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At first, the MCC system irked me slightly, because I felt like I was being forced away from doing any sort of RP interaction with my persona. How can you really RP in a game where you’re constantly in control of three characters at once?

This aside, however, I noticed that I had a bit more freedom to create characters with three avatars to work with. As each character has multiple costumes that they can wear, creating three such characters becomes a process that is nearly as time consuming as creating one fully customized character in a standard MMOG.

The concept of controlling three characters at once may seem daunting, but it’s no more difficult than delivering orders to a specific group of units in an RTS game.

Exerting Control

In order for players to understand the uniqueness of the MCC system, a bit of explanation needs to occur. With a standard MMOG like World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings Online, players control their characters movements with the WASD keys and their abilities with mouse-clicking and / or hot key pressing. Controlling three characters in that sort of environment would have been impossible, as obviously a player doesn’t have three hands to move his characters with.

Instead, the developers at Hak Kyu Kim’s company and K2 Network devised a way for players to move and interact with their characters that doesn’t overwhelm the player. Instead of using the standard solution, much of the gameplay and movements has been tailored similarly to what can be found in most modern multi-unit games. By hitting the F1 – F3 keys, players switch between there avatars, while F4 brings the other characters to the selected leader. CTRL-A selects the entire group, but CTRL-Left clicking orders the team to “Assault” an area, meaning they’ll cut through anything in there path to reach their objective.

The developers even included a way for players to still be able to select special powers to use. For example, instead of having a standard hotkey bar, each of the characters special abilities is engaged with a press of a letter key on the keyboard. Your topmost character uses the QWERTY row, the second character the ASDFG row, and the final character the ZXCVB row.

With all of these options, beginning players may feel like they have very little control over what’s going on around them, and it’s probably a fair assumption. It takes a little while to really gather every command that you’ll need to issue to your characters. In fact, I’d recommend playing with a single group of characters for awhile, just to become familiar with the process of hitting your hotkeys and learning the foundations of the game. There’s no reason to get alt-it is (the disease of creating numerous alternate characters) when you already have three characters to play with, so stick with them!

That said, I found the MCC system to be quite intriguing and I spent most of my time reviewing Sword of the New World playing through the game and trying to become skilled at the concept of using special powers with three characters at the same time. At first, I didn’t realize that the hotkeys were each on a different letter row, so I’d constantly throw fireballs instead of healing my characters. Eventually, I got the hang of it and was comfortable engaging in some PvP action.