Chrono Tales Impressions

By Jordan Hall (ApocaRUFF), OnRPG Journalist

Chrono Tales is F2P Browser-based 3D MMORPG. Brought to us by Ray Media Group Limited, it promises innovative features that will set it apart from the competition such as being fully browser-based, offering a detailed pet system and an immersive story. What truly makes it stand out is how easy it is to get in to thanks to being played on the browser. It can be as hardcore or casual as you like.

Character Creation and Customization

I wasn’t expecting much in the realm of character customization when I downloaded Chrono Tales, and because of that I was not disappointed. You can choose one of the five classes: Warrior, Mage, Assassin, Priest, and Scholar. I found scholar to be a lot like the tinkerer class in other MMOs. After choosing your class, you get to choose your character’s gender, select from eleven different faces and nine hair styles. I would have liked to have the ability to choose skin and hair color.

Scholar stood out as the most unique class. That’s why I chose it. The rest of the classes appeared to just be the same old story we get from other MMOs. While other MMOs do have Tinkerer classes, there aren’t many of them. Once in-game I got a look at the character skill tree and I’ve got to say I was not too impressed. There weren’t many skills to choose from and it was on a pretty linear path. You can pick and choose whether you want to upgrade or learn a skill, though.

Outside of skills, other customization options include a refine/upgrade/enchant system where you can change the stats of your armor and weapons. You can also choose from different pets that are available to use as companions in combat or mounts. Improving your pets is also possible. Furthermore there’s an astrology system which can give you some bonuses. Despite Chrono Tales initially feeling like it offers a lot of options, you’ll quickly realize the beginning of the game to be painfully linear. The path to level 20 was just a grind.

The World

Thankfully the grind is alleviated by the world of Chrono Tales being a pretty interesting place. The game starts off with you being thrown two years in to the past to stop a great evil. Along your journey you will come across a wonderful cast of quirky and interesting characters who are made great thanks to the game’s very cartoony art style. That mixed with the bright colors help make up for the overall low quality of the models and textures.

I did notice a few graphical bugs that are slowly being patched out of the game. The bugs that stood out the most were the occasional NPC standing with its arms awkwardly out to its sides or floating high in the air. Localization is still a work in progress.

Give Your Elder a Hug!

Automation

Just about everything is automated. I haven’t actually moved my character or fought anything manually since I got in to the game. All I have to do is click on a quest and it’ll take me exactly where I need to do, start me talking to whoever I need to, and fight anything I need to fight. It’s cool that the game isn’t tedious, but I have to think, “What’s the point?” Why am I even playing if I’m putting in such minimal input. And while I still make some choices, I can’t help but think that this game is closer to a multiplayer visual novel than an MMORPG.

Gameplay

The gameplay in Chrono Tales is pretty traditional. While there are some innovative features, most of what is in the game is no different than what you would find in many other F2P MMOs. You have the usual class line-up, common “kill/collect 15 of X” quest, and bare-bones crafting system. The system that stood out the most to me was the pet system. The thing I disliked the most is also the thing that probably saved the game – the near complete automation.

While the quest objectives are repetitive, the quests in general are pretty enjoyable thanks to a couple of key features. As I already mentioned, the game has an interesting story with some great characters that will pull you in. That added with the completely automated questing makes the game a lot less tedious than it would have been otherwise. And while I did next to no manual combat, even up in to my twenties, the monsters my character fought were quite interesting.

The combat was actually nice. The few times I decided to take over manually and partake in combat myself, I found my Scholar had some pretty neat abilities. My favorite in terms of visual appeal was Gravity Ball, which shot a big spiky ball into the air before slamming into the enemy. In terms of effectiveness, Machine Gun had a very nice DPS output and could be used frequently. Overall though, combat is hardly challenging.

You can gain pets through various means. Pets have two uses. They can be used as mounts to get around with, or to help fight in combat. Pets are not limited to which role they can fill, but sometimes they need to reach a certain level to be able to be mounted or used in combat. If you have a pet summoned while in combat, whether it is being used as a mount or to help you fight, it will gain exp along with you and level up.

There are daily quests, instances and world bosses you can do. Instances are level restricted and you only get so many instance points per day. World bosses respawn regularly, and the person who defeats them gets their name announced on the server as well as listed as the last person to kill it on the world boss page. The ability to quickly teleport to the world boss spawns is quite nice, but there is one big negative. Anyone can participate in the world boss, so you get people who are way over the level of the world boss who come to farm it.

Crafting isn’t too intense, but there are a lot of options for improving items. Socketing, embedding, upgrading, enchanting and more. I only briefly got into the item improving, but it seems pretty straight forward. You get special items which you can then use to improve your items or pets. The more you improve an item, the less chance at success it has the next time.

Conclusion

Chrono Tales isn’t perfect but does well for a browser RPG. The world it takes place in is wonderful, yet the game seems to encourage you to not participate in it. From the completely automated questing to the meditation system which gives you exp when you go AFK, I had to wonder what the designers were thinking. Sometimes I couldn’t help but feel that I would have more fun playing Progress Quest. The biggest redeeming factor was the fun story that made the questing interesting. Chrono Tales is off to a decent start by bringing us what would usually require a client, to our browser. I look forward to seeing how things develop in the future.

Vanguard Saga of Heroes: The Dark Horse Turns 6

By Darren Henderson (DizzyPW), OnRPG Editor-in-Chief

As you may have seen on yesterday’s OnRPG Shotgun News, 1/30/12 marked the monumental 6th anniversary for SOE’s Vanguard Saga of Heroes. Why is it monumvanental you may ask? A title that carried as rocky of a launch as living through the MMO graveyard that was 2012, surviving stiff competition from hyped titles like Diablo III, Guild Wars 2, and TERA is something quite a few older MMORPGs weren’t able to say come the New Year. After reading a scathing review from OnRPG’s local GW2 expert in November I decided to accept a press tour invite to see for myself just what is going on that not only is keeping this game alive after 6 years, but has suddenly prompted an increase in the playerbase in the US.

First Impressions Are Everything

Now back at the time of launch I was a poor college student cooking pizzas at the brick oven at UC Riverside. I couldn’t even afford the quarterly parking fee so playing a B2P game like Vanguard was never even a consideration. For those in the know the Vanguard launch came and went with various issues plaguing the game that badly hurt the retention of the initial playerbase and the game disappeared into the annals of MMORPG history.

As I first logged into the game it occurred to me that I am painfully oblivious to titles that launched during 2007 and so I jumped into the character creation screen to get a feel for what Vanguard is all about. Boy was I in for a surprise when I came across that race/class selection screen. I stared in disbelief at 19 races (each with male and female variants) as well as 15 classes (non-race specific) ready for the choosing. Now granted the graphics in Vanguard aren’t terribly detailed so this amount of selection is still reasonable but when I looked further into the game and saw each race carried unique stat bonuses and skills my first impression left me spellbound. Combined with the detailed customization I felt as if I was preparing my Elder Scrolls Oblivion character. Though I was a bit let down that some of the toggles seemed rather useless or so subtle that I couldn’t for the life of me tell the difference. But as I was called into the press tour things started to make more sense.

The Cancelled Review and Rapid Direction Change

So you might be wondering why the above mentioned review by Merry was never published on OnRPG? Well less than 2 weeks after it was completed, Vanguard made a serious decision to change up their F2P business model in a big way. It seemed Merry was not alone in her hate of their previous F2P model as they followed the outcry of the community to make a more fair system. Rather than punishing free players by denying them housing, many of the races, gold inequality and such, they decided to push their game in a direction where monthly payers received nifty bonuses and free players still had access to all the same content, housing, classes and so forth. This combined with the revamps from a while back including the Isle of Dawn newbie tutorial and merging each faction’s starting location to the best of the bunch helped to build up the community early to improve the all important first impression. Heck before I even spotted my first quest NPC upon logging into the game someone ran by waving and welcoming me into the game. As sad as it is to say, I have never experienced this in an MMORPG before.

The Community and PvE Focus

This initial incident was a sign of things to come. Normally when checking a game out I always enjoy snapping screenshots of people fighting and trolling each other in all chat for comic relief. Did not see any of it during my hour long press tour. It was just people helping people, forming groups, answering questions, giving advice. “Is this really the Internet?” I asked myself. But then I looked deeper into the features and realized the reason Merry hadn’t covered PvP in this title during her review is because there isn’t any. Despite having 3 separate factions there isn’t any combat between them. So while it’s a feature decision that might not be for me, I can see the freedom it offered the designers to only balance classes around PvE elements. The multiple diverse races and insane number of classes now made sense.

The closest thing to flaming I saw in this game were these birds.

However even in a world of PvE when it comes to content focused on raids, inequalities still rise up. The team behind Vanguard mentioned that they are deeply interested in player feedback right now as they are planning reworks of every class in the game to get them up to par with each other starting with the Druid. It seems the rise in playerbase is giving them the resources to finally start patching and updated the game as they have always wanted to so the next year should be a very interesting time in the Vanguard world.

Call me easy to please but I loved watching NPCs cut these trees down. Cool Beans!

The Features that set it Apart

As I played through I noticed a few features not often used in MMORPGs these days that I really enjoyed, perhaps simply because the designers put the effort into adding them when so many others simply don’t put the TLC into their games to do so. The first I noticed and probably the one I was most pleased with was character stats improving based on what happens to the player. If you take damage, you slowly gain resistance towards that damage. Swing a weapon? Get better at swinging that weapon. It’s not a major feature but it does break the monotony of feeling like your character isn’t advancing in the slightest degree until those major level up moments when you suddenly just become a better fight. Kind of breaks the immersion and doesn’t add any fun factor so honestly other MMORPG titles need to get on this.

The diplomacy, crafting, adventurer system also intrigued me. They take it a step further from most profession systems I’ve seen (with maybe the only exception being the eternally stuck in beta testing title Lime Odyssey). To truly master crafting or diplomacy you need to actually collect outfits with bonus stats directed towards improving traits needed in each. This has the nice effect of diplomats actually looking like diplomats and crafters looking like crafters while also offering that extra carrot for players to chase in their goal of becoming the ultimate whatever they always dreamed of being.

The diplomacy functionality is also pretty sweet. It functions like a card game (don’t ask me exactly how. I’m sure there’s more to it than a 1 hour player could figure out) in which you can earn various benefits to yourself and other players in the area depending on your choices. It adds a bit of RP immersion in as well in that you feel there are actually dynamic events occurring in your world that have impact on your character. I know I had 5 or 6 buffs on my level 1 starting character so there are certainly diplomats out there looking out for the giantesses.

The last bit of the game that left a lasting impression on me was the open freedom within the world. You never really feel like you’re fully on a theme park ride as you go through the game. The world is huge and exploration seems like a major part of enjoying yourself in Vanguard. While the game certainly isn’t for everyone, it offers enough different features that I can see a niche in the market that would absolutely love this title if they took the leap and tried it out. And with the anniversary events going on this week and the newly released City of Brass challenges waiting players at end-game, there’s never been a better time to try this game for free.