English Version
 | Alganon is the new Theme Park MMO by Quest Online. We played it savouring the feeling and exploring the locations, touching first-hand the legend describing it as a clone of World of Warcraft. |
Even if the similarities are undeniable, we daresay there is life, after the "first contact." If we wanted to cry out in pain like other portals did, we could dismiss this review entitling it "Wow! Find out the differences." However this introduction is not that commonplace, nor it's absoutley negative... quite the contrary. Up to now, any game trying to follow the formula of the forefather of best-selling MMOs was accused of copying it in order to get a small part of its sales. Even blatant cases, like the wonderful Runes of Magic, differences notwithstanding, have been classified as games that had to tip their hat and bow in front of World of Warcraft, and call out "thanks for existing" to boot.
For its first game, Quest Online made everything a little more subtle and imbued with a meta-language difficult to describe, since it originates from sensations and feelings that one can fully understand only by playing Alganon. Therefore, in this first glimpse at the gameworld, I won't be listing everything you will experience in the first levels of the game, because, of course, you already know that. I will begin with the major new feature you will have from the beginning: just like in EVE Online, you can progress several skills even when you are not online: you just have to set the specific "study" in a given field and select a priority queue. Beginning with basic studies about melee or ranged fight, or about specific damage-type resistances, up to increasing a particular attribute, you will open up several branches of studies with each new level, so you'll have to make careful choices.
Focusing on some skills instead of others, you will unlock the chance to get specific quests or to craft particular items, without the need to spend plenty of hours playing to increase your crafting skills. In a nutshell, the "Study System" might not reveal its full potential at a frist glance, but in fact it's a little paradise for casual players and a very nice added feature for the hardcore.
You can even dedicate yourself to more "social" studies, which open a gameplay definitely more captivating, centered on interaction with others, through the use of items, services and quests reserved only to the more "sociable" players. At the very beginning, during character customization, you can join a "family" of players who share our game goals (socialize, explore, craft): this alone is a great sign that Quest Online plans to eradicate the Theme Park genre from its usual elements, giving it a more "massive" flavour.
These are ingredients that push the community towards the desire of comparing and trading those social elements, already deprived of preliminary veneers, ready to be used directly by those who are interested in them. That said, Alganon spins a thin thread of meta-gaming level after level, not to position itself beside WoW, but to overlap it. Therefore, Alganon is not a simple clone of the Blizzard blockbuster.
Alganon tries hard to be a total revamp of the current king of MMORPGs. A kind of return to 2004, with some sort of time machine that tries and penetrate the code to realign its basics. Quest Online takes the core of WoW, implants new social functions and mainly an incredible design of landscapes and the world in general. Not with architectures or surprises that make you drool from the first level thanks to graphics or brilliant design, but for everything you cannot feel at a conscious level and that, unconsciously, will compel you to freely explore seamless lands rarely to be found.
A real "open world" that gives credit to the real meaning of the term, without smears, loading time, lag or whatever else. And even more subtly, Alganon amazes from the very beginning for the careful geometry in placing every rock, mountain, hillside, stream, tree. Nothing is random.
Try and get any MMO, play through the first five levels, walk along roads, fields, swamps, go back to the starting point and close your eyes. You will feel something unnatural, even if you cannot quite place what it is, but that does not fit with your everyday perception of the real world. Try Alganon and you will not experience this. Slopes are perfectly natural, terrain structures and horsehair are absolutely realistic. The colour patterns, going from one seamless area to the other, are simply amazing. You might miss all these details at a first glance, since the developers have worked in a subtle way, unable to compare directly - and for budget reasons - with more ambitious titles.
If you are patient enough to get yourself dragged with the flow of the game, without prejudices, you will be awed by every detail that the world of Alganon has to offer.
About gameplay, everything runs as usual. We found a solid and decently long progression of classic quests, which will get you through the various zones, with some climaxes focused on fights with the bosses (some of them quite tough), even if the PvE in Alganon is designed mainly for solo-play. We tried out a human healer, taking advantage of the pre-order items that Quest Online kindly granted to us. The bonus pack included a mount (a mule, for humans) with quite decent speed, a nice top-hat and a tabard which granted some stat bonuses, and a non-fighting pet (you will find it in the starting villages anyway).
About the skills, we have earned a couple of resistance buffs, a defensive magic shield, four offensive skills - one of them a DoT - and three heals (plus the classic resurrection). Using the specialization tree, in pure WoW-style, we started our climb in the Spirit Mastery branch, which gives to the healer a secondary role similar to the Shadow Priest of the Blizzard title.
A really satisfying variety. And the same goes for combat situations: the mobs are sufficiently varied and never boring.
The other features are always in the theme park wake, like crafting, for example, centered on classic professions (with the addition of salvaging, that might remind the enchanting of WoW, for its results). Anyway, everything we tried out is made very wisely, never overdoing and without any annoying bugs that would hinder the fun (and it's fine like that: plenty of software houses - not only independent, but even major ones - build MMOs as castles without fundations in beta, and sometimes even for release).
But if you put aside the quests for a moment and stand there staring, suddenly everything we said before will materialize before your very eyes.
Conclusions
To sum it up, the first impression travelling through the lands of Alganon is surely a positive one. Quest Online, small softco based in Arizona, did not build castles in the air: they never claimed to be inventing the next-generation MMO, but eventually they realized a solid product, in the path of tradition, but with some interesting features (for instance, the study sistem, the social "flavour" of the game, the dual role for each of the four classes - with two selectable races). They released a simple MMO without bugs, promising to introduce further contents as soon as they will be playable (and there are a lot of important things on the way, like deities, other additions to the crafting system, to the PvP, etc.). And, most of all, an excellent structure of the world.
PROs
Excellent design and world structure
Some "peculiar" features
Very good feeling ed remarkable social elements
CONs
It's a very classic MMO
No groundbreaking innovations
It's a Pay to Play
MMORPGITALIA mark 6,5