Dragon Nest(NA) First Impressions

Dragon Nest is blowing up in popularity, and has amassed a huge following in each place it has landed. The game is developed by a little known company called Eyedentity Games, which actually got purchased by a Chinese company named Shanda Games. The version I got a chance to play was released by Nexon. Suffice to say, I was looking forward to this, since I heard a lot about it from the various staff members at mmosite for a good while. Getting into the game I am greeted with the character selection screen. The first thing that does pop out at me is that the game does gender lock, which if you follow my articles, I am not so much a fan of. It tends to come off as a bit lazy from the developers, and tends to lose some points with some gamers as well. Beyond that however, the selection of classes is fairly basic, giving players four classes to chose from, in my case I went with the Cleric, mostly since it was dubbed a harder class to play, but also I wanted to try a healer to see how it would play out in this setting, but to add a bit more variety for my experiences I also did try the warrior class as well. As for the customization of the characters, it was severely lacking. When trying to personalize my character I found that the options presented were too few, and made it feel a bit empty. Hair color selection is bound to the character classes, so the variety there is heavily lacking as well. Overall at least from this screen, I wasn't really impressed with the game thus far.

Dragon Nest - Character Creation (NA)

Venturing into the actual world itself was a vast improvement, and they did do something I felt was a bit odd. When picking a character the different classes start different locations. The starting point for clerics and sorceresses are the same, but differ from where the swordsmen and archers go. So that was a bit odd. The settings for each starting village are vastly different as well. When I was on my cleric I was brought to an almost winter wonderland, snow covered the area and created almost the feel of being on a mountain peak. On the other hand my warrior's world was green and lush with a more forest/jungle feel to it. Getting into the dungeons on both did bring up a slight concern for me, which is that the variety of monsters seems to mimic each other. By that I mean that the monsters and bosses for different villages are identical but differ just in color, and make it feel like they were just recycling textures and bosses to save on time, which makes me even wonder why they bothered having two starting locations in the first place. How much it changes later on, I don't know, but at least in the beginning it does also come off as a bit lazy on the developer's part.

One thing you may notice, which I did quickly, is that pretty much almost anything in the game is instanced, save for towns. If you leave a town, even before you go into a dungeon, that is all instanced for you group. Personally I liked it in that it kept those areas just for my team and I without people standing outside of each portal spamming that they need a party for it. Though that didn't stop them from doing it in town, at least I was saved from it when I left.