Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Holic Online

While doing research for the Chronicles of Doryen, I came across this nice MMORPG. It's rather unknown (well I guess so since I had never heard about it until a few days ago) but seems pretty promising.

It has clean manga-style graphics that may not please everyone but it's really a cut above the bulk of
free corean MMORPG. Some details could be the signs of a really good game, like the use of Oblivion's speedtree library for the tree rendering. The usual quick and dirty MMORPG doesn't care about having nice and moving trees.

The user interface is very intuitive and pleasant. If fact, I would even dare to compare it to World of Warcraft's GUI in terms of intuitive-but-powerfulness, with some very nice innovations like tags on the ground in cities to show the direction of the main shops.

I didn't play enough to catch a glimpse of the whole game, but early impres
sions are really good. Of course there are the usual "kill x critters" quests, but WOW has them too. You can upgrade and/or enchant items, there is even a background story which seems much more interresting than the usual MMORPG stuff (in fact the background story of WOW or Guild Wars is so dull that I wouldn't be able to tell anything from them).

And I kept the best bit until the end, it is completely free ! So if you're interrested in MMORPGs and got a not-too-old graphic card, I can only urge you to give it a try :
http://holic.netgame.com/