathering quest items, or delivering items from NPC A to NPC B. Some quests are petty whims of the NPCs, others are actually related to the game’s lore, which is definitely a welcome sight for story-driven gamers. Watch out for mistranslations in the text, though. A nice feature in the game is the “Find Quest” button. The function tells you who’s looking for you, along with their map coordinates. You can input these coordinates on the map, a waypoint will be set, and color-coded arrows will show up on your HUD. The marker is visible on both the small and large-scale map, and you can store up to 5 waypoints. This makes it easier for the players to find quests and saves a great amount of time. On the downside, the number of quests per level might not be enough to help you reach the next level. You are still forced to grind your way to higher levels once you’re out of quests, even repeatable ones. 

The game is free-to-play with an item mall to offer a lot of goodies. Fashions, wedding items, flights, mounts, crafting materials, fireworks and restorative amulets are a few of the available items in the mall. On the good side, these are actually tradeable, and players who can’t purchase from the item mall can opt to buy it from respective sellers instead.

Perfection Guaranteed?

Despite being a “Perfect World,” the game has its own irks and troubles. Players might experience in-game delays responding to issuing commands for skills. Other troubles like floating land monsters or sea creatures giving chase on land are trivial annoyances. Lag issues might not fully load up data like player names or inventory contents. Untranslated or mistranslated quests and NPC dialogues are still aplenty, but will be corrected in due time. Bugs like non-responding monsters when assaulted are present, but that’s to the player’s advantage (or abuse). Problems may also arise in dungeons in the form of collision bugs, like players going beyond walls or monsters attacking through walls. The lack of an in-depth tutorial for beginners might turn off players, but the detailed help section can get you going.

Aside from the troubles, the game seems to urge you to be quite rich, seeing that most of the skills and items are tagged expensively. The rich can also dominate in the clan wars during bids, and earn more money through taxes, giving less chance for the small and medium clans to participate fully. Earning in-game can be a chore and might take up more time than leveling your character. A hasty inflation is most likely to happen, and this does not bode well for new players. However, if you can find your way to gain more profits than losses, then this might not be a problem.

To sum it up, Perfect World might not be a perfect game (actually, no game is perfect IMHO), but it can be one of the top contenders in the MMO world. It’s free to play, having hours of gameplay involved, with lots to explore, plus new areas and features (like a proposed housing system) to be added in future expansions. If you’re thinking of an MMO to devote your time with, Perfect World is one recommendation. This game should be on your must-play list.