The Online Gamer Diary tells the tale of the online gamer and the online games he encounters on his travels. RPGDot wishes you lots of fun with this diary. Feel free to comment, ask questions or suggest new topics on this diary via RPGFool or mail us.

It has been a while since the last diary. My real life has caught up with me and I had to do a lot of other stuff to keep the wife and kids happy also. Anyway I've been playing lineage in the meanwhile and wrapped up a review on that game. And about a week ago I started playing the Fighting Legends Beta. And this is my first edition of a beta report on it.

Fighting Legends Beta Report, part 1

I've presented you with some information about Fighting Legends in my previous Online Gamer Diary. In short it explained that the game takes place in a world named Exisle and that it consists of three circular planes, in which each plane was inhabited by 3 different clans. Well that is where you start out, you can visit other planes and zones in the game of course. Also each clan has 9 different units and you can have up to 16 units in your tribe. To create units you need to have a base and collect resources and when you reach a high enough level you can start creating them. Level?... resources?... Yes this is an online game combining RPG and RTS elements into one. More info can be found in the diary so you could check that out first, or visit the Fighting Legends site.

In the beginning..
So there I was behind the PC with the beta CD in the drive and I started the installation process. It took a while to install all the megabytes of the client, so after pouring me another cup of coffee and drinking half of it, I could launch the client.
From previous experiences with betas I know you can expect anything at these times, so I was ready for anything. However it just came up with the message that it wanted to upgrade my client to a newer version and after installing the couple of megs of new data (yes I'm real happy with my cable connection) the screen went black, then became white and then black again. It took a while to load and I was getting worried, but suddenly there it was the startup screen, after entering all the info I started creating my character. As said before there are 9 of them unfortunately I did not remember them anymore so I switched to Windows and printed the documentation on the CD and looked again at the clan info and switched back. Oops.... now I had a big white screen and nothing happening. I save you all the details but it's not possible at this time to switch back and forth between the Windows desktop and Fighting Legends, at least it's not in Windows ME which I'm running. It's one of those small things that I assume will be fixed at a later stage and not such a big thing either.

So I've started Fighting Legends again and got to the clan selection again. I've decided to select the Bone clan. I'm not sure why but it must have been the fact that "the power of plague fuels their lurching forms to victory now... hoping to infest everything with their own doom.." as stated on the Fighting Legends site that made me think they were a fun bunch to have. So I selected them after which I selected the Lich as my avatar. the Lich is using magic and I happen to like magic.

Then I entered the game and then ...

Entering Fighting Legends
... I found myself in a strange surrounding. Wow, this is a strange world indeed. Fighting Legends has an anime look with Japanese influences and where I am now it just looks strange, but nice. So I wandered about while trying to familiarize me with the controls. Pressing the space bar targets an enemy and left click makes me attack it. How hard can that be? Well it's not hard, so I wandered off trying to kill the first thing I saw, which was a buttbug and easy enough to kill. So I tried killing them all. Even though they were able to hit me also I never really gotten into danger and I managed to kill bug after bug.

I levelled up fast enough and thought it would be great to wander about a bit more an find other things to kill also. And I did find something that threw stuff at me from a large distance and ... killed me. Ok, no problem I knew my avatar had eternal life and could be resurrected. I just didn't have the faintest idea how. Fortunately there was one other player in my zone playing and I asked him. He was kind enough to tell me that I first needed to setup my base before I could get resurrected. So I did that and indeed Myrthos the Lich has risen again.

Take this you.. you.. BUG!
There are a lot of bugs in this zone. No, wait.. not programming bugs. Bugs to kill! They offer a great way to level up easily. As said before by pressing the space bar you target an enemy and by pressing the left mouse key you attack. Ah.. but Myrthos can attack with magic and do this from a distance. After leveling up enough I was able to kill the bugs from a distance with one attack. Something that looked like a lightning flash emitted from my staff and squatted all the bugs I targeted.
However I managed to get things not to work anymore after a while. There was something with pressing the space bar the enter key and my mouse button in some kind of repetitive manner that made the targeting not work anymore. So there I stood and that little bug just kept hacking away at me and managed to kill me. There was nothing else to do but to quit the game and come back again to make everything worked again.

Ok this is a beta, and I'm not worried. As far as a beta goes the whole thing seems very stable. The bugs I killed respawned again at exactly the same location and as I could kill them from a distance I was able to get myself into a position that I was far enough away for them not attacking me and close enough for me to be able to kill them. I was able to level up reasonably quick after that. But as usual getting at higher levels will mean also that the amount of critters you need to kill becomes higher in order to get to the next level. or find yourself higher level monsters to kill of course.

Every hit you make while attacking a monster will give you some experience points. So even if it kills you, you are still able to level up as dying does not cost you anything so you do not loose any of those experience points. I'm not sure if this is good game balance. It seams very favorable to the player and it does allow you to level up real quick. So for all of you who hate the first levels in most online games (like I do) this is a change. You can attack anything you want and still get experience points and don't need to be bothered with dying.

I'm getting there
At the moment I just reached my tenth level, which means I can expand my base and create one extra character and we can both roam this zone. I choose a zombie who is good in melee combat. This is where the RTS part begins, well a little bit at least. You can create an extra character for every tenth level you reach. So one at 10, one at 20, one at 30 etc. When I become level 160 I can have the maximum of 16.

Next time I'll tell you about how the two of us massacred every bug in sight!