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.
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Controlling the three
characters requires a combination of mouse and keyboard buttons.
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.
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Learning to move your
characters and hit hotkeys is a skill that is required in late game PvP
matches.
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.
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