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As regular readers of my CT articles may be aware,
back in December I decided to start a new MMORPG:
Horizons! I'd been waiting nearly 4 years for this
game to come out, at times suspecting that it was
really vaporware (indeed, I maintained this belief
until I actually held the game box in my hands).
A lot can change in 4 years, and I'll admit that I
didn't follow the development of the game too closely.
All I needed to know was that it was going to be
really freakin' awesome and have some really cool
playable races (my only other MMORPG experience is my
four-year addiction to UO, which only has humans as a
playable race). Due to staffing changes,
impracticality of some ideas, the demands of the
MMORPG market and other factors which I'm probably
unaware of, the game I purchased was a lot different
than the game I had been waiting for.
Horizons has admittedly been a mixed bag. The game is
beautiful, has great music, and generally friendly
players (in 6 months of playing, I've only been cussed
at once, and that was the only jerk I've enountered).
However, it has bugs galore and a support system which
makes OSI's Game Masters look like they most friendly,
helpful, prompt people in the world. You can't even
get in-game support, which irks me. On the other hand,
the game play is so freaking addictive!
Let's start with the pros of this game. First of all,
as I mentioned before, it looks really nice. It
doesn't look as nice as say, Lineage 2, but it looks
much nicer than UO or EQ. Character customization is
great! I've yet to see another character who looks
even close to identical to either of my main
characters. Characters tend to look pretty nice, too,
unless you purposefully choose garish color
combinations. There is the option, by the way, to make
your character "portly", and you can also adjust your
muscularity and how well "endowed" your female
character is.
Adventuring is fun, but not too unique. It's the
usual "kill the monsters, get the loot" sort of thing.
You can get quests from your adventuring school
trainer and other various NPCs for extra experience
and money, which helps a lot (especially when you're
just starting out). A wise player can go get about 3
or 4 different quests to kill the same type of
monster. Every time you kill one of that monster type,
it counts towards all of your quests. At lower levels
especially, there are also quests such as "Go talk to
this guy in that town". At medium to higher levels,
you'll get quests to kill specific named boss-type
monsters, who tend to be surrounded by lackeys.
The game is definitely geared towards group hunting.
At lower levels you can hunt by yourself no problem,
but beyond that it's best to get a few friends
together. If you're in an actual group with others,
you'll gain bonus "group experience". You'd still get
more experience if you killed the monster by yourself,
but with friends you can take on tougher monsters,
with less resting time in-between. As well, with the
recent addition of multiple enemy bonus experience,
grouping even makes sense for taking on monsters your
own level or below. Each member of your party can be
fighting a monster, and as long as you're all within
sight of each other, everyone will get experience for
killing that monster, plus group experience, plus
multiple enemy experience, PLUS monsters killed by
your group members count towards your quests.
The game is very much level-based. Just about every
item in the game has a minimum level that you have to
be to use it, and it takes a similar crafter level to
create that item. I like this for several reasons. One
is that it means you don't have high-level people
giving their friend who just started the best items in
the game and turning him into "Uber Newbie!!!" on his
first day. Another is that it helps the economy . . .
Every 10 levels or so, you can upgrade to a new armor
or weapon. Since almost everything in the game is
crafted by players, it means there's a lot of money
switching back and forth between characters. While on
the subject of level-basedness, a lot of enhancement
spells (which many gamers will know as "buffs") also
have a minimum level that a character has to be before
the spell can be cast on them. Your experience is also
based on your level vs the monster's level.
The economy seems to be in really good shape on
Horizons. As I mentioned above, almost everything in
the game is crafted by players. There are a few things
you can buy from NPCs, but most of them are much
cheaper and easier to get from players. To make it
easy to find player-crafted items, every town has a
consigner. The consigner will allow you to have 10
items on it at a time, and charges you a 10% fee. You
set whatever price you want on the item. Other players
come by, they can see every item which is on that
consigner, and they can buy it without ever having to
meet you. As soon as they buy it, the money gets
transferred to you, no matter where you are. If you're
on-line, you even get a message telling you the name
of the player and what they purchased. If you're a
good salesman, you can even send them a private
message and ask if there's anything else you can make
for them.
Of course, if you can't find what you need on the
consigner, there's a chat set up specifically for
people looking to buy, sell, and trade items in-game.
And if you still can't find what you need, you can use
the player search option to look for someone on-line
who has the right crafter school and level to make
what you need and ask them if they can help you. Just
the other day I needed new armor for my faerie
berserker (you read that right. Little Pixie, Big
Axe!), but I wanted it custom made in a certain color.
I couldn't find any armor that color on the consigner,
and no one in market chat had the right skills. A
player search found a nice tailor not only willing to
make my armor, but all he asked was that I give him
the dye it took. He then asked if I needed a weapon!
As you can see from that, people on the RP-enforced
shard at least are pretty cool. Back when my husband
and I first started, we'd show up at a spawn area with
monsters which lots of people needed for their quests.
Rather than getting yelled at to leave, we'd usually
end up invited to join their group so we could all
share. In such situations everyone would always ask
"How many more do you need?" and often times the whole
group would stay until everyone had killed as many
monsters as they needed to. As well, I've been in chat
rooms and seen someone say "Help, I died!" or "There's
this nasty monster in my favorite crafting place" and
other players would rush to help.
There's a strong sense of community on Horizons.
There are structures in the game which players can
work on which help the server as a whole (for
instance, bridges leading to new islands, buildings
with crafting machines near rare resources, etc). On
top of that, crafters and adventurers alike have to
work together for things like freeing new races. On
the shard I'm on at least, people work together very
well on whatever new challenge comes up. A few months
ago we were working to free the faerie race, and I
desperately wanted to help. Although my dragon
character didn't have a lot of great skills, they
found something for me (and everyone else who wanted
to help) to do, and no matter how big or small
anyone's contribution was, they were thanked for it
and made to feel welcome in the crowd.
The crafting system on Horizons is a lot of fun as
well. When I go out gathering resources, I just have
to find a resource "node" (vein of metal, tree, stone
outcropping, etc) and start gathering from it. My
character will keep gathering until the node is
depleted, her pack is full, or I tell her to stop. No
more clicking on the node over and over and over
again. Then when I have the resources I need, I go
over to the necessary machine (an ore smelter, or
stone cutter, etc). I can make as many items as I want
to at once, rather than making them all at the same
time. If I don't have quite enough resources, I can
adjust the amount of resources I want to use for it,
but it will lower my chances of success. If I use the
maximum amount of resources, I have a 100% chance. No
more wasted resources from failing to craft items.
My favorite thing about the crafting is the lack of
repetitive clicking. Rather than feeling chained to my
mouse to mine resources, I can set my character to
gathering while I talk with my friends in guild chat
or on ICQ, or I can even get up and get a snack.
Another favorite thing of mine is the variety. There
are so many different items that you can make . . . and
people actually want to buy them! My dragon has made a
fortune crafting spells and selling them on the
consigners. Also, as a crafter you can get quests from
your trainer to make items, and get extra experience
from that.
An offshoot of crafting is construction. Unlike on UO
where you just double clicked a little deed and
there's your house, on Horizons you have to actually
BUILD your house. Building your house requires special
prestige classes and TONS of resources. I've had my
house for a month and a half, and it's only halfway
done (though we did finish building one of the trees
outside). While it's a lot of work to build a house,
it gives you a big sense of accomplishment. And whor-
er, selling your construction skills is also a good
way to make money. Not everyone has an awesome guild
willing to work on their home for free (I do, neener
neener!).
If you have a plot of land zoned for commercial
properties, you can even build your own shop and a
consigner will come live there. If you have a plot of
land zoned for industrial, you can make crafting
buildings with machines (and I believe that craft
skill trainers will move in there). If you make your
land accessible to the public, other players can make
use of these buildings and trainers, and they will
bless your name for helping out the community.
No matter what sort of land you have, plotting out
what you're doing with it is a lot of fun. You get to
bring up a little overview of your land, and add
whatever sort of buildings and items you're zoned for
to it. You can move the items around and rotate them.
And while you're in preview mode, you can see what
they'll look like when they're done. You can even go
walk into the house you're considering and see if you
like the floor plan.
But now, now it's time to move on to the cons. One of
my biggest gripes here is the lousy customer service.
After I quit OSI, I started playing on a player-run UO
shard with an awesome staff of GMs. If you had a
problem in-game, you used the help feature and a GM
would come help you out. Players who broke the rules
got jailed promptly and sometimes even banned from the
game. The staff was also friendly and cool to be
around. So obviously, Horizons as a large company just
couldn't hope to be able to afford to hire as many
cool Game Masters as my UO shard had as volunteers.
The sad thing is, they didn't even try!
If you have a problem in Horizons, you have to load
up your browser, go to the support site, and file a
report. If it's a technical problem, they request an
ungodly amount of technical information. It takes them
a couple of days or a week to get back to you,
depending on the complexity and urgency of the
problem. Usually your response is pretty useless, too,
something along the lines of "We're aware of the
problem and are looking into it."
Now, as I mentioned, I play on a supposed RP-enforced
shard. You're not supposed to talk out of character in
public, and your name is supposed to fit in with a
certain set of rules: no copyrights, no characters
from fantasy books, movies, or other such sources, and
no anachronistic words or references. And obviously,
no names containing offensive words. For the most
part, players are expected to self-police the shard,
asking people to stay in character and stuff. But
obviously we can't change names that break the rules,
so we have to use the support site to report them.
Since using the support site is too much of a pain to
do it every time I see an annoying name, I decided to
start my "List of Death." I put a Post-It on my
monitor, and every time I saw a name that broke the
rules, I put it on my list. When I had 5 names, I sent
them in to the support site.
One of the names which irked me, my husband, and my
friend who plays Horizons on my computer was "Funky
Cool". Two clearly anachronistic slang words. They
went on the list of death. I reported them over a
month and a half ago. Just yesterday, I logged on and
"Funky Cool" was standing there in town. I only hope
that "She Bytch" gets her name changed more quickly.
My own personal pet peeve, which only affects part of
the game populace, is that the Powers That Be at
Horizons won't stop messing around with a little thing
called the dragon hoard. Dragons need their hoard. It
affects their armor class, increases their fire
breath, and it has to be at a minimum level for them
to become adults (dragons start as hatchlings,
eventually become adults, and in the future should be
able to grow to Ancient status). A dragon maintains
its hoard by putting items of value into it. At least
once a month, which items have value and the value of
those items changes! They're striving for the perfect
balance and they've yet to find it. In the meantime,
we dragons have to scramble around and see which items
we have to buy or have made for us to have enough
hoard points.
Horizons takes a long time to load, making it
difficult to log on just to do something real quick
when you only have a few minutes. And it takes an
absolutely ridiculous amount of time to patch!
Whenever there's an update (usually once a week), it
scans EVERY file in your Horizons directory to see if
it has an updated version for you. Then you have to
download the updated files. Every time I patch, I'm
thankful for my nice computer and fast connection.
Up until the past few weeks, there's been practically
NO communication from the developers of the game as to
what the hell is going on behind the scenes. We
finally have communication now, but it may be too
late. The game isn't doing well and they just laid off
a lot of people. I'm sorry, they call it
"restructuring".
As I mentioned in the pros section, Horizons is very
much geared towards group hunting. While that's a good
thing if you have people to hunt with, it really sucks
if you don't. After level 20 or so, it becomes really
difficult to hunt on your own, especially if you're
not a class which can heal. Of course, you can use the
player search function to try to find someone to hunt
with, but that's pretty hit or miss. Whenever somebody
asks me if I want to join their group, I'm already
busy with something else.
A big problem with Horizons, and probably every
MMORPG to ever allow players to have housing, is
there's not enough land! Finally in May they started
repossessing the land of inactive accounts. On the 7th
of every month, the land of every player who hasn't
paid for their account in the past month gets returned
to the community. By the end of the 7th, it's already
all been bought back up and there are still tons of
people wanting land. My guild has been lucky enough to
have 4 plots of land, and by lucky I mean "They have a
player (me) without a day job who gets on and finds
land on the 7th." Most people aren't so lucky.
It's very hard to get a plot of land zoned for
commercial or industrial purposes, so most people
(including those of us in my guild with land) end up
with strictly residential plots. You can build nice
houses, gazebos, fountains, walkways, plants, and
walls on a residential plot. The problem is, your
house serves no purpose other than it helps your
construction class gain levels, and it looks cool.
There's no sort of furniture or other sorts of
decoration for your home. Since one of my favorite
things to do on UO was redecorate my house, this was a
huge disappointment for me.
Other people have been complaining about issues with
lag, but ever since I upgraded my video card and the
Horizons staff made some changes to the combat system,
my lag has been virtually non-existent. Granted, I
have a nice computer and just about the best cable
connection ever. I'd hate to imagine playing on
dial-up, but then again, I don't even like to imagine
reading CT on dial-up!
While the world of Istaria is beautiful, it's also
highly unrealistic. Every NPC in the game is either a
trainer for some class or another, or related to a
quest. And they all stand in one spot and never move.
There are no random townsfolk wandering around, no
children, and no animals (other than the ones related
to crafting skills). It's kind of eery. There are also
no doors. Imagine going to an arctic town and finding
all the buildings open to the freezing wind!
One of the biggest gripes with Horizons is that
they've failed to deliver a lot of things which we
were promised. For instance, there was going to be a
crafting class whose whole purpose was to customize
peoples' weapons and armor with engravings. Not just
stock engravings, you could design your own. Imagine
having a guild where everyone carries a shield with a
custom-designed guild logo emblazoned boldly across
it! Well, unfortunately, immature gamers said "Wow, I
can draw whatever I want . . . Look, I'm gonna put a big
penis on my chest plate! Ain't I clever?" and the idea
was scrapped.
Unfortunately, there's very little image customizing
after character creation. You can't dye or cut your
hair, or go get tattoos or any such thing. You can
purchase dyed armor, but there are only about a dozen
colors, and once your armor is one color, it stays
that color. You can't dye the so-called community
clothing (clothing which serves no purpose other than
making you look cool). Oh, and there's no skirts,
dresses, or robes, and cloaks are all invisible.
A big issue with Horizons is the fact that right now,
many people are worried that it's going under. The
Powers That Be made some poor decisions during the
game's early months, and the corrections they've made
may not be good enough. They've laid off a lot of good
staff, and a lot of players are jumping ship in
anticipation that it's going to sink later. The MMORPG
market is highly competitive, and if people are paying
a monthly fee, they want a good product.
In all fairness, the game has come a long way since I
started playing. It used to be that you'd run into a
town . . . and then wait 2 minutes for the NPCs to load.
NPCs would oftentimes dissapear, leaving you unable to
complete quests. Combat lag was a HUGE problem. The
game was riddled with typos and recycled code. They've
introduced a lot of cool new items, and tried to
balance out some broken classes. When I first started
you were stuck as a hatchling dragon. Now I see adult
dragons all the time, and am on my way to becoming
one. They've added two new races in 6 months. And
there are plans for an expansion pack with new races,
new classes (including, thank god, bards), and fixes
to a lot of problems.
Despite its many flaws and some changes which have
bothered me, I'm still hopelessly addicted to
Horizons. I play for several hours a day, and try to
get all of my friends to play (with some success). All
games have their problems, and the most important
thing is if the game is fun for you. Horizons is a
very fun game. I love going out hunting, I love
crafting, and I love the wonderful guild that we've
put together. As long as the game is still around,
I'll still be playing.
If you play on the Dawn shard, look me up . . . My
characters are Vhalydanya and Nairisha.
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