Conquer Online: Behind the Battles

Conquer Online is yet another one of the many MMORPG's that can be found commonly around the net and as such it is no surprise that it is a swordfighting/combat game. The game brings into play five classes: the warrior, trojan, taoist (split into fire and water elements), archers, and the ninja. As one might expect, these five (six including both types of taoists) classes serve to balance power among players and also have their own strengths and weaknesses. Warriors are masters of defense as they employ both a shield and a choice of any one of an array of single handed weapons. They are naturally given the ability to improve their own defense, accuracy, etc. but their most favorable ability by far is a move known as superman (no tights involved) which multiplies your attack power by ten for a set amount of time. Then comes the trojans, wielders of dual weapons that employ mainly offensive skills. They have the ability to heal themselves in battle and are by far the strongest stand alone class of all, despite being the most expensive due to costly equipment. Taoists, as one may guess, are magic users who, despite having the lowest defense around and being extremely difficult to level, are some of the most potent fighters in the long run. Water taoists are given the ability to heal, power up, or even revive other players while taoists focus completely on offense, rivaling the warriors and trojans on a damage basis. It takes no genius to figure out that archers use a bow and arrow to inflict ranged damage, but many may not know that they are, by far, the weakest class of all with regards to physical strength and damage. In the game they have the ability to fly for a short period of time (40 seconds to one minute) and use varying moves like the scatter, which attacks several enemies at once. Now, the final and newest addition to the class lineup is the ninja, another dual wielding class that is limited to the use of twin katanas. These masters of stealth are given the ability to use an attack called the toxic fog, which steadily removes 10-50 percent of the recipients remaining HP.

Aside from the character classes, the game offers players the ability to engage in several quests and holiday events. A system of rebirth is also offered to players who have advanced far enough into the stages of leveling and would like to test out a different class. Players are allowed to create their own houses, get married, or peddle items for a profit though none of these things come without a heavy time consumption. Unfortunately, the graphics of the game can only be described as mediocre at best as all if not most facets of the game's landscaping and audio quality are poor, demonstrating very little effort to character design. The game makes almost no effort to diversify the enemies and the decor as almost all the monsters of a specific area follow a monotonous design and many stale reuses of images are present. Despite this total lack of careful attention to detail, the gameplay serves to balance the bad aspects of the game.

Similar to most any of the modern online games out there, Conquer Online serves as a combat/MMORPG that utilizes a system of leveling to advance in the game. Unfortunately, leveling appears to be the only thing that there is to do in this game as the elements that make the game an RPG are very lacking in plotline fluididty. While playing I have noticed that there are also several, very obvious and yet still very irritating grammar and spelling errors. This may not affect many of the literarily disinclined but personally i found the lack of attentiveness when writing the scripts for the NPCs to be fairly distracting. On another note, though the game is said to be completely free of charge to players it soon becomes apparent that that is not entirely true. To succeed in the game, one must amass the best gear of any other player, or at least the majority, in order to avoid being PK'ed by other players or killed by monsters. Unfortunately, in order to do that people have to either spend a ridiculously long amount of time collecting money to pay for the substantial equipment, or make it themselves by buying Dragonballs online. Due the the game's inner workings, it its quite obvious to anyone playing that, without paying for Dragonballs, it is almost impossible to succeed in many of the greater aspects of the game. To this end TQ's attempt to earn money goes too far as a player who spends six months leveling to level 120 can easily be surpassed in a week by a person who buys a bulk pack of Dragonballs.

Overall, the game is decent and is recommended for those who have no experience in online gaming. The game's decent rating serves only to entice those who don't mind a few flaws in plot and gameplay, nor sparing a few hours or dollars every day to improve your character.