ChangYou is here at E3 showing off Dragon Oath, their new MMORPG. In this recently released game—taking place in ancient, feudal China—all players start on equal footing. There is only one race, Human, and players don’t choose thier class until level 10. They spend these first levels trying out various class skills, Guild Wars-style, and establishing their stable. The classes are based on magic and martial arts, and contain the typical selections of various rangers, tanks, healers, and DPS. The levels cap out at a suprisingly high 100, and players choose skills in a branching fashion.
ChangYou seems to have a goal of encouraging socialization, so parties with more members get XP bonuses, and guild fights with enough participants can utilize siege weapons. The main objective of these large weapons in combat is to give the lower level, or otherwise low-combat members of the guild something to do, even in battles between the upper echelons of the guilds. The siege weapons can cause devastating amounts of damage to a group of enemies, and may be opperated by any player without penalty or bonus to operation or damage.
Most of the end-game content is also party-oriented, with players joining their guilds and friends on adventures based around daily, weekly, and monthly events in the game-world.
Dragon Oath has an achievement system in the form of titles that players can earn for various accomplishments, ranging from winning streaks to pet strengths—which brings me to one of the most interesting features of the game: husbandry.
As I mentioned players will start a stable in the opening levels of the game. This is accomplished by capturing pets in the wilderness, which must be tamed and then maintained and fed regularly. Pets serve as valuable combat companions, sometimes even meeting or excelling the combat abilities of their masters, making them very important to a character’s survival. The wild animals are all rather similar in statistics and abilities, but they are gendered, and each player has the option of pairing males and females from their stable to generate new pets. Depending on the stats and abilities of the parents, these new pets will become new evolutions of the original animals, with new, more powerful stats and abilities. Like real husbandry, much of the process is chance, but through careful application players could even become in-game breeders, creating new animals from good stock, and selling those pets to other players.
Dragon Oath is already out, and is free to play, so if you don’t mind the somewhat low-tech graphics, you can give it a try now.
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