First posted back in 2009, the Taiwan server for The Heaven of Three Kingdoms entered Open Beta last week. As you know, the Korean server has too many barriers when registering an account, and luckily the Taiwan server ain’t that far behind. The game, once again, uses the lore from Romance of the Three Kingdoms, while adding fantasy elements and slightly editing the storyline.There are 8 classes in The Heaven of Three Kingdoms, which can be seen here. They are pretty standard, but man, the armor and weapon designs are really awesome. They are kind of exaggerated, but still managed to stay within the line, in my opinion. I am only started playing yesterday, and got a level 26 Monk pretty quick (cap is at 50).
Combat is the standard and loathed “point and click”, but I had a rather fun time since the attack speed on the Monk is kind of insane, despite the low damage. I even have a party buff which further increases the attack speed, which you can see me use in the videos here. There is mounted combat as well, with the mounts being able to level up and be equipped with special gears. I personally hated it, since the attack animations are not as good. It is actually a disadvantage not to pursue mounted combat, since players will miss out the extra damage from the mount.
I have only tried 1 PvP mode, and of course it will be a Nation Vs Nation one. Here, players have bumped up stats and every class will be wearing special battlefield gears, making it a “fair fight”. Trust me, if the game ever enters the English market, go for the Guardian class if you are seriously into PvP. There are no triple threat modes yet from what I see, but apparently players can cross over to other nations to kill players, which I have not encountered. If you played games such as AIKA Online, you will get what it is like.
Developer Hanbitsoft is rather kind in terms of providing players with bonus experience points, where there is an increment after every 20 kills, with the max bonus up till 150% EXP (the bar can be seen at the top left of the screen). However, the quest system seems lacking, with majority of them being “kill X for X items” most of the time. The fast experience points will definitely help shade some of these monotonous activities.
There are various other features, such as party formations, artifact items, world bosses, changing into some of the famous Three Kingdoms and of course, instanced dungeons. Even the first dungeon is too tough to solo, which I tried, and sadly I couldn’t find a party to clear it. The Heaven of Three Kingdoms was supposedly to launch for the English market this year, but apparently the schedule either got delayed or cancelled. While not really a game which brings something “new” to the plate, the overall look is certainly “refreshing”.
