I will likely check it out, if it goes the free route.

Knowing the Korean game market, however, there is going to be something really dumb about this game.

1. It’s going to have a restrictive skill system. You will either have to jump through hoops to get skills, or you will have limited skill points with little or no way to respec them. Respecing you skills is very much an American invention – most Korean MMOs only allow it as a premium service through cash shops.

2. It’s going to have an exp wall. Many Korean MMOs do not believe about endgame content, and instead make it stupidly hard (if not almost impossible) to reach max level. Many games nowadays try to hide this fact by making the first number of levels (10-50 is a typical number) what an American player would consider easy or average. Then, suddenly, at a certain point in the curve it becomes way harder to level. The goal here is to get American players addicted, then convince them to buy items to make levels easier.

If this game can avoid all the pitfalls of most Korean MMOs, we’ll SEE. Remember, these games are designed for a completely different mindset.

I don’t know what kind of jurisdiction WOTC has worldwide, but when a title that was near-and-dear to this gamer’s heart, FATE, was forced to remove approximately five creatures included in its original release and replace them with renamed and re-textured (read as: godawful) ones, I realized how just how litigious we (Americans) have become as a people.

While I will concede that one of the creatures bore a passing resemblance to a Beholder–the FATE version was called a Watcher–it saddens me that something immediately familiar but ultimately different can be labeled as copyright infringement just because someone else says, “I thought of it first.”

If the Watcher had a half-dozen or more eyestalks and had a critical attack that turned the player into stone then I might give WOTC a little more credit. But it was more an instance of ‘inspired by’ and not ‘based upon.’ Certainly not ‘ripped from.’

Which really sucks, because the act of feeding my pet the fish that would transform him into a Watcher for the remainder of the game has definitely lost its lustre. The ‘replacement’ creature just looks, well…sad, really.

Perhaps because at the end of the day there is really no shame in doing so?

If we start disregarding every game with a more-or-less generic copypaste setting or rehashed play mechanics then we are going to have to start disregarding a whole lot of games.

Shameless copying isn’t something that China’s game industry does in isolation. 5 minutes looking over the shelves in the games section of your local HMV should be enough to convince you of that.

This game might end up being a sucky grindfest, but I doubt that it will be due to it being a run-of-the-mill MMO set in a generic fantasy world.

WOW (particularly at release) didn’t substantially differentiate itself by radically breaking the MMO mold or rewriting fantasy genre conventions.

As for Dragon Nest, it is not an “outrage” by the way, just a little feeling that something isn’t right. It is probably the fact that the whole country and every single industry and manufacturer in it are shamelessly copying foreign products, let it be cars with the of the BMW X5, the Vii in answer to the Wii in the gaming platform and the fact that you can buy pirated copies of almost every single movies on the streets. It is definitely a culture with which I can’t associate in the least, and playing a game like Dragon Nest would be something like encouraging it for me. Dragon Nest has more a “Limbo of the Lost” vibe to it than Warcraft or Starcraft ever had as far as I’m concerned. Again, that is just my opinion and everyone is welcome to disagree or agree with it.

And to add to my previous comment, haven’t I seen a Warcraft Murlock or whatever these frog-like creature are named in this video too?

@Skalpadda: Yeah… I guess. It is probably that orcs have been used in hundreds of different universes, while I don’t recall having seen a Beholder in anything else than D&D. Of course, I’m far from having seen “everything” so they may well have been used somewhere else a couple of times without me knowing.

You mean like.. any Blizzard game? They rip stuff off wholesale, where’s the outrage there?

Also, it doesn’t look like a WoW clone. Other than involving you fighting monsters that occasionally stand about in villages and caves. It actually looks, both in art and action, a lot like FF Crystal Chronicles. Which I kind of enjoyed a little bit, and would have enjoyed more if I could actually play it with people. And I assume there’ll be other people in an MMO. And that not everyone playing will need a Game Boy Advance.