FileBlog: Sword of the New World Beta Begins

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June 05, 2007

Sword of the New World Beta Begins

With so many massively multiplayer games in development, and so many being imported from overseas, it's easy to lose track of everything that's happening. But there are a handful of very cool games in development, and we just landed a beta of one of the most interesting here at FilePlanet:

Play the Sword of the New World Beta! (Subscribers only)
[Click here to join FilePlanet]

Sword of the New World has a lot going for it -- including some absolutely breathtaking art -- but probably the biggest single innovation is the ability to control a party of up to three characters simultaneously. In fact, when you play Sword of the New World, you don't just play a character; you play a whole family of characters, swapping them in and out to form a new 3-character party with every adventure.

She's got guns. She knows how to use them.

This seemingly simple innovation really opens up the game and gives it a unique feel. At times it plays more like Dungeon Siege than a traditional MMO. Your characters can execute some simple AI: for instance, it's awesome to be able to click a button and have all three of your characters fan out to loot an entire room in a couple of seconds, all automatically.

It sounds like controlling three characters would be overwhelming, but the game has a lot of built-in ways to make it easy. You can set the characters to all follow one leader, healing and assisting as necessary. (Yep, healing characters are smart enough to auto-heal your party.) In relatively safe areas you can also just turn your characters loose to kill anything that moves -- and hope that things don't get too sticky.

Naturally when you join up with a couple of online friends things get pretty intense pretty fast. Think about it: with just two friends you can have a nine-character party. A group of five players will field a small army of fifteen characters! If this sounds like overkill, it isn't: Sword of the New World throws dozens and dozens of monsters at you with every encounter. Your musketeers will be blasting away left and right, your elementalists will be dropping massive spells, and all hell will be breaking loose all over the screen. Yeah, Sword of the New World is not for the faint of heart, but it's a riot if you're looking for a new challenge.

But what about player-vs-player? Here, the party system gets out of control. The permutations of even just a one-on-one duel alone will make your head spin, since everyone can experiment with three different characters. When we played around with it here at FilePlanet we tried to keep our parties together, but the top PvP guys at K2 (the U.S. publisher) like to fan out, which really threw us off. The strategies can get deep.

So far Sword of the New World hasn't gotten a ton of press, but I think once people start getting their hands on this beta the word is going to spread. It takes a little while to get used to the controls but the gameplay is wildly different. Try it out and tell your friends:

Play the Sword of the New World Beta! (Subscribers only)
[Click here to join FilePlanet. You know you want to.]

-Fargo

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