by Jeff Francis on Jun 07, 2010
The gameplay in
style="font-style: italic;">Craft of Gods
is a mixed bag of both good and bad. We’ll start with the
good. First, the world is large and you can roam over it at will,
exploring to your heart’s content. There are unique zones for
your hero to adventure in. While character creation related to
appearance is limited, the character system itself is interesting and
kind of a throwback to earlier days. There are no set classes. When
your character levels, you get a few points to distribute amongst your
four attributes. You also gain a point to spend in one of the fourteen
schools. These schools range from Berseker to Necromancy to various
elemental disciplines. Each school has abilities you can purchase for
your character to use and each school emphasizes certain stats.
Your character can also train talents to make them stronger. Talents
can increase your stats, increase your resistance to various things,
and increase your ability with various magic types. You can train every
talent; all it takes is time. The first time you train a talent, it
will increase in 10 minutes. The second time, it will take 10 minutes.
For the third increase, you’re looking at 4 hours, and so on
for higher levels.
The biggest kick for me is the ability to charm any animal and make it
an instant mount to use for your riding pleasure, as long as its level
isnt too high above
you. I charmed my first mount at level 2. Granted,
it was a cow, but at least I was travelling faster than on foot! This
was the most fun part of the game for me.
Now, we look at the bad part of gameplay. First, the UI is ungainly and
impractical. The chat window is situated in the upper right of the
window and the mini-map is located on the bottom right. Fortunately,
you can move the chat window around, but you still
can’t
resize it smaller width-wise. Also, you can’t create tabs
with filters for specific chat channels; you’re stuck with a
tab for chat and one for battle reports. If you want to talk in global
or local, you have to click that tab, which pops up the
‘global’ or ‘local’ command in
the chat window for your use. There are tabs for groups and raids, but
it’s rather cumbersome.
As bad as the chat window is, the mini-map is worse. In fact, it is
practically useless. The only thing the mini-map shows is quest givers.
It does not show enemies, locations of quests, resource nodes, or
anything of real importance. If I could, I would turn it off since it
seems to only exist to taunt me with its uselessness.
Dealing with the quest givers themselves and fulfilling the quests is
cumbersome as well. When you talk to an NPC to get a quest,
you’ll see the title on the far right. You then click the
title of the quest to have the NPC describe it, and then you click
accept or decline. You’ll see other quests that you may not
be high enough level to get, but you won’t know that until
you click on them and then you’ll see “not high
enough level” in red text appear over your character for a
split second. To get the location of any quests, you have to open your
quest journal, click on the quest, and then click “show on
map,” which will open your main map and display some circles,
which appear like sonar pings around the areas you’ll need to
go to. They don’t appear on your mini-map. There’s
also no highlighting of completed quests versus unfinished quests.
You’ll have to manually go through each one to see if
you’ve completed it.
The quests themselves can be frustrating. You may be told to collect
specific items, but not told from which mob they drop. Resource
gathering is a nightmare. (According to the forums, the company is
aware of the problem and is attempting to fix it.) Resource nodes are
extremely hard to pick out from the surrounding terrain. Some resources
may not even be on the same map you’re on, despite the fact
that you received no notice from the quest giver.
Be prepared for some awkward English as you play through the game. The
company’s first language isn’t English, and it
shows in the clunky translations.
Combat itself is uninspiring. It’s basically button mashing
with auto-attack thrown in. The fights themselves are not visually or
audibly interesting, but we’ll discuss that later in the
appropriate sections.
While there are some interesting ideas within the game, there
isn’t much value to be found here. If the game was free to
play, I could see messing around and hoping that a lot of the bugs and
problems mentioned above would be ironed out. The game currently costs
30 US dollars to download (all the prices on the official website are
in Euros). You can buy a month’s subscription for 10.7 US
dollars or you can purchase a single day’s worth of play for
90 cents. Overall, paying real money for a product with all the
irritating gameplay issues that
style="font-style: italic;">Craft of Gods
has doesn’t seem like a wise decision.
Cons: