Everyone is Unique

Once you do get yourself thoroughly comfortable with your
characters, however, there are hosts of options for you to explore
within Sword of the New
World itself. On top of the five classes you
can choose from at the beginning of the game – Fighter,
Scout, Elementalist, Wizard, and Musketeer – there are dozens
of stances within each class for the players to explore.

Stances in Sword
of the New World are another innovation from
the game’s developers. Instead of merely restricting
characters to particular classes based around certain fundamental
concepts of each character, the developers decided to allow each class
to have its own sort of unique “personality”,
insuring that even a group of three Fighters would not be merely the
same character swinging the same sword over and over again. You see,
each Stance has its own way of dealing with certain situations. Stances
also vary from class to class, Elementalists’ stances all
deal with their various magics – Wind, Earth, Fire, Water
– while Scouts can choose between damage dealing and healing,
to name a few examples. Each Stance can be leveled up individually from
a character’s overall level and the every other stance,
meaning a Fighter could be level 15 but only be level 1 in
Bare-Knuckled fighting.

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title="Panfilo the Chef"> src="/image/view/10340/preview"
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Unique Player
Characters, like Panfilo, can be acquired through various means,
including questing.

On top of the various stances, there are also Unique Player
Characters (UPCs) for the players to find or enlist to join their
family. By optioning to go with the MCC system, Kim really tapped into
an area of MMOGs that had gone unnoticed but is a prevalent part of
many single player RPGs: the idea of “recruiting”
characters to join your fighting force. Like I mentioned previously,
players of Sword will have the opportunity to collect various UPCs that
can fight alongside your standard family members. While players can
still play with the characters they have created, the UPCs will present
them with characters with special powers that are a bit different than
what comes with a standard character.

UPCs are typically collected through completing various quests
and missions, and you’ll receive your first UPC fairly early
in the game. Be careful, once you make your UPC you can’t
remake them unless you redo the quest. This can get a bit hairy early
on, as I found out in my barracks. When I first made my squad, I
started with a Fighter, Elementalist, and Musketeer; a group very heavy
on damage. However, playing without a Scout (healer) can be extremely
frustrating, and dying often is not fun at all. However, when I went to
make my Scout I noticed that the final spot in my barracks had been
used by my first UPC, a soldier from the starting town. I continued to
play with my initial three characters, albeit at a slight disadvantage.

For me, although the UPCs often had abilities that surpassed
the regular Stances of my characters, I had a hard time opting to throw
them into my squad. Along with the high price of buying extra barracks
slots – at least at first – it was extremely
difficult to give up a character I had been working on for several
weeks just to put in a UPC that was “better” than
what I had used previously. Although for the high-end PvP game,
it’s almost essential to have a variety of UPCs, for the low
to mid game, I found that my UPC cards would be left unused in my
inventory.

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Opening those extra
character slots is important if you want to collect UPCs.

However, once those extra barracks spots do open up,
it’s a thrill to play with characters that you’ve
grown to know throughout your gameplay. The first time I was able to
use Panfilo the Chef was a terrific moment; Panfilo is one of the
earliest NPCs you meet in the game and has a quirky chef-ish
personality to him. All of the UPCs are well-conceived and have their
own unique look about them, not to mention their unique abilities.

A Beautiful World

Finally, it would be a shame to review style="font-style: italic;">Sword of the New World:
Granado Espada without mentioning the absolutely beautiful
graphics the
team has employed to create the game. In the MMOG world, nothing can
really compare to what K2 Network has brought from across the ocean;
Sword of the New World
stands alone when it comes to sheer graphical
style and panache.