King of Kings 3: Gods of the Seven Realms
by Mitch Baylosis-Benesa (Syllica)
King of Kings 3 is another brave new entry in the 3D fantasy MMORPG genre. The game takes you to a medieval world where you can become a king of your own land and defeat other realms with your power. King of Kings 3 will not mislead you with claims of new MMORPG features although it proudly bears the tagline “the ultimate PVP and clan war MMORPG”. The question is, does it live up to its promises or will it leave you a bad taste in the mouth
Hotkey Smash!
In King of Kings 3, there are no other races apart from humans whose looks, facial features, hairstyles, and makeup are customizable. You can only choose from three classes at the start of the game: the Warrior, the Mage, and the Cleric-all of which has three subclasses that you can activate when you reach level 50.
Upon learning this, I would have to inwardly cringe and sigh at the thought of having to plod through several levels with but just two to three useful skills for combat before I could expand my skill set. When I look at the skill tree, it looks like a plant that is severely lacking leaves. I did my quests with just a thoughtless skill rotation-if you can call using one spell a rotation-making the leveling experience not only monotonous but boring.
The King of the World
This game touts itself as a PvP-oriented game, with some PvE aspects for character leveling purposes. King of Kings 3’s strength highly depends on its community and its response to its PvP system. To further enforce its PvP is their in-game community feature. One of the game’s main purposes is to allow any player to rise up the ranks from a mere citizen into someone worthy of founding a kingdom. This could be easily construed as a guild, although wars between a guild, legion and kingdom are altogether different concepts. In this aspect, I could say that King of Kings 3 has taken clan wars to another level.
Establishing a kingdom in this game is exactly just as it says. You acquire land, you build a home, create a livelihood, open new opportunities for your guild or kingdom-it’s like playing a browser-based strategy game within the game. Your kingdom can offer a truce to other kingdoms and create alliances with them to be able to attack other kingdoms from the enemy’s realm. With the game’s community feature, you can monitor the various kingdoms around you and compare their relative strength to your own.
Let’s Coordinate
Undeniably, the world of King of Kings 3 is huge. The main town alone has a myriad of NPCs and the buildings are realistically proportionate. All of these NPCs appear on your minimap, and unlike most games, you will not know if a new quest has opened for you unless you pass by the character.
For easy navigation, the minimap is quite peppered with details but not overly so. It has useful features that will let you input which NPC or landmark character you need to find, and it will be marked on your minimap. This should eliminate the pointless running around in the area, or being trolled on the chat for being slow on finding your quest area.
Pressing F would launch this window and allow you to see if there any nearby players whom you can befriend or party with. Aside from that, all the NPCs in the town are listed in one of the tabs and will provide you with not just their coordinates, but also a specific button that will take your character to where that hapless NPC is. Thanks to this I can take a bio break while my character is running from one distant corner to another and she’ll be where I want her to be by the time I’m done. It also takes the tediousness of pressing the forward key or the mouse to lead the character around. Unfortunately with how mindless the questing is, I quickly felt less immersed in the game and more focused on the efficiency of the quest grind. I stopped reading the quest lines and soon became completely oblivious to my purpose in the overarching story.
Graphics Fit for a King
King of Kings 3 has a-forgive me for the bad pun-royally awesome graphics. It is vivid, smooth, and will early on imbibe a solid fantasy world feel. The texture of the environment is clear and there is the kind of depth that I do not normally find in other games. In King of Kings 3, buildings cast shadow on the ground and the bar signs and festive banners blow casually in the breeze. The user interface is quite neat, although sometimes the text boxes are somewhat hard to read because most of the windows tend to pop up in the left side of the screen. I will open my quest log, skill tree, and character screen only to have them pile one on top of the other, becoming entirely unreadable in the process. While its graphics are quite laudable, I couldn’t say much about its sounds which is pretty generic.
Just Get It On
Overall the storyline becomes more of a chore than an epic. There is no sense of urgency or an alarming matter at hand to think of: just get strong, rise up to the challenge, and take over the realms before you end up someone else’s serf. I guess this is very medieval in a sense. On the bright side, this is the type of game that compensates for this weakness with pure PvP action. PvP in King of Kings 3 encompasses not just rated PvP arenas, but regular Player Killing, guild wars, legion wars and kingdom battles. It also offers a dynamic system that lets you raid NPC cities or realms.
In this aspect, King of Kings 3 has presented us with a whole bunch of new options for PvP. However, the experience in itself is quite lacking. Most of the time, players will just use one or two skills in PvP. Watching two ranged players duke it out is terribly unexciting with them just barely moving from their place as they launch their favored spell attack as soon as it comes off cooldown. The combat just lacks the kind of action that you would normally expect from PvP. King of Kings 3 claims and offers the ultimate PvP and clan wars experience: they certainly nailed the later, but their 1vs1 and the like needs a little more spice.
