Saga of Ryzom

The French company Nevrax launched Saga of Ryzom last week with little fanfare. Ryzom is an unusual MMORPG, with some very original and creative ideas. But do these add up to a playable game? I checked out the open beta just before release to find out.

The first thing one always notices about a MMORPG is the graphics. Saga of Ryzom is certainly pretty. The landscape looks good, the mobs even better, and the characters are nicely animated. The world does not have the old middle ages fantasy look, but is much more organic. Instead of elves and orcs, we get original races living in a tribal environment as hunter-gatherers.

Saga of Ryzom uses a skill-based system without character classes. The player does not have one character level, but 4 completely separate skill levels, in fighting, magic, crafting and harvesting. Every level you go advance in one of these skills gets you 10 skill points in that discipline. These can be spent at a trainer to purchase either new actions or stats improvements.

The interesting thing with this approach is that you can decide which and how many skills you want to pursue. There are no artificial limits, like in other games, where you can't be good in both melee and magic. There is only the natural limit of your time and effort. Advancing in all four skills is possible, but takes four times as long as specializing in just one.

Combat, by melee or magic, is very similar to many other MMORPG. You double-click on one of your actions to set it to auto-repeat, and go drink a coffee while your character is killing the monster. If you have special actions, you can work those into the combat, making it a bit more interactive. But in general, combat in Ryzom is not very fast, not very interactive, and not very interesting.

After combat you will find that there is no loot in the traditional sense. All monsters are animals, and those don't carry coins or items. You can only loot monster body parts, with a quality level corresponding to the monsters level. These body parts can be used as ingredients for crafting.

Aside from monsters, you can also get resources using the harvesting skill. This is comparatively interesting; there are different harvesting actions to find and then dig for resources. All resources can then be combined with the crafting skill to give weapons and armor. Every single piece of equipment in Saga of Ryzom can be made by players. NPCs sell the same items, but for relatively high prices. NPCs also buy resources at very low prices. So the advantage of trading between players is obvious. Unfortunately, there is no auction house or other automated trading possible; you just have to shout on the trade chat channel.

The big innovation in the different actions for the four skills is that you can design actions yourself, out of so-called stanzas. Whenever you buy a standard action for skill points from a trainer, you also acquire the stanzas this action is made of. Any action is made out of a stanza that describes the basic action, like melee attack, or fire damage spell, plus stanzas that modify that action, for example its range, plus finally the stanzas that determine the cost. Positive modifiers have a positive point value, while costs have a negative point value. You can only make actions in which the negative points are equal or greater than the positive ones. This system is probably most interesting in the design of spells, but the other three disciplines also profit from it.

Saga of Ryzom also has quests, but they are very simple affairs: kill some monsters, bring back some monster parts, harvest some resources, or craft some items. The quest giver NPCs each have a list such quests, and once you took one of them, you will need to wait some time before this specific quest respawns on him.

The game has some unique problems as well. The main problem for anybody who wants to advance in fighting or magic is how to find monsters of the right level to kill. The unusual twist here is that there are not too few monsters, there are too many. Set your radar to the maximum range of 250 meters, which still isn't all that far, and you might well have over 100 mobs showing up. The non-aggressive mobs travel in huge herds, often circled by the aggressive ones, and you can observe occasional fights between them. But while such a big herd consists of mobs of all the same type, they vary in levels over a huge range. You need to click on each individual in the herd before you find the one of the right level for you to kill.

The problem gets even worse if those monsters are new to you, as you have no way of finding out how strong they are. You are told neither their level, nor whether they are stronger or weaker than you, like in other games. Instead the game uses a classification system with adjectives, which are different for each mob type. Your only chance to find out if a "roaming" mob is stronger or weaker than a "wary" one is to attack it, possibly dying if you guessed wrong. Or you look up the information on some website. There was supposed to be a color-coded system as well, but in the open beta it still wasn't working.

It all adds up to a game that is certainly playable, but unfortunately not very exciting. Saga of Ryzom is not a bad game, but it is probably not good enough to stand against the strong competition from all the excellent games that came out or are still expected for this year. In Ryzom, you can grind in four different ways, to four different levels, but beyond that there is no sense of purpose. Nevrax promised a "storyline that matters", but I haven't noticed one. The biggest selling point is the customizable actions, but even they are not all that fun in the end. It is doubtful that Saga of Ryzom will become a big commercial success.

This review also published on Grimmwell.com.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:59 PM Permanent Link