Overview

A couple weeks ago I heard that World of Warcraft was having a free 10 day trial/attempt to re-ensnare former users. I played back when it first came out. My server was Proudmoore - one of the eight most troubled servers - and was in one of the first three guilds to take down Ragnaros. Got some of the loot from that first kill, too. I spent about a year and a half pissing my guild off to no end that I wouldn't go Marksmanship on my Beast hunter, and finally left when I realized that I was spending more time developing an add-on than I was actually playing the damn game. I decided to play my way through the trial, and as it ticked down, I realized that I still wanted to do some general MMO'ing. I just didn't want to pay for it. Enter Granado Espada, and their pre-open beta.

Review

After spending about half a day downloading the client - a massive 3.5gig total download - I logged in and set about making my first three characters. That's characters, plural. You see, Granado Espada functions from an interesting premise - the designers wanted to take the feel of MMO'ing back to a more traditional party system base - whether or not you feel like soloing. So, rather than playing a single character for each account, such as in EverQuest or WoW, you control up to three characters - all at once. This is done through using the three major key lines of your keyboard and a reasonably advanced character AI. The first eight keys in each row of letter keys controls your character skills, one row per character. In addition, your characters are smart enough to handle themselves - albeit without the use of skills - if you park 'em somewhere and tell them to kill things.

I'm going to delve into this concept a little deeper before continuing. Take my primary part at the moment. I use a fairly basic Fighter-Musketeer-Scout group - Tank-DPS-Healer. When I'm traveling around, I switch into 'control all' mode, which pipes general commands to all three characters at once. But say, now, that I find a place that looks ripe for the xp'ing. I switch my command scheme into 'individual' mode, and take command of my current 'leader' character - generally either my scout or musketeer, depending on where I'm fighting. My fighter gets put into patrol mode: Run around... Kill Shit. My musketeer gets set into 'Hold' mode: Stand still... Kill anything that gets close. My Scout I also put into patrol mode, as in this game, the healer class actually has some pretty decent DPS, when equipped with a weapon... and when they aren't, they heal automatically.

...Yes, that's right folks... Granado Espada is a game where it is fully possible to park somewhere, and let your characters do all the work for you. They won't pick up loot on their own... but they will kill anything. And everything. And kill, and kill, and kill, and... Lemmie explain something to you, folks. GE isn't really an MMO based around pulling MoBs one or three at a time, and killing them. No... not even close. Remember playing Gauntlet? Remember getting in the middle of four or five enemy generators, and just wailing on 'em for a bit? Triple the spawn rate, and you have 95% of GE's entire combat world. MoBs come fast, furious, and unrelentingly. I've actually set my characters up and watched them kill, absolutely non-stop, for five hours solid while I worked on other things. Not only is AFK leveling an acceptable practice, it's almost expected of you, because the XP is damned slow.

Granado Espada is set in a Baroque-styled world, in which massive numbers of families (single-player groups) are all immigrating to the recently discovered 'New World' from the old countries. Sound familiar, anybody? Yes, the simplest way to describe the setting is 'Settling the American Colonies... with magic.' I mean, that really is the feeling that they've promoted in this game. Your characters are there as pioneers, sent in to tame the new lands in the name of the old world. They've even just started up a new part of the story... the rumblings of a revolution, one that you can join - or fight against. The story world is rich with historical-inspired themes, and thus far I've found it to be considerably deeper than WoW's, and more consistent than EverQuest's.

You start out with five classes to choose from, as suggested above; the warrior, your standard tanker, the elementalist, the high-end area damage dealers, wizards, mid-range damage and buffers, scouts, a combination rogue and healer, and the musketeer, who does awesome single-target damage at range. You also have the ability to gain other 'classes' in the form of Recruitable NPC's, which allows you your own personal copy of some specific NPC's, after you do some quests for them - and beat them in direct combat, after which they join your family. An interesting note is that you can actually trade these RNPC's to other characters if you so choose, as long as you don't make one yourself. Through the course of the game as your family levels up via questing, you are able to have as many as 32 characters to play with.

Individual characters maintain their own EXP pools, and in addition you also have to manage their 'stance' experience. Equipping different weapon types requires learning different 'stances' to use those weapons in. For instance, there are three different stances for using both a sword and a shield at the same time for the warrior, each granting different bonuses to attack/AC depending on which one you're using. Each stance also has different skills, though some skills are part of multiple stances. Killing creatures in one stance levels the stance up, increasing the bonuses received, and unlocking higher-power skills. It sounds more complex than it actually is, folks. One thing that I don't like, however, is that there is no direct way to change from one stance type - sword+shield, for instance - to another - dual-wield, let's say - without manually changing your character's equipment, a process that takes time. Equipment sets would be a very nice addition to the final product, or else making it so that you can double click a different stance to auto-equip the proper weaponry.

The visual experience in Granado Espada is a lush one. The cities are exquisitely detailed, as are the character costumes - remember, these toons are running around in Baroque-styled outfits. Petticoats, multiple-layer skirts, bodices... The options are vast and impressive. This is a good thing, because there is zero allowance for changing the facial features of your base characters. RNPC's of course have their own look, but still... would have liked to see at least some character customization that isn't accomplished through switching equipment. The game world itself is breathtaking, with high attention paid to little details and extremely well made areas. I even have to admit to being surprised that the game doesn't bog down my system, for all the eye candy.

That's not to say that it's not graphically intense, mind you. In fact, one major problem that I've noticed is that, when moving into an area with a lot of monsters - remember folks, the leveling areas are freaking meat grinders - or other players - three characters PER PLAYER - there is a major amount of screen lag while the system loads everything. To be fair, this game is still in pre-open beta status, and I suspect that at least part of the lag is due to the server load... still, if you don't have a pretty meaty system, you're going to want to turn down some of the graphics settings. Something that Granado Espada badly needs is an option to adjust the clipping plane IN GAME.

Granado Espada features a soundtrack with Baroque and Eurobeat styled music. Most of it is fast paced and each area has three or four different pieces that get cycled through. There is a 'jukebox' feature that allows you to change between the current area's music at will, but as of yet there's no support for custom tracks. Overall the music is good, though admittedly after three or four hours grinding in an area you start to get tired of hearing the same themes over and over again. Take the time to listen to the themes at least once, then put the background music volume control to good use and turn on WinAmp.

Overall

How to sum up Granado Espada simply... One word, folks: Casual. There's the standard ability to form groups (squads), guilds (factions) of course, but you ARE your own group... I haven't joined up with anybody else yet, and I've been doing just fine. Death has almost no penalty - you're just out of the action for x amount of time while your characters recover. Granado Espada has to be the single most casually playable MMO that I've ever tried; it makes WoW look like a slave grind. Bear in mind, of course, this is a pre-open beta, especially if you consider playing it... Not only are some things very unstable, but things are subject to change.

Also, I should really mention that this is an MMO that was originally developed for Korean gamers. The interface has been translated in preparation for a release here in the states under the name Sword of the New World, but not completely, and in some cases not well at all. The game is playable, but many of the help screens are cut off mid-text because their windows are spaced for Asian characters, not English, and there are a lot of quirky little things to be found. For instance, when moving from one zone to another, you get the text (Area Name) Moving to. You'd think that it'd be Moving to (Area Name).

I think that this game is worth a shot, folks. I can't call it an MMORPG, though. Actually, it feels almost more like playing a Real Time Strategy, only without the resource management. It's an interesting feel, and certainly a fresh way of playing MMO. As with any MMO, it is a time sink - and I've stared in disbelief at time just vanishing between the time that I sat down and the time I looked up. You might want to look elsewhere if you don't like to multi-task. Even with the advanced character AI, you NEED to tell your characters to use their skills if you want to get the most out of them. Still, a fun game for now, and you can't beat the price of 'free'. During the beta, anyway.