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One of the things that the MCS guys offered the first phase beta test players was that they were given the opportunity to level up to 20 in phase 2. All it needed was finding someone in the game belonging to the support department of MCS. So off I went searching for one of them, well that was easier said then done.
As I live in Europe and they in the states we have a time difference, which results in them being in the late afternoon and me in the dark of the night. To cut a long story short it took me a week to find one of them, but I must say I did not try to find them each and every moment I could. However as usual, right after I eventually found one who instantly leveled me up to 20, I noticed the others from the support department were online as well :-).

Fighting Legends Beta Report, part 3

The Core
As explained before in Fighting Legends there are several zones. Depending on the clan you select you start in a clan specific zone. My Incinerator Gunner belongs to the Pyron clan so I start out in the Pyron zones. The zones are located on planes. With 3 planes there are nine starting zones and also nine clans, each with their pros and cons. You can read more about this in the Online Gamer Diary 5.
Anyway, the planes are connected to each other by means of The Core. In the center of this core there is a circular shaped arena type area which serves many purposes, of which one is to hold events and another to meet other players. From this center three very long strips of land move to the three different planes. I tell you, running from one end to the other takes a very long time, this is how big the core is.
As a player the core is the place to meet others (including support dudes) as it is in general the most crowded area of all.

The core connects the three realms together		The centre of the core

Alliances
Right after I leveled up to 20 I went to my own zone to see what I could achieve all. Upon entering I met another MCS fella (yep suddenly they were everywhere ^_^). He went by the name of "imperialdstroyer" and no the missing 'e' is not a typo. We chatted a bit and he offered me the opportunity to form an alliance with him.
An alliance is one of the RPG elements in the game in which you can group together with an other player or players. Together you will find it much more easy to kill those higher level opponents, before they kill you. Alliances also give you the opportunity to share a priest. And why is this any good you might ask? Well a priest has the ability to heal and as such he can heal anyone in the alliance.
So before I could even start thinking of which member of the clan I would create we were off to the Burning Lands, one of the new zones.

This is [MCS]ImperialDstroyer. He can multiply himself		He can also destroy his clones

The Burning Lands
Each starting zone has a gateway to another zone, which is very much larger than the starting zone is. The Pyron zone led to the Burning Lands zone. A huge area where the soil was black, like it was burned (hmmm would that have anything to do with the name of the zone....) and the rocks looked like they had lava all over them. The opponents you can find here are much tougher than in the zones I've been before, even for a level 20 character. The good thing is that this zone leads again to other zones, although most of those are not working yet in this point in the beta. But as you can calculate for yourself the amount of zones they can make in this way is very large, thus allowing them to create a world that can inhabit many players without it getting to crowded.

Anyway, I discussed with Imperial what the best character was to create, as at level 20 I can create 2, I wanted to make sure that they were some good. He suggested the priest to me for it's healing powers, so after creating the necessary hut (see my previous diary). I started the creation of the Priest and we went off fighting.

The sun burns in the Burning Lands		This dude throws Ice Crystals at us

Imperial is an Incinerator Gunner like me but I noticed that he was not shooting yin&yang bullets like I was, he was shooting huge balls of fire. So we chatted about that and it was something I missed in the level 1 beta. You can learn your character an extra ability, and you need to be level 10 to be able to do that. All I had to do in order to learn the ability is to select it and after a while when enough resources were gathered by my base I would have learned the ability.
So I started fooling around with the few controls there were, doing all kind of stuff wrong with Imperial kindly giving advice without telling me I was a complete moron. Well he was from MCS after all so he can hardly go around calling people names. So to help him out I called myself a moron instead. :-).

We did some more fighting and when I had my new ability working and my priest ready it was time to say goodbye again as he needed to eat and I was almost falling asleep in my chair.

Hey Foot, meet Toe
And there he stood my mighty priest, his head just above my waste and when he was moving he was moving his body from the left to the right in a strange way. It remains a mystery if my priest had any feet. But I suspect he does why else would he be named "Foot".
So I made my little friend a hero, so that he became immortal too and learned him his second ability which gives him his healing powers.

I've pondered about what to create next for a while. Besides creating another priest or gunner, I could create a mage, a melee fighter or a high speed tank. Having some experience with a mage character in the phase 1 Beta I decided for a mage. After a while he was created and born into my tribe and , as the title already gives away, his name was "Toe". Now I'm wondering what the others would be called....

The next time I played I tried out some combat scenarios, in which I placed the three of us in different positions. But soon found out that the best was to have me up front and Foot and Toe a few steps behind me. I would take most of the damage and inflicted the most damage also. Foot, my priest would heal me constantly and Toe would throws his magical balls of fire to the opponent. It worked like a charm and Foot and Toe leveled up really fast.

What's That I'm Hearing?
In the first beta phase there wasn't a single sound coming from Fighting Legends. I've played the game in ME, but I understood that sounds did exist in Win2000. Anyway they exist in ME now also. And some of them are real great. Toe can throw balls of fire to an opponent. These are accompanied with a loud thunder. The only thing that make sure that you're not in the middle of a thunderstorm is that there is no lightning. There are a lot of other cool sound effects and ingame music that is playing every now and then which really gives something extra when playing the game.

What's That I'm Seeing?
On one of the occasions I noticed it was snowing. Snow was coming from above and disappeared in the soil. Although it does add a nice effect to the whole thing, one can wonder why the snow is melting away immediately as the grass was still as green as before and the trees didn't turn white either. It's not a big deal as there are not a lot of games where the weather effects actually influence the game, Fighting Legends is not different from that.
You can also don't get wet from the rain that falls down every now and then. The odd thing however is that it even rains inside the caves :-).
I'm not sure that either rain or snow adds something to the game, but on the other hand it's not bothering me either.

It even rains inside the caves		It sure has gotten colder

Heya Bugsy
As it is a beta you also encounter bugs. That goes without saying I guess (I'm just saying it for when I guessed wrong). One of them was that the gate from burning land back to the Pyron Realm, took me back to the Core. And not just anywhere on the core but in a completely other plane. I ended up right in front of the human gate. As I sad before, it's a bloody long run from one plane to another. But these things happen so I did some running.
To prove I can be a moron sometimes, I decided after a couple of days to head back to the burning lands and try it out again to see if they fixed it. Well they knew about it but nobody from MCS said they did solve it, so..... it wasn't and I could run the whole stretch back again. But as I was in the neighborhood I decided that I might as well visit the clan zones here first, of which there are some screenies below.

Wow! a plant is shooting at me		Nice pussycat... nice...

Up to now there was not a lot to do besides killing in Fighting Legends, but recently they introduced relics, powers and special events. These things are great and enhance playing a lot. With quests being promised as one of the next things the game is shaping up to get a healthy dose of extra RPG stuff in it and that's good in my opinion.