TenTonHammer.com - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

By Danny "Ralsu" Gourley

Perfect World presents a world of magic and high fantasy featuring the Chinese creation myth as its backdrop and leveraging on a rich and diverse oriental setting. Developed by Beijing Perfect World, the game hit Asian markets before landing in North America. I spent some time with the game recently and am ready to share my first impressions with the Ten Ton Hammer audience.

Download and Installation
Before downloading any game, it's always best to check out the system requirements. You can find the minimum requirements for Perfect World below:

Operating System : Windows ME/2000/XP/Vista CPU : Celeron 800MHz and above Memory : 256MB or higher Graphic Display : 32MB Video memory, supports 3D graphic acceleration Sound Card : Support DirectX8.1 or Higher Hard Disk Space : 2.6GB disk space Control Device : Mouse and Keyboard Internet Connection : 56K Dial-Up

Perfect World allows an amazing amount of customization, so your character can truly look how you want.

Gamers cannot download Perfect World directly from the official website. Instead, they must use any of a number of mirror sites. Like Boomjack, I don't think it is a good sign when a company finds it necessary to farm out the hosting of their game. It makes me suspicious of its ability to maintain stable servers during crunch time.

The Perfect World installer downloads at a little over 2.2GB. Installation is simple. Players just specify a directory and the installer takes care of the rest. The frustrating part comes when players try to login for the first time. Not only are gamers required to register at the publisher's site (Cubinet), they also must "activate" the game. All this really requires is following a link to account settings in a auto-generated email that arrives soon after registration. Once logged into the website, players can click a link in their profile page to activate a game and then choose Perfect World. I know it's quibbling, but the extra step seemed so unnecessary to me.

Character Creation
First players choose one of three races: Humans, Winged Elves, and Werebeasts. A player's choice of race also determines his choice of classes and his avatar's gender. Humans can pick Mage or Warrior. Werebeasts can be Werebeast or Werefox. Winged Elves can select Archer or Priest. The choice of race possibly could influence starting statistics also. I did not get a chance to investigate this.

Expect a number of different modes of travel in Perfect World.

But forget the races and the classes (I chose Human Mage in case readers wonder). The important thing is the options to make your character look how you want. It is quite possible that Perfect World has the best character creation options of any game I have ever played. It's difficult to describe just how deep the system is, so I captured a video of it (coming next week). In short, you could make a character with wavy black hair with gray streaks who has big ears and a round belly. To top it off, you can design that character to always raise the left corner of his mouth or cock his right eyebrow, which could be pencil-thin or very bushy. The character creation tools in Perfect World left me with the feeling that I could design real characters rather than a graphical representation of my stats.
 
There's more to Perfect World. Keep reading.