By Danny "Ralsu" Gourley



Graphics

4Story
looks like Wow. It has slightly blocky character models with bright but
not childish colors.

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style="font-style: italic;">4Story uses skill
trees like WoW.

The ground does not have massive details, but the draw
distances are pretty good. Spell effects in the early going are decent
as bright flashes of magic energy exploded out of my Wizard toward the
enemy. Combat animations were pretty fluid from what I could see of the
melee fighters in my group. The game is in beta, though, so I saw some
leashing issues with monsters and some pathing issues for players.



Buildings in the starting town for my faction were detailed enough to
create whatever feeling the artists intended (in the case of my town, a
pioneer woodsmen settlement). The overall stylized art direction, like
WoW, prevents anything from looking like real life, instead lending a
feeling of a romanticized caricature.



The
monsters I saw included pumas (young and adult) and werewolves (in two
flavors). Like the character models, their featured stylized graphics
that made what they were clear--but clearly in a game. Dare I say it
again, it was just like WoW.



Game Play

The first
quests my Wizard
encountered were about learning which non-player characters (NPCs) sold
weapons and armor, how to equip gear, who could bind my spirit and what
that even meant (hint: It's just like WoW). Once I got through with
those quests, I was sent to the captain of the guard to report for
patrol duty.



This became my first real challenge in the game
because I could not find the captain or read the cluttered mini-map
well enough to discern his location. On top of that the quest text was
written in such broken English that I could not be sure which direction
I needed to go. I made a sweep through town and ventured outside a bit.
I came back in and made another pass. I finally accidentally found him
standing on the porch of a house, the awning obscuring the question
mark above his head from my view.

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Ralsu found a
friendly party easily.

The captain was portrayed as a man of rotten disposition,
pressured to keep the safety of the townspeople and forced to deal with
an untrained military force (including me). I have no problems with
that somewhat cliche concept, but the execution was lacking because the
translation in the game is horrible in this early stage. I honestly had
trouble following the dialog half the time. The code for making NPCs
say my character name was broken, so I often saw a number sign (#)
where a name would be, but that wasn't the real problem. I just plain
could not understand what I was being told to do some of the time. I'd
just look at the bottom of the dialog box to see what I needed to kill
and get to it.



The captain sent me on to an outpost where I had
to kill a few pumas to prove my worth. The next quest had me fight
werewolves held captive for the purpose of training new recruits like
myself. The spelling here was atrocious, as the quest dialog told me to
kill "catched warewolves."



style="font-weight: bold;">Parting Thoughts

With a solid translation into English style="font-style: italic;">4Story could
pass for some World of
Warcraft
spin off. After only an hour or so, I was already tired of playing the
game because it felt like a colossal grind. After I logged out and
thought about it for a while, I realized that my sense of the grind
could be artificial because the shoddy translation left me without a
clue to the lore behind what I was doing. True, levels seemed to come
slowly, but part of my awareness of the XP curve could be because the
game had no purpose except to kill monsters without a story I could
understand.



4Story
might get a
recommendation from me for people who love WoW if the translation were
better. As it stands now, even being free would not be enough to entice
me to play this game over WoW. With a solid translation, I think
free-to-play gamers could really get into it. But right now, people get
poorly
translated quests that attempt to appeal to some undefined
audience through the use of cursing.