Editorials

Trickster Online Revolution Play Session

NTreev's Daniel Noss was kind enough to walk me through some of the stuff available in NTreev's free-to-play MMO, Trickster Online Revolution.

Like many other MMOGs, Trickster Online came from Korea - all the game's images, sound, and concepts are being developed by NTreev's Korean parent across the Pacific. The decision to bring Trickster over to Western audiences was an interesting one. While American audiences were increasingly receptive to Korean MMORPGs, the market was in danger of being oversaturated. However, as a free-to-play game, Trickster had achieved particularly notable success in Korea, being the #1 clicked game in its genre on Neighbor (the Korean equivalent of Google).

So, NTreev made the decision to expand to the West. Eugene Kim, the COO of NTreev USA, was one of the original developers of Trickster Online, and other original Trickster developers crossed the pond to help work on the development of the USA version of the game.

One thing that separates Trickster from many other games is the daunting level cap of 400. In fact, hitting the level cap in Trickster is such a feat - and so rare - that the GM staff has thrown in-game celebrations for players about to level up, traveling to their location and setting off fireworks. For a casual player, level 400 would take a considerable amount of time - but the philosophy in Trickster is less about what you do once you hit the level cap (as in most modern RPGs a la WoW), and more about what you do getting there.

According to Noss, it's fairly common for players to surpass level 200, and even 300 is easy enough - it's getting from 300 to 400 that is the real challenge. At the moment, level 220 is where the "cutting edge" of content is. If you're past 220, you're pushing the envelope, progressing for the sake of progressing.

Like many other games in the free-to-play genre, gear in Trickster is less about getting decked out in epic phat lewtz, and more about looking how you want to look. An interesting way that Trickster handles the "Stats Vs. Appearance" dilemma is the Fusion System. The character that NTreev had kindly provided me with was level 220 and decked out in gear that resembled a dragon, with a large, flaming sword. Naturally, explained Noss, some players would like to keep this appearance - or perhaps they would like to keep the stats without calling so much attention to themselves and getting tons of people asking where they got the gear.

The Fusion System allows you to combine the stats of one piece of gear with the appearance of another. So, say you get an upgrade, but you don't think it looks as cool - you can keep your current appearance, but get the boosted stats. Or, if you wanted, you could choose to look like a total noob, but slaughter everything in a few hits.

Combat in Trickster is fairly standard and mostly mouse-based, though you can map skills to keyboard bindings for use in combat as well. There are four different class archetypes in the game - Power, Magic, Sense, and Charm - that are all based off of different animals, and interestingly enough are divided by gender. For instance, the Male Power class is the Buffalo, specializing in AoE damage, while the Female Power class is the Bunny (man, those bunnies must be tough), specializing in single-target damage. Noss walked me through the character creation screen, which offers a decent amount of flexibility in assigning one's stats. Every class archetype will have their corresponding stat maxed out - that can't be changed - but you can distribute points to other stats (and future stat growth) however you like.