Three Is Better Than One

A Preview of Sword of the
New World: Granado Espada

By Cody
“Micajah” Bye

Free-to-play games are experiencing a tremendous surge of
activity, with Asian developers jumping on the lack of AAA titles from
the North American and European companies to push their own games on
the Western continents. By partnering with publishers like gpotato.com,
Codemasters, igg.com, Acclaim and games&games.com, Korean
developers are making a killing by exporting their games to the West.
However, many of these publishers aren’t taking the time
necessary to prepare these games for the Western market, and they are
washing up on the North American and European shores with shoddily
translated text and horribly unlocalized gameplay.

A company that’s looking to change this habit is K2
Network. Instead of simply porting the game to the States with a flawed
word here and there, K2 Network has been wholly localizing the game,
adding more to character creation, storyline, and adding all sorts of
new material.

When Ten Ton Hammer was given the opportunity to preview style="font-style: italic;">Sword of the New World: Granado
Espada, we graciously accepted and have provided you with
an in-depth preview and some un-cut screenshots for a better view of
what your screen will look like in-game.

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The MCC system is a crucial element of SotNW.

Giving You More Options

Before the details of the game are laid out in this preview,
it’s important that the readers understand a critical element
of the Sword of the New
World
formula. When he was creating the game, Hak Kyu Kim
wanted to give players more choices than what was currently being
offered by Eastern and Western MMOs alike. Taking this into account,
Kim and his team at imcGames created the Multi-Character Control (MCC)
system, an interface that allows you to control three separate
characters and unique characters at once.

Why did Kim create a system like this? In his developer diary
that is featured on Ten Ton Hammer, Kim answers this question in his
own words:

“What inspired the development of the MCC system is
I wanted to deliver what most MMOs were lacking, which is the
opportunity to party play.

When the user wants to party play in the game, they will have
to open several clients to create different characters in one game and
play with all of the characters together.  So, the original
RPG party play problem is solved because users would be required to
form a team with different character roles.”

The MCC system is inherent in almost every aspect of the Sword
of the New World and it is an integral part of the gameplay. Only with
this fact in mind can you grasp the essence of SotNW.

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Character creation allows you to create a whole handful
of characters, like this female Wizard.

You Can Bring A Friend!

When you start the game, you’re presented with a
character creation screen that echoes the rest of the gameplay
you’ll find in Sword
of the New World
, similar, but strikingly different.
Instead of being in a neutral environment of some kind, your character
is actually standing in your family’s
“house”. Your house will serve as an out-of-world
storage point for all of your characters. You can select them from here
and choose which area you’d like to start from.

Like many Asian MMORPGs, Sword
of the New World
initially had a very limited character
creation process. While Asian gamers tend to be more concerned with
achieving unique looks through in-game items or cosmetic improvements,
the Western culture wants to look cool immediately and part of the
localization process in SotNW was enhancing this area of the game.

After playing an Australian version of the client (that
wasn’t published by K2), I can only agree with their decision
to enhance the character creation process. The only choices in the
original version were your character class and your gender.
That’s it. Anything more than this is an improvement and K2
Networks has been ardently trying to improve on this area of the game.

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Traveling in SotNW is always treacherous.

With or without that improvement, you still feel quite content
after creating your characters. Even without a unique face or clothing
type, you aren’t stuck with only one character to play with.
You have a whole family made up of men, women, musketeers, fighters,
and more. This makes a world of difference.

In most other MMORPGs, you rely upon your singular character
to provide you with a sense of uniqueness in the game. style="font-style: italic;">Sword of the New World
takes that concept and turns it on its head. Rather than create one
character “persona”, you create a
“family” where all of your characters are branded
with your selected surname. For example, if you select the name
“Longrunner”, all of your characters will have the
Longrunner surname (Micajah Longrunner, Ethec Longrunner, Boomjack
Longrunner, etc.). To a degree, this takes away some of the sting you
might feel in any other game. Just change out a character if
you’re getting tired of your selected group.

Once you’ve generated your characters (and you can
make quite a large number), you then must select three members of your
family to go into the game world. This decision is as hard or easy as
you want it to be, but you’ll probably find your favorite
combination of characters rather quickly as you determine which class
does the most damage, heals the best, and can take the most punishment.

The classes are broken down as follows: Fighter, Wizard,
Scout, Musketeer, and Elementalist. While some of the classes fall into
particular MMORPG molds (the Fighter is still the toughest character in
the game) they also break those molds to some extent by employing the
stance system.


To read the latest guides, news, and features you can visit our Sword of the New World Game Page.

Last Updated: Mar 29, 2016

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