Nelson Schneider's Game Review of Dragon Nest

Why is This an MMO?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/15/13

“Dragon Nest” (“DN”) is a free-to-play-with-microtransactions MMORPG by the Korean developer, Eyedentity. The Korean and North American servers for the game are operated by a company called Nexon, while other localizations are run by different publishers. I’ve never really been a fan of MMORPGs thanks to the ‘O,’ due to my perpetual horrible Internet situation and chronic aversion to subscription fees. I would never have given “DN” a second look had erstwhile guest blogger and MeltedJoystick videographer, Matt, not chosen it as our staff co-op game. Now, 500 hours and 6 months later, I have found that it is actually possible for an MMORPG to be fun… so long as it is as unlike an MMORPG as possible.

Presentation
“DN” is a fully polygonal game with polygon models that look like they could have been done during the 6th Generation of consoles. However, as a PC game, these lowish-polygon-count models don’t have any jaggies and the textures are far higher resolution than anything that ever saw the light of day during the 6th Generation. Because of this non-intensive graphics engine, “DN” can run on lower-end PCs without cutting edge GPUs, but still looks incredibly good. Character design is anime-inspired, but not obnoxiously anime, as so many 7th Generation single-player RPGs have been. While there is some painful reuse of character models for non-player characters (NPCs), sometimes even for characters that appear in the same town, there is enough variety that all of the really important NPCs have a unique look and a lot of character. Monster design hearkens back to the days when Amano did all of the character and monster designs for the ‘Final Fantasy’ series, and provides the player with a large stable of interesting, creative, and well-animated beasties to kill.

The audio in “DN” is solid as well. While the soundtrack isn’t particularly expansive, all of the tracks are distinctive and pleasing to the ears. The voiceacting mostly consists of greeting quips spouted by NPCs when the player initiates conversation, but there are a few fully-voiced cutscenes as well. All of the voiceacting is well done and helps to solidify the individual personalities of the NPCs (though, as with character models, there are some characters who share voices and comments).

The only significant flaw in “DN’s” presentation is the number of annoying technical bugs that have made their way into the game, yet never seem to get squashed. During my time with the game, I experienced several service outages where the game was abruptly unavailable due to non-scheduled emergency maintenance. I also experienced an ongoing issue with the Steam “DN” launcher giving an ‘authentication server has been shut down’ error because Valve and Nexon couldn’t coordinate correctly. As a Windows 8 user, I also got to experience the joy of a known-but-perpetually-unfixed bug in “DN’s” accompanying “Hackshield” plugin that would randomly boot me from the game to my desktop with the message ‘Speedhack has been detected on this PC,’ despite the fact that I don’t even know what ‘Speedhack’ is, outside of the vague knowledge that it is used by people who like player vs. player (PvP) matches to simulate lag and dodge their opponents’ attacks. As “DN” has continued its existence (it just celebrated its 2-Year Anniversary), new content has been added-on, as is the case with most MMORPGs. However, I noticed that much of the newer content in “DN” is sloppier than the earlier content, with numerous typos in the text and cutscenes with Japanese voiceacting.

Story
“DN” doesn’t try to break a lot of new ground with its narrative. The world of “DN” is a pretty typical fantasy setting, with a single Goddess dreaming the world into being. Also typical of this type of setting, a terrible war, called the Dragon Raid, took place 50 years prior to the events of the game. In the present day, an evil group, called the Dragon Cult, is trying to revive the dragons that nearly laid waste to the city of Saint’s Haven during the Dragon Raid, and have kidnapped a young village girl named Rose. Rose, it seems, is the last existing member of the race of the Ancients, and thus has powers that the Dragon Cultists want to harness for their own ends.

As our intrepid heroes set out from one of two starting towns, they strive to learn the dark secrets of the Dragon Cult, rescue Rose, and defend a handful of cities from encroaching armies of evil creatures, like orcs, kobolds, and gnolls. In addition to the overarching group narrative, each character class has their own particular set of goals, which sometime differ from the rest of the party, and provide the player with some personal stakes in the game. “DN” is currently divided into 5 different story chunks across 9 chapters. The initial story takes place in the starter towns of Mana Ridge and Ironwood Village, introducing the player to the basic concepts of the game and the initial story hooks. At level 10, characters all get lumped together in the town of Cardarock Pass, where they remain for a significant amount of time before moving onto the city of Saint’s Haven, taking an excursion into Lotus Marsh, then returning to Saint’s haven. Each of these towns is filled with interesting characters who provide a large number of sidequests to accompany the relatively small number of main quests. While it is possible to completely ignore the sidequests, doing so is not recommended, as most of the NPC character development and a significant amount of the game’s personality come from these side dalliances.

While normally I’m not a fan of games with tons of MMO-inspired sidequests, the ones in “DN” are all pretty simple affairs that can be completed simultaneously with the main quests, with no long-term grinding for ‘X copies of item Y’ or killing ‘X hundred specimens of monster Z,’ as the MMO stereotype goes. The overall narrative in “DN” can, however, get a little bit lost in the huge number of sidequests, which speaks more poorly of the narrative interest provided by the main quest than it does the number of sidequests. Of course, there are some boring, pointless sidequests available from the notice boards outside of each dungeon entrance (though these suspiciously disappear in the newer content), but these never really provide any interesting story ties to the NPCs or the world at large, so they can be ignored for the most part.

Perhaps my favorite part of “DN’s” story is how self-aware it can be at times. While it doesn’t overtly break the 4th Wall, most of the dialog between player characters and NPCs is filled with wry observations of MMO tropes and plenty of snark. The odd personality quirks of each of the important NPCs really come through in the text, and it’s obvious that the people at Nexon in charge of the translation from Korean to English really know their stuff. “DN” is a game with a great sense of humor threaded throughout its entirety.

Unfortunately, “DN’s” story starts to peter-out the longer it goes. Currently, there is no actual ending to the story. Few of the plot threads have been resolved, and the last story update, instead of resolving anything, added the first part of a significant side-story revolving around one of the character classes. As a result of leaving dangling plot threads and stretching things thinner and thinner as the game ages, the entire experience becomes significantly less interesting toward the end. I’m hoping that the game is able to survive and remain online long enough for the writers to give us the resolutions that the story needs. While “DN” features plenty of limited-time events that provide temporary enticements for players (mostly based around real-world holidays), nothing would motivate me more than learning how the story ends.

Gameplay
“DN” is an MMORPG that doesn’t adopt very many of the features of that genre. While it’s possible to interact with numerous random players in the game’s towns and read a constant stream of ‘tweets’ by other players using Messenger Bird items to search for specific party members or trade specific items, the rest of the game is entirely ‘instanced,’ meaning that, upon leaving town, the game server creates an instance of the dungeon hub areas and the dungeons themselves for each solo character or party of 4 characters. Instancing removes the fear of player killers (though PvP is limited to the Arena anyway) and leeches swooping in to steal loot or experience from other players. Instancing also cuts down on the amount of data the game pushes back and forth between its servers and the player’s game client, keeping lag to a minimum, even on a connection as terrible as mine. It is actually possible to play the entirety of “DN’s” non-optional content as a single player game! The solo-friendly nature of the game left me wondering (mostly during server outages) why “DN” was an MMO at all. Why, when my only interactions were with other people in my Guild (that is to say, Chris, Nick, and Matt) and with random players via the in-game marketplace (both selling stuff I had and didn’t need and buying stuff I needed and didn’t have), was the always-online MMO part of the game necessary when it could have worked perfectly well as a partially-online or online-on-demand game like “Dragon Quest 9?”

Another way in which “DN” is unlike most MMOs is that it is an action/RPG. The player has direct control over their character’s actions in combat, including important things like manual dodging and manually aiming attacks. Critical hits and status effects are still handled by the random number generator, and stats are far more important than reflexes, allowing the game to keep at least a portion of its RPG pedigree, but for the most part it closely resembles a 3D action game or third-person shooter with a trailing camera.

The main way in which “DN” does resemble current MMOs is the fact that combat relies heavily on the use of skills with cooldown timers. While each skill in the game does use an amount of a character’s MP, these amounts are percentage-based, increasing as characters gain more MP (which really makes a high MP stat worthless). MP regenerates slowly over time, making all but the most feverish battles far more reliant on how often a skill can be used than how much it costs to use them.

Combat takes place in linear dungeons that feel less like dungeons and more like the stages in an action game thanks to the prohibition of backtracking and the lack of branching paths. There are a couple of dungeons with branching paths, which are incredibly well done, which leads me to believe that it’s entirely possible within the game engine, but the developers were too lazy to do it often. These dungeons can be played on one of 5 difficulties: Easy, Normal, Hard, Master, and Abyss. I found the entire game to be an absolute cake-walk on any difficulty besides Abyss, and even that was incredibly easy for my particular character to solo up until I reached the level 40 content (the game currently ends with level 60 content). The game also features a handful of super-difficult dungeons, the titular ‘Nests,’ that would typically be referred to as ‘raid’ dungeons in other MMOs. While most of the nests are limited to standard 4-character parties like other dungeons, the actual Dragon Nests require a party between 5 and 8 people, which prevented our group from experiencing the very thing the game was named for. The most questionable result of these linear dungeons is that most main quests and sidequests simply require the player(s) to run through the dungeon, occasionally stopping to click on an important object. Story-related item drops are automatic and guaranteed. Thus the game has a tendency to just send the player(s) through one dungeon after another, which works great in the early game. But in the stretched-thin endgame content, the number of available dungeon entrances drops from around 3 (with each of those 3 dungeon entrances leading to 5 or 6 unique dungeons) to 1, which leads to a lot of needless repetition of the same dungeons over and over and over again, simply because there are fewer locations for the player(s) to go.

When the game first launched, there were 4 playable character classes: Warrior, Sorceress, Archer, and Cleric. Over time, 2 extra classes – Tinkerer and Kali – have been added. In my group, we had Chris as a Kali, Nick as an Archer, Matt as a Cleric, and myself as a Tinkerer. Each class gets to choose a specialization at level 15, then again at level 45, which helps to narrow the character’s skill focus, but also permanently locks out skills from the unchosen specializations. It would be possible to write an entire encyclopedia about the various classes and their specializations, so I’m just going to stick with my thoughts on the Tinkerer: She’s awesome… despite being a loli. Tinkerers use cannons or bubble blasters as their main weapon, with a giant-wrench-swinging powerglove as their off-hand weapon. The first specialization allows a Tinkerer to choose between Alchemy or Engineering. I chose to be an Engineer (then later a Gear Master) because it plays to the Tinkerer’s most over-powered ability: She’s a one-girl army. Early on, a Tinkerer gains the ability to summon a robotic butler named Alfredo, but Engineers gain the added ability to summon robotic ducks (called robo-quackums) and a variety of quackum-piloted stationary gun turrets. The Tinkerer/Engineer’s ability to fill any combat situation with a ridiculous amount of robots makes them an amazing ‘tank’ character, since Alfredo can absorb 600% of the Tinkerer’s HP in damage, then be resummoned immediately if he’s ever (rarely) killed, and the quackums and turrets provide numerous other distractions to enemies. Even better, every one of the Tinkerer/Engineer’s robots attacks autonomously and most of them have competent AI, making them effective in combat as set-and-forget sources of damage that can be deployed far away from there the player-controlled characters are actually standing, making the Tinkerer/Engineer a great ‘DPS’ character to boot. I know that I easily had the most powerful character in my group, since I was breezing through early game dungeons by myself that the other guys couldn’t handle and was able to tough it out and complete difficult end-game daily quests by myself as well. But when it comes down to it, I was never really ‘by myself,’ but always had Alfredo and an army of insane robotic ducks to back me up. I think the disposable nature of all of the Tinkerer/Engineer’s robot sidekicks makes them far better than the AI sidekicks in other games because if they do something stupid and get killed, there’s always another one ready replace them.

The loot system in “DN” is pretty laid-back. The in-game economy operates on a copper-based system, with 100 coppers equal to 1 silver and 100 silvers equal to 1 gold. Each character can wear 7 pieces of equipment (and 7 pieces of ‘costume’ equipment that can be purchased from the NX Cash Shop via microtransactions) and 4 pieces of jewelry (not to mention ‘costume’ jewelry and a handful of ‘costume’ accessories, like wings). While there is a large variety in jewelry drops, normal equipment only comes in 6 color-coded flavors for each of the game’s various level caps. Normal equipment (white) is worthless and can be purchased from any blacksmith for a little bit of money; magic equipment (green) can be randomly dropped in Easy to Master difficulty dungeons; rare equipment (blue) can be randomly dropped in Abyss dungeons; epic (orange) equipment can be randomly awarded at the end of an Abyss dungeon (generic), exchanged for tradable items acquired by doing daily quests (generic), or crafted out of readily-available bits of random junk (sets); unique (purple) equipment can be randomly awarded at the end of ‘raid’ nests; and legendary (red) equipment can be randomly awarded at the end of hell mode ‘raid’ nests. Epic loot is the only level that has any variety, as there are multiple sets of epic loot that grant bonuses for wearing multiple pieces from the same set, making them far more desirable than generic epic gear. Regardless, gear of any given rarity starts out identical, only changing when a player improves it themselves.

In addition loot quality, it’s possible to use the blacksmiths to enhance equipment to various degrees. By spending in-game money and gemstones, it’s possible to add Dungeons & Dragons style ‘plusses’ to equipment, making it more powerful (though it’s possible for this process to fail). It’s also possible to spend in-game money and specific combinations of random junk to add ‘suffixes’ to gear, that add significant stat boosts and special abilities that almost never trigger (thus suffixes are only ever used for the stats). The influence of luck in “DN’s” crafting system is limited to the random success/failure of the blacksmith adding plusses. For the most part, while luck can occasionally speed things along, getting good gear in “DN” is just a matter of putting in the time to do daily quests. Much like the post Gold/Silver games in the ‘Pokemon’ series, “DN” constantly keeps track of time (despite having no day/night cycle in-game), and allows certain quests at each major level cap to be completed on a daily basis. These daily quests always reward the player with an item that can be accumulated, then exchanged as currency for crafting materials, among other things. While it can be somewhat tedious saving up daily rewards to buy crafting materials, I find this system far superior to systems that randomly drop a wide variety of variable-quality loot, as those systems tend to not reward the amount of time a player puts into the game, allowing some players to have godlike equipment with no effort or screwing other players with crap rewards despite a huge investment of effort.

The biggest flaw in “DN’s” gameplay is the integration of microtransactions. While the entire game is free to play and I ‘only’ bought about $35 worth of microtransactions, there is potential within the game to spend hideous amounts of money to do simple things. For example, when enhancing equipment with extra plusses, once a piece reaches +6, it becomes possible for the blacksmith to break the piece on subsequent enhancement attempts, destroying it completely and removing it from the character’s inventory… UNLESS the player coughs up real money to buy ‘NX’ points to spend on Item Protection Jellies in the NX Cash Shop. It also becomes hideously tedious to pick up the tiny amounts of copper dropped in dungeons manually, thus any player who has played the game for more than a few hours will want a pet to vacuum up loot for them… but pets must be purchased with NX (outside of a few giveaways for promotional events), AND pets only last 30 days before they need to be revived… which is another microtransaction (though it is at least possible to revive a pet for a meager 7 days with an item that can be purchase with daily tradable items… but it costs 10 of them). Using the marketplace to sell in-game items for in-game gold is also incredibly limited without a market pass… which is a microtransaction and only lasts a week. As if this integration of important features of the game with microtransations wasn’t bad enough, the NX Cash Shop supports two different ‘types’ of NX: NX Credit can be purchased with a credit card or Steam Wallet funds, while NX Prepaid can only be obtained via buying Karma Koin cards at 7-11, Gas ‘n Shop, or other convenience stores. The worst part is that some of the most important microtransaction items CAN’T be purchased with NX Credit, but only with NX Prepaid. Apparently this NX schism is some sort of convoluted, ham-handed attempt at battling credit card fraud, but it makes paying for any microtransactions far more convoluted and annoying than necessary.

Overall
“Dragon Nest” is a stylistically pleasing, low-system-requirement MMORPG that provides a lot of entertainment for little-to-no cash investment, despite the bugs, technical issues, and awkward microtransaction system. While the story eventually peters-out with no resolution, the game is still ongoing, which leaves hope for the future. Despite the lack of a conclusion, the overall quality of the writing combined with a well-executed action/RPG battle system makes “DN” fairly unique in the sea of “World of Warcraft” clones. Anyone who thinks they hate all MMORPGs due to the social aspect or subscription fees should definitely give “DN” a try. It’s the least MMORPG-like MMORPG I’ve ever seen. If Eyedentity had sold “DN” as a non-MMO in the same vein as “Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles,” I think it would have been an overall better experience, with none of the few remaining MMO-endemic flaws it currently has.

Presentation: 4/5
Story: 3.5/5
Gameplay: 4/5
Overall (not an average): 4/5