![]() Combined with the occasionally sketchy network latency and a few other things, like incomplete character animations and a pretty rough user interface, one gets the impression of playing a slightly unfinished game. There's also no background music, also scheduled for mid-November. While this doesn't hobble gameplay, it does mean that the pacing is a lot slower than what was probably originally intended, and the variety is a lot narrower. The actual quests that would do that aren't scheduled to be implemented until the middle of next month. Speaking of missions, those don't gain you experience points or items, just money. ![]() You can sell materials to your heart's content, however. Since you can't sell or trade mission items, it doesn't make much sense for them to show up when you don't have a mission for them, especially since the mission items you collect don't count until you've actually gotten the mission. The items appear as icons, and the mission items have a purple background while craft items are blue. You'll be tasked with collecting X number of fur tufts from a Mektoub or another creature, and it will drop a random number of those, or none at all. All you will collect from a conquered beast is crafting materials or mission materials. Unfortunately, there is no item looting in Ryzom. Once you've purchased a crafting category with these points, you can purchase recipes for specific items. With those 200 points, you can buy crafting skills, which are broken down into armor, jewelry, weapons, and so forth. You've also used a combat spell and have gained 100 magic points. For example, you've killed 50 Mektoubs and have 100 combat points for doing things like increasing hitpoints, health regeneration, dexterity, and so forth. However, there are certain skills you buy using whatever specific skill points you have available. Interestingly, you can eventually max out all of your skills, up to level 250. ![]() Gathering materials from the land and using those materials to make items also have their own skill development trees. Kill with magic and you get magic points. Kill with a melee weapon and you gain Combat points you can use to upgrade skills and buy new types of skills. Instead of being necessarily class-based, you have several categories your skill points go to, fueled by some basic abilities. Ryzom is set in the far future, with multiple playable factions competing and cooperating for territory, against each other and against the indigenous creatures of Atys. Load times are also longer than what I'm used to elsewhere, but thankfully you'll only have to deal with that when launching the game, and a little bit when your character dies. Unfortunately, while having so many creatures and non-combat characters running breathes life into the game, it does seem to play havoc with even the fastest Internet connection. Lots of polygons, particularly with the character models, weather effects including snow and rain, shiny spell and water effects, lots of foliage and beasties-in fact, Ryzom is one of the most heavily populated games I can remember. I've heard otherwise, and I can only assume that these people aren't maxing out their settings, because it's pretty easy on the eyes with a Radeon 9800 Pro. Let me say off the bat that Ryzom is a pretty game.
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