A futile quest for entertainment – Dragon’s Prophet
Super metal! That’s what the makers of the trailer want you to know about Dragon’s Prophet. That should evoke some of the most epic, skull and spike covered, power chord wailing imagery imaginable. If that’s what you’re expecting from this particular MMORPG, you may be just a tad let down. Sadly, this particular offering from Runewaker and Sony Online Entertainment manages to be mediocre at best. The only thing even remotely metal is the absolute abundance of dragons and pseudo-dragon creatures present in virtually every part of the game. You can’t swing a dead dragon without hitting two dozen more dragons in this game.
The graphics in Dragon’s Prophet are sub-par for a modern game, even among the free to play genre. Characters have an excessive amount of customization available, but the polish just doesn’t seem to be there. I would happily give up buttock position and foot size sliders if it would mean slightly more realistic or possibly cartoonish looks to the characters. As it currently stands, they come off looking like something out of an RPG from a good five to ten years ago. The environments I was able to access during my admittedly brief time with the game were rather homogeneous and dull. The instanced cavern early in the game provides an amount of visual variety for a time, but ultimately provides an unsatisfying experience as a game element. Having to walk back out through a dungeon you’ve already cleared of enemies is downright boring. Why streaming to twitch is built into this game is beyond me.
The combat gets routine very quickly, key mapping is limited, and quest stories are long-winded walls of text. I have difficulty not falling asleep when playing. I’ve put in about 10 to 12 hours just hoping that it might pick up after you learn the basics. However, much of Dragon’s Prophet remains tied to a strange mix of attempting to combine click and key based combo attacks. While it is possible to bind some actions to keys close to your WASD movement keys, there are far too many for that setup to work. What you end up with is an overflow of abilities being tied to your number keys that would be useful if you could reach them while attempting to dodge enemy attacks. Thankfully, the game isn’t made terribly difficult during the first 20 levels. I was doing very well even though I had, in fact, forgotten that I was gaining ability points to apply to stats as I leveled.
Many combat abilities come directly from having dragons in your active stable. Free players are allowed 2 slots in their pen and you can purchase additional slots for real money. You buy the ability to have more abilities available to you in combat. When the whole selling point of your game is to bring people in because fucking dragons, perhaps there should be an in-game way of equipping more and thus more abilities. Hell, make it cost an outrageous amount of gold or something, but don’t make it impossible. If there’s anything more pay to win than the need to purchase a way to equip more and varied combat abilities, I’d like to hear about it.
Crafting is confusing and ultimately too time consuming to feel useful, at least early in the game. There’s a thing called synthesis that never gets explained, and your inventory fills with crafting materials rather quickly. If I have to find a wiki because something isn’t explained at all in game, something is wrong. Much like the very grind based crafting of Star Wars The Old Republic, the way you gain most improved recipes is to craft virtually useless items and then break them down hoping for an improved recipe. Quite frankly, if you spend time actually questing, you get better gear far faster. If crafting becomes useful at a later stage of the game, I’m sure as hell never going to find out because I’m not going to play that long.
Bottom line, there are too many good MMOs out there to deal with one that is this flawed unless you just love the fuck out of dragons and are willing to endure anything to have them as a pet in a game. Unfortunately for Dragon’s Prophet, I simply cannot force myself to continue playing this highly monotonous title any longer. If someone wants to let me know when they patch fun into the game, I’ll pick it up and give it another go. There are intriguing concepts to the game (like skills from tamed dragons) but it’s all executed rather poorly. I really had hoped that my love of the whimsical and super metal (seriously filled with #SuperMetal plugs) was going to carry over into the flavor of the game itself, but it doesn’t even come close. So bravo to a solid marketing team, but sadly they were working for a game that couldn’t even make dragon riding rangers wielding gunblades interesting.
