Hero's Journey Preview

The MMO Gamer is offering some impressions of Hero's Journey after seeing Simutronics' MMORPG firsthand at the Leipzig Games Convention.
The game also has something called player services, abilities limited to one per character which help other players. Examples of such abilities are lock picking and identifying. As no character can have more than one player service ability, the developers hope that these sort of player skills will encourage interaction between players. Locks will need to be picked in order to open chests and players with unidentified wyrs will have to have them identified by a player with the appropriate skill to be able to use the wyr's effects.

The game overall has nice graphics and although not in the highest technical league, the game should be able to compete with games coming out this year or next with its atmospheric graphics and very nice particle effects. The UI of the game was also refreshing by being familiar without immediately reminding too much about the interface in World of Warcraft.

What seemed most interesting about Hero's Journey, something that is more likely to interest players than either the number of classes or customization, is the branched quest system. The game's quests can not only be completed, they can also be failed. The former will lead you down one path and the latter will lead you down another. Quests also involves options for the players, our demo character received a quest to deliver a crystal to an NPC and could choose between handing it over, refusing to hand it over and faking knowledge about said crystal. As we opted to not hand the crystal to the NPC, he summoned monsters and killed our character.