Horizons review

After first offering a free trial for North Americans only, Horizons is now offering a 7-day free trial for Europeans also (bottom of the page I linked to). It's a 1 Gigabyte download, so you better have broadband if you want to try. The American and European versions are running on different servers, and you can currently not cross borders and play with people on another continent. Anyway, I've been playing Horizons for a few days now, enough to give you my opinion of that game.

Horizons is a fantasy MMORPG with a lot of good ideas. There are a range of character classes between which you can switch freely. The tradeskill system is very good. Many details seem to be well thought through. For example, in Horizons you are running faster on a road than on other terrain. Seems obvious, but I don't remember any other MMORPG having this feature. The game economy seems solid enough. Death has a penalty, but it is neither too harsh nor too lenient. All cities have teleport portals, making travel easy. And everybody has the ability to recall, teleporting back to his bind point at any time.

Unfortunately all these good ideas are marred by the rather low quality of the games engine. The graphics are not up to standards of 2004, reminding you more of the first generation games like Everquest. In comparison to recent games like Star Wars Galaxies or Final Fantasy XI, Horizons is definitely ugly. And even if you are willing to cope with graphical glitches and character movements that are downright silly (like running backwards), you are a lot less likely to overlook the horrible lag. Horizons manages to lag even in areas where no other players are present, like the big central city of Tazoon. And if you enter a village where 10 other players are present, you framerate drops into the hardly playable region. You can combat lag by making the graphics even uglier, but even then it is still noticable.

One of the selling points of Horizons is having dragons as a playable race. This is actually rather well done. Dragons don't have the variety of character classes that the other races have, nor do they have the variety of weapons and armor, but they are more powerful than the other races. This makes dragons an ideal race for starting playing Horizons, or even MMORPG in general. It's a bit like MMORPG-lite. And the dragons have the nicest looking character model, although they do look a bit funny when running.

What would keep a more expert player in Horizons for a while is the tradeskill system, which is much better than average. I'd rate it second place behind Star Wars Galaxies, but thats a matter of debate. Crafting itself is probably better in SWG (where the quality of your resources determine the quality of your product), but the related areas of improving crafting skill and game economy are better in Horizons. In Horizons your character has not just one character class, but two: One adventuring class, and one crafting class. Some quests give rewards for both classes at the same time, but usually you advance your adventuring class by killing monsters, and your crafting class by crafting. And you can freely decide to level just your adventuring class, just your crafting class, or both.

Crafting consists of first gathering resources, then transforming them into intermediate resources and final items. Everything in the game is crafted, not only weapons and armor, but also spells (which are curiously crafted out of stone), and player houses. Gathering resources consists of finding an area where the resource is present, like a cedar wood, and then applying your tree axe to the cedars. That will give you 1 or more cedar logs per second, until the resource is depleted and the cedar tree vanishes. Higher level gathering skill gets you more resources per time unit, a high level character can turn the whole forest into grassland in a couple of minutes, but the trees grow back after a while. Resources also often drop as loot from monsters you kill.

To transform the resources into items, you first need the recipe. Recipes are gained by tradeskill quests, or rarely drop from monsters. They can be traded between players, but can not be crafted. Tradeskill quests give you tokens which you can either trade in 1:1 for a random recipe appropriate to your skills, or you can trade in 5 or more tokens for one specific recipe you need. There are hundreds of recipes, it would take you months to collect them all. You can modify the recipes you have by applying techniques (which are gained in a similar way as recipes), which allow you to make your items better, or color your armor. Of course a modified recipe needs different ingredients, like the proper dye if you want to color your armor. So making your first basic items is easy, but with more recipes and techniques it gets more and more complex, keeping the system interesting for a long time.

In comparison to the good tradeskill system, the adventuring system is pretty standard. Quests are mostly random, like "Kill 10 zombies", or "Collect 20 maggot hides". Then you got to where the zombies or maggots are, target them, and hit the attack button. As everywhere else, combat then runs automatically. You can influence the outcome by using special abilities and spells, but once you use them they are unavailable for the next couple of minutes. Spells work just like abilities, there are no mana points.

I don't plan to play Horizons beyond the 7-day free trial. If I wanted to continue, I would need to buy the CD at full price, just to get the CD-key, in spite of already having the full game client installed on my machine. If there would just have been the monthly fee to pay, I would have been tempted to play Horizons until I receive the City of Heroes I pre-ordered.

Horizons is not a bad game. But in a year full of MMORPG releases, including some big budget games, it fails to stand out of the crowd. Would have been great two years ago, but in 2004 it is just another game.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:09 AM Permanent Link