So, the first step on my foray to find awesome F2P MMOs takes me to the self-proclaimed Perfect World. I was at first quite confused as to how a MMO world can be "Perfect", considering you need to kill stuff to level up. Stuff which is bad. Bad stuff makes the world not perfect. Speaking of bad stuff, I was horrified to hear in chat that, while they did a science-breaking job in teaching horses how to speak, the citizens of Perfect World are heartless bastards. I did not wanna know what they were doing to this poor Red horse, so I quickly fled the scene:
But really, in terms of graphics, Perfect World is mighty impressive for a free-to-play, heck, it even competes with some renowned pay-to-play MMOs. As a Werebeast, you start off in a small camp hidden from their capital, the City of Vanished, by a small patch of trees. Why they try to hide the city I have no idea; it provides nice views from the cliffs which surround it and its ground double acts as a cushion in case you lose footing and fall. Hence, City of Vanished is home to Perfect World's suicide rehabilitation centre. From what I have seen, character customisation is little other than +Xing your items, although this does give a glow to your weapons which will amuse you for a while. Despite this, the armour I wore was awesome, considering I was not even in the high levels.
Moving onto sound, the launcher music is a nice authentic Chinese soundtrack, which reminds me – Perfect World is one of the few F2P MMOs I've seen that actually pretty much admits that it's a direct copy of an Eastern F2P. Although this is commendable honesty, it does result in some hilarious Engrish, which I'll cover more in depth later. Staying on topic, the music drastically changes to the most annoying J-Rock track I think I've ever heard. Enjoy the launcher music while you can, and log in ASAP, for the music changes back to its near-epic classical style once you're in game.
Finally we move onto where most F2Ps crumble, the gameplay. The quest system in Perfect World merely a cover up for the largely grinding based levelling system. But hey, it's a direct copy from an Eastern game, so I won't complain. Despite the grind, Perfect World tries to give a challenge by providing certain monsters visible passive abilities - like 'Life Risking Attack', an ability which reduces the foe's life in exchange for an increase in attack. This concept is a nice idea, but has a horrible implementation. Why? The monsters are not challenging as it is. Fighting monsters my own level, as a level 8, should start to be a challenge, but it's not. I even managed to quantify the degree of challenge I faced with an item I received in a quest. This item refilled my health automatically as soon as my health fell below 50%, providing a total of 10,000HP. Only around 300 of this was used up, in 5 levels.
Moving on swiftly from the boredom that is the inevitable grind to the giggle-providing UI, I was told I could press L for help if I was “stucked”. Honestly, I'm sure it wouldn't cost too much to hire a translator to focus on one part of the interface at a time. It's not just the translation though, I was kindly reminded by a system broadcast not to buy ID, you can see this in the video later on, because frankly I'm too lazy to screenshot it again. On top of all that, below is the result of me trying to break out of the low-level equipment situation.
Lastly, I leave you this video to watch, showing an aspect of Perfect World which was probably the most irksome part of the game for me. The jumping.
