typenights

Rohan Online is one of the better Free to Play (F2P) games I have had the chance to play. With unique features and other cool upcoming attractions in the following weeks, can YNK Interactive make sure to deliver on the goods and keep this game afloat?

Introduction

Some of you might already be raising your flags in objection to this review. You’re going to give the tiresome argument that this game isn’t even “live” yet, therefore I should not review it. However, I have played more than enough MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) to know that the core elements of a MMORPG never change, what’s true now will be true four years later. The only exception to this rule that comes to mind is Star Wars Galaxy, but we will just leave that alone.

That being said, I play on the server Silva and have a level 40 Dekan (2INT/2VIT) and a level 26 Elf Healer. The Dekan I mainly solo quest and with the healer I try to party as much as possible to understand the dungeon play of this game.

Customization

Nothing too shocking here, as most Free to Play games never excel in this department, character customization in Rohan is non-existent. You get your five or so choices for your character’s face and hair and that’s it.

To add to the lack of customization is that every class in the game shares the same armor. Meaning to say there is no cloth for the magic casters, or plate for the tanks, one armor fits all. So you guessed it, everyone looks the same. You can immediately tell what level range players are in by what they are wearing. Level 40 players for example have a white colored armor, while level 30 players have a reddish/gold scheme.

Classes

There are six races and each race has their own unique class. Here is a simple break down of your choices:

Humans : The natural tanks of the game, can also equip two swords if they prefer to dish out damage.
Half Elves : The archers of the game, specialize in movement impairment snares and long distance damage.
Elves : Healers, simple eh?
Dekans : Primary hard hitting melee damage and tank. In later levels can evolve into a dragon.
Dhans : The rogues. Sneaky, can turn invisible and dish out quick but spiky damage.
Dark Elves : The magic casters.

Player versus Environment : PVE

There are quite a number of quests available per level. None of which are entertaining to say the least. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, you kill X monsters and return to Y person to collect your reward. Forty levels of doing nothing but quests and let me tell you the quests never deviated from this norm. What would relatively be a simple task of killing X amount of monsters is the fact that these quests are scattered all over the place. Just getting to the NPCs that offer the quests can take well over 5 minutes just to get to. I don’t even want to factor the time it takes to go to the area where the monsters you have to kill are even located. Overall it’s really an unnecessary chore and just bad planning. When you hit level 30, you can get a mount, but trust me, the slow trudge of obtaining quests, finding the area, and returning all the way back to the quest giver just does not go away no matter how fast you’re traveling. There are teleports available to help you out, but I was already factoring this in with my rant.

The game is not seamless per say. Dungeons are instanced but the dungeon itself is shared by everyone. Dungeon play basically consists of deciding what types of monsters you want to fight for the next several hours, getting to that spot, then killing monsters while your brain just switches to hibernate mode while you mash your fingers into 2 or 3 buttons while downing Red Bulls till your eyes bleed.

Leveling, The Grind

It’s not pretty. Hopefully they’ll fix it. The grind is one of the major reasons lots of players have decided to “bot.” In my 30s it takes me roughly 5 hours to solo quest a level, I heard people reporting around 8 hours or more in their 50s. These can be alleviated through Cash Shop items that boost your experience gain for a couple of hours, but as you read on, you’ll see my opinion on those. Grinding along with guild mates can also speed up the leveling process and keep you from going insane.

Player versus Player : PVP

Lets get this out in the open first. When you PVP there is a 60% damage reduction on all abilities. However healing is still at 100% efficiency. What does this mean? Well it means killing a healer 1 vs 1 is borderline impossible for you can not dish out enough damage that the healer cannot out heal.

But for mass PVP encounters (Town Wars) this will make sure that PVP is a long drawn out event. It also makes sure that certain hard hitting classes just don’t go around and literally “one shot” opposing enemies, thus they are given a chance to actually retaliate and keep things interesting.

Since this game is not instanced and people do have to fight for boss spawns and hunting territory, expect lots and lots of world PVP. PVP has become common place as guilds start establishing themselves as top dogs and other guilds start to hate the ones at the top. The fact that PVP guilds just love to start some mayhem wherever they are is just feeding to the fire when it comes to PVP.

As for PVP punishments, experience loss was non-existent. I think it’s when you PK (Player Kill) another player your name turns red and you suffer the chance of increased item drop and actual experience loss if you die.

Vengeance System

So you’re hunting by your pretty old self, minding your own business. Then BAM, some jack-ass from thin air is stabbing you from behind. Stab-stab-stab DEAD. Now you’re back in town pissed. But what would you know, Rohan allows you to teleport back instantly so you can kick that guys ass! Hell, maybe you’re too chicken to teleport back because you can’t kill him, don’t fret, for you can teleport an entire party of your bloodthirsty guild mates to help you out! So when he dies, he can teleport back with his guild mates and everyone can have a merry old time killing each other. There is a limit to the number of times you can use this feature though.

Town Wars

These aren’t open yet, but they are the main attraction to why people even play this game. All those countless hours spent grinding in a dungeon are put to use here. These are mass scale PVP encounters. I’m not really sure how they work, but if it is at least 100 vs 100, trust me these will be immensely fun.

Pets and Mounts

I really don’t know what they were smoking when it came to pets. You have to feed the little buggers every hour or it literally dies. No joke, it dies, as in you can never use it again, just chuck it in the garbage at this point. You can revive it however, but that requires, oh jeez, real money from the Cash Shop.

Mounts are slow as balls but at least it didn’t take too long to get it. You get them at level 30. A faster version you can get later for an obscene amount of crones or you can buy one off the Cash Shop.

Forging and Refining

Forging and Refining are unique to Rohan, two very cool features other MMOs should incorporate into their game. Basically Forging is a 50/50 gamble at combining two different weapons or armors. If successful the attributes of both items are combined. It’s very addicting, basically like a gambling addiction if I may say so myself. There is an adrenalin rush to see if your 100,000 crone investment is going to become a godly weapon or evaporate into thin air. Did I mention if your forging fails both your weapons/armors will be destroyed on the spot? Well yeah it does and believe me it sucks sometimes, because for those moments you fail you feel like quitting the game on the spot.

There are two flavors of Refining, Levels and Status. Naturally weapons and armors have level requirements before you can equip them. Level Refining comes into play as it will allow you to lower the level requirements of a weapon in level increments of 1,2, or 3 so you can wear it at much lower levels than it was designed to be worn. It allows impatient players to risk their money to obtain weapons and armors they would have had to wait days or weeks before they could obtain the level to wear it. Status Refining is quite similar as it will lower the stat attributes needed to equip weapons/armors.

Economy and Trading

Rohan does trading right. Players have both the option of placing their loot in an Auction House or make their own personal store in town and sell over night. Because of ever accumulating listing fees of the Auction House some players just choose to make their own personal shops. What’s great though is Rohan allows easy searching of player shops so you don’t have to individually click each shop. Of course the only downside to player shops is that you would have to leave your computer on running for however long you wanted to keep your shop up. Rohan is pretty stable as it will not disconnect you for a long period of time, as I had my personal shop running for 9 hours when I was not at home.

So far, I haven’t had any real problems when it came to obtaining enough crones. The drop rates are pretty fair and with the combination of the forge system and low prices in the Auction House, with a little bit of luck you can craft your own armors without putting a huge dent in your purse.

The Black Market

Sadly to say, the gold farmers are taking over the game and the situation is looking bleak. There is nothing more depressing than watching the same farmer spam your chat screen to buy currency at low prices or pay for power leveling.

The game has these “handcuffs” that you can buy that you can use on botters that display a captcha image. But apparently the bot programs can read and answer whatever it’s suppose to type back or they simply log off the game to remove it and relog back. So the bots run rampant. It’s a fight of attrition, as you can report bots via forums, but they just keep coming back.

International Rohan, not English Rohan

Besides the farmer spamming your chat, be prepared for foreign language spam! Just remember this is not English Rohan, this is International Rohan, so don’t be surprised if you don’t see an ounce of English for hours on end. There are a lot of international players, considering the biggest guilds in my server (Silva) are non-English based, and hell their guild names and guild icons make sure I know so.

Cash Shops

This is still in its infancy stages, so there isn’t a lot of things to buy. The experience scrolls (more experience gained) is a borderline scam. If anyone purchases these things, I don’t know what to say, you’re retarded and please do us a favor and make sure you never reproduce.

But really, YNK’s prices just don’t make sense. There are plenty of things I’d like to buy, but the prices are insane. There are plenty of people on the forums who are more than willing to spend some cash on this game, but not at the current rates YNK thinks they deserve.

I don’t even want to talk about the Exchange Market, the prices other players are listing their virtual goods just blows my mind. More than likely the prices will settle down in the near future.

Graphics

Rohan surely is not going to receive any rewards in the graphics department anytime soon. The texture quality is locked, therefore the game is going to look the best it can the moment you start it up. Sure you have the options of fiddling around with the draw distance and how many characters you want the game to display at a time, but that’s it. There are no options to increase the quality of character textures or the environmental textures. The overall graphics of the game is all over the place. Some areas are just down right ugly, while others seem to impress.

Sound

The music is pretty generic. What really hurts is when the music starts pumping, it only lasts for one minute at most and then it goes back to ambient sounds. Then a couple of minutes later another track might play. This goes on and on and on as you are hunting monsters and let me tell you, the number of tracks the game picks from is so limited that you will be compelled to bust out your own music collection within a matter of hours.

Conclusion

Should you play this game? Well, it couldn’t hurt to try, especially if you’re a cheap bastard. This is one of the games where dumping real cash isn’t really necessary as you could more than make do with what the game provides you with. But overall, if you’re into the typical Korean MMO experience, you might like this game. If you don’t know what the Typical Korean MMO experience is, well think the complete opposite of World of Warcraft. If you haven’t played World of Warcraft, hell give this game a couple of hours, you might like it since you can’t prejudge it.

There are some pretty cool people playing, but you have to delve into the forums and apply to these guilds. Did I mention if you’re not in a guild, you’re going to get bored out of your mind within hours? Yeah, they are pretty integral to the success of your experience.

So overall, the game is pretty solid, despite the horrendous translations and lack of real end game PVP content, but what’s here now is pretty good and getting better and better every week as YNK Games keeps adding onto the game.