Vindictus First Impressions

What North American Players want from MMO Imports By Dominic Strohmeyer Dominic is currently a student and an active participant in the MMO industry. He has worked for the press and has helped out a few gaming companies , and has played nearly every game on the market today.

Vindictus was brought to my attention by a friend who was obsessed with Mabinogi and could not wait for Nexon's newest hit, Vindictus, to be released. Nearly all of the buzz I saw was positive, surrounding Vindictus with a cloud of hype that made it win some pretty large awards so far. Now, the game has been out for a decent amount of time and continues to expand, following in the footsteps of the foreign versions. I have been playing the game for awhile now, and feel that I have given it plenty of time to have an unbiased effect on myself, so here are my first impressions of the game.

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You begin Vindictus with a short tutorial teaching you the basics of combat; attacking and using objects from the environment. While nothing too in-depth is covered, the basic elements truly show how unique of a game Vindictus really is, allowing you to form combos and use destructive pieces of the surrounding scenery to your advantage. Enemies can be grabbed and thrown into walls or off cliffs, or they can be thrown over your shoulder as if you were a wrestler. The game boasts off of the combat since it is a hack-n-slash style online game.

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Once you get into the game you quickly learn the basics. You are in a town that has six main buildings to explore; the forge, the inn, the mercenary outpost, the general store, the magic lab, and the traveler's shop. Each of these buildings is home to different people, each bringing you new quests and stories as you progress through the game. The inn is the hub of the town, featuring the oracle, Tieve. She is the one who at the center of everything, or so it seems from my interactions in the game. Everyone in the town attempts to please her and/or protect her.

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As you progress through the game you do not spend all of your time in the city of Colhen nor the six buildings previously mentioned. When you venture out of Colhen, you will see a line of boats outside docked and ready to be boarded. At the beginning, you only have two options; the fishing boat and the boat to Perilous Ruins. First we will discuss the combat boats. These boats take you around to the world and each have several different missions they can bring you to. Each mission is locked by level and progress requirements, and each boat is controlled in the same manner. The missions appear when you approach the boat, and from there you can change around a few options. First there is the oath of honor, which is an added difficulty to the missions, such as harder monsters or not being able to use potions. Next you can vary both the party size, and the difficulty. The difficult has three modes: regular, hard, and hero. Hero is locked until you reach level 50, and hard simply makes the monsters more difficult and removes health bars from the bosses.

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