When you kill a wolf in, say, Lord of the Rings Online, it just kind of fades away. When you kill a wolf in Dragonica Online, THAT happens. That wolf isn’t going to be just fading away. They’ll be picking bits of wolf out of the trees for the next year.
Dragonica Online is an arcade-y, 2D MMO along the same lines as Maple Story and Pi Story (no relation). You travel along from screen to screen and encounter merchants, monsters, other players, special glowing portals to missions, and you do your best to help those NPCs you come across with the problems that threaten to bring light to their dark, meaningless lives.
Because, that’s what adventurers DO.
Character creation in Dragonica Online is similar to that in Dream of Mirror Online and other highly children’s manga-influenced MMOs — very few customization options, and a list of classes (warrior, mage, thief) common to casual RPGs.
Combat is of the rock-paper-scissors variety; you trade spells or blows until the monster starts a special attack animation, then you choose the appropriate ability to either evade or counter that attack — or take severe damage. In the aforementioned wolf fight, you could evade the monster’s charge attack by standing in front of a hen house, dashing beneath it while it was gathering strength for the charge, and then attack it from behind while it tried to get its head out of the coop.
Boss encounters start from special portals from which you can choose your difficulty — solo, duo, full group — and your reward depends in some part on how fast you complete the instance. This turns every boss encounter into a solo or a collaborative mini-game of its own, and it wasn’t rare to see players gathered outside boss portals, forming groups and trying for better scores.
This is the Dragonica experience: An arcade-style MMO with quests, levels, gear upgrades and so on, that is quick to bring you to the fun and you get to choose the difficulty. Not a bad combination — if you can get over the cutesy, kid-friendly art style. Or maybe you ARE a kid, in which case, carry on 🙂
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That solo, duo or group mechanic is what I’d love to see in the AAA titles such as WOW, LOTRO and EQ2. By all means scale the rewards to meet the difficulty but it’s a perfect options. Group players to choose to form groups and deal with the typical timing of availability and PUG behavior of non static groups and get better stuff. While solo and partners don’t compromise their play styles or availability and still get to try the content too.
Yesterday I helped two people in my tri-box trio run Scarlet Monastery. Everyone was nice and polite but some of the reasons I don’t group happened. One person has to keep going AFK even though they are one of the two people for whom, I’m taking the time to run the instance for. While the other one needs to hurry, please hurry because I have to log soon. You know what, you DO NOT start SM without enough time on your hands (has 4 large wings to complete) to finish it and be present and engaged while doing it. This is why I hate grouping and won’t play games where grouping is required. My time is precious too. I’ve done too many hurry-hurry runs that cause wipes so you actually take more time than it should and others where it’s wait-wait I have to…. what the heck ever. Grrrrrrr.