Free MMORPG Round Up

Last Chaos

When you’ve finished chuckling at its embarrassingly cheesy name and step into the world of Last Chaos, you’re met with a decidedly average looking MMORPG. We soon found out though that this is because the game starts with the resolution and all detail settings on minimum. Crank up the sauce and you’re in for quite a treat. Even Harry, the free MMO naysayer, stopped in his tracks as he walked by and asked in surprise, ‘is that free?’

Of all the free MMOs we looked at Last Chaos was the most technical in terms of graphics. It seems as though considerable effort has been put into the lighting engine especially. The Vaseline-on-the-lens-style soft lighting, water reflections and camera glare all contribute to making the game world look as believable as such a world of faries and mythical beasts can be. The textures are detailed too, but one thing that does show the game up is the animations, which make some of the characters look like they’re straining with considerable constipation. The maximum resolution is 1,600 x 1,200, so if you’re running a widescreen display everything will look stretched out from left to right.


After the initial starting zone that sees your level one toon felling heavily armoured undead warriors with single sword strokes, you emerge in the city of Randol. Here you begin your questing, which becomes the more commonplace starter material such as killing poor, defenceless foxes in order to take their freshly skinned hides to a townsperson for experience points and gold. In this sense, the game is every bit the cliché that the title suggests. As you level up, you spend skill points on learning new abilities from the Master [enter standard MMORPG class type here] who commends you on your progress, making you feel both warm and fuzzy inside.

The problem with taking on the development of such an ambitious game as Last Chaos when you’re going to be giving it away for free and don’t have the marketing budget of a developer giant such as Blizzard backing you up, is that you forgo some of the polish. Last Chaos is a pretty flaky affair. For example, sometimes when you arrive at a quest giver they don’t appear on screen until you walk around them a bit. Once they do appear, you sometimes have to click them 15 times before a dialogue box opens up.


The chat system also has some ridiculous feature that stops you being able to use it, as letters only open up interface windows if the chat box is selected. In the end, we had to browse the internet to find out was going on, as there are no instructions as to how to turn it off. Quest givers are marked with what turned out be very small ‘Q’s on the map, but the letter looks like a little blue squiqqle, and isn’t very clear. At first we couldn’t seem to get any quests from any of the NPCs, so we took it upon ourselves to slay some of the wildlife and hope that levelling up would open a few options. Then out of nowhere, we got told our quest was completed despite the fact that the quest book was clearly empty.

Conclusion

On the whole, Last Chaos looks incredibly good and works relatively well, but intermittent flaking out shenanigans such as those outlined above ruin immersion somewhat. This will no doubt have lots of players leaving the game in frustration, to get their free gaming kicks in a smoother and perhaps less cliché environment.