City of Eternals Review

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City of Eternals is a new browser-based, modern vampire MMO from the all-star team, Ohai. The team itself is made up of people with tons of experience in the MMO world, most notably some of the team from the original Everquest. Knowing this, let’s see how it stacks up.

Gameplay

Given that the game is an actual, graphical 2D MMO puts it lightyears ahead of some of its competition. This isn’t another Mafia Wars, or another Ogame. This is a real MMO. It’s broken into zones, but it’s an MMO alright. However, seeing as it’s already got some competiton with Fragoria and Gilfor’s Tales, there’s no telling what will happen. I’m confident, though, that more people will go for City of Eternals, due to its more unique setting. That…and/or the recent Twilight craze.

By the time I had gotten invited, loaded up the game and started out my adventure in New valencia, way back in the days of alpha, there were a few things that had already annoyed me. First off, there’s absolutely no character customization, and even at the time of writing (June 26th) I’ve yet to see this change in the beginning. Everyone starts exactly the same, and the only way to change that that I’ve seen is to get more unique clothing.

Second, the only way to log into the game is Facebook. There’s talk of Twitter integration, but that’s beside the point. The fact that there’s no option to simply create an account that doesn’t use Facbook Connect had me a bit peeved. It also doesn’t help that the game uses your real first name as your character name, and that you can get a basic profile of anyone you see in-game by simply hovering your cursor over their character and waiting for it to load. This profile may simply be your full name, your city/state and your profile picture, and I can see where Ohai is going with this, given that they want it to be a social MMO, but it can easily be a cause for concern in the eyes of a lot of parents (most recently, Blizzard’s RealID seems to have caused similarly dramatic responses from the press).

As far as actual gameplay goes, it’s pretty standard fare. You get a quest, you complete it, you get a reward. To actually start a fight, you just click on the enemy you want to attack, and you fight it. If you want to use a skill, you click the skill icon. There’s not much more to that. You can join a House, or as more people would like to believe, a Coven, but it’s mostly just a badge of who you’re aligned with, based on which House’s beliefs (from the lore) you agree with more. Currently, there’s no faction-based PvP. There’s no quest you have to do, there’s no one you have to see, and your house can be changed on the fly wherever you are.

Actually, believe it or not, there’s no PvP at all. However, seeing as it’s a social MMO, I can see why there isn’t. That’s not to say there isn’t demand for PvP, though, and though I could never get a straight yes or no answer from Ohai on the forums, Susan had responded once saying that they had thought about it before, and that it might happen at some point.

Beyond this, there’s gathering, a rather confusing skill due to daily caps on gathering and the fact that you can only gather in your own backyard, and there’s crafting, which is easily just as confusing at first, due to questionable usefulness. Something that could go either way with people is that your Fighting, Gathering and Crafting levels all level separately.

A few complaints I have about actual gameplay are that, first off, due to the semi-3D nature of the game, and it’s Flash-based engine, the load times are horrendous if you don’t have high-speed internet. Second, the map is tiny. There’s really not much there currently. Hopefully, that will change, but as it stands, the world is horrendously small. Third, the inventory is nowhere near enough and there’s a bug that allows your inventory to overstack, allowing items to be there that you don’t even know are there. Third, though the shops are set up nicely, the development team craftily slipped all of the real-cash items into them, thus giving you false hope. Their usefulness, though relatively arbitrary, such as cosmetics and convenience, are definitely enough to get a bit bothered over, especially since the inventory is so small that convenience turns to need quickly. The fact that you can get up to 150 Ohais simply for inviting people to play does very little to ease this bothered feeling.

My biggest complaint, however, is that despite how simple the interface is supposed to be, that despite how streamlined the interface is, the interface is confusing as hell. It’s as simple as that. There are just too many buttons that new players won’t understand, and that are often simply not labelled well enough.

Another large complaint I have is that, despite all claims that you can customize your house to your liking, I’m having a hard time figuring out how, as well as where to get items to customize your house with, other than the preset figures.

Graphics

The graphics are well done. I’m not going to lie. While not entirely stunning, they’re already way ahead of similar games, and definitely way ahead of the non-graphical browser-based MMOs. Depending on the person, they can add or detract from the experience. For me personally, they add to the experience due to the fact that, despite distinction between certain areas, all of the graphics flow. However, I know how a lot of people are about graphics that look or feel 2D, as well as isometric views.

It should also be noted that the animations annoyed me a bit. Despite being realistically created, they seem to frameskip a lot.

Sound

Sound does its job. There’s not much to say. There’s no background music outside of House Cosca, but there is sound, and it does what it needs to. They aren’t high quality sounds, but they definitely aren’t the worst.

Community

For the longest time, I didn’t know much about the community. I’m sure a lot of people were very hesistant to communicate, so as to try the game out without people doing background checks on them for the longest time. It was only after beta started that Ohai reluctantly created a forum for the community to chit chat with no strings attached. From what I know, the community is pretty cool for a browser game, and there aren’t a whole lot of “annoying Twilight fans”, despite what a lot of people expected. However, I don’t know how long people will stick around. The game can be repetitive and I can say for certain there have been quite a few complaints about the game.

Overall

The game has a lot of room for improvement, but at this point in time, it’s on the right track. I can’t blame the developers for leaving PvP out, but between the interface, the player housing, and the size of the world, there’s a lot left to be desired. They could also do with a desktop client for those of us that don’t like opening our browser to play. At this point in time, it’s doing what it aimed for. I can only hope it can learn to adapt and be more than that, though.