Expedition into ArcheAge

Daily Ramble 101: Expedition into ArcheAge

As I’ve mentioned previously, I started following along with a group of gamers that call themselves the MMO Book Club. These guys are from Reddit and they have a unique way of gaming together – each month they vote on a game to play and they all focus on leveling up characters in that franchise. This month, ArcheAge was the winning selection so they headed into that Trion property – and I went along for the ride. This is the start of my expedition into ArcheAge…

According to the Trion website, ArcheAge has no predefined progression and you are encouraged to “play your way”.

In essence, it is a version of a Sandbox game and from what I can tell, a lot of the content at later levels is player generated PvP. There’s lots of opportunity to craft, build, and destroy. You can make houses and castles or you can play as a pirate ship captain. So much of what you choose to do in the game is completely up to you – you are not funneled into theme park activities or strict class leveling. And it’s been pretty fun so far.

Race Selection

Of course they didn’t get rid of every similarity to modern MMOs and one of the first choices you have to make is what race you want to play. There are 2 factions – one that lives on the Western continent and the other that lives in the East. These factions don’t really get along very well and I’ve even heard that they can’t even talk to one another without a lot of effort.

In the West, we’ve got the Nuian Alliance that has some common races – the Nuain who seem to be human, the Elves who seem to be elvish, and the Dwarves who seem to be Dwarvish. In the East are the Haranya Alliance, the Firran, Harani, and Warborn, with the Firran looking like cat people, the Harani seeming to be human, and the Warborn seeming to be demons of some sort.

The Book club chose to play on the Haranya faction so I picked out a nice kitty to play.

And play I did…it took me over 90 minutes to finally settle on a character look – they have so many options for adjustment and features. Usually, I don’t really bother with my character look, but since I was gonna be a cat person I figured I’d tweak things a little and as I said 90 minutes later I was picking a name – MiaowMix

4 Starter Classes

I’m sure I’m not too unique with the name, but I thought I was being clever so I stuck with it. Now that I had my look and my name, it was time to figure out what class I wanted MiaowMix to play. Usually I like to play a healer with survivability and the ability to progress through the game in a solo fashion if I need to, so I set out to figure out what class that would be. Wow! There are 120 classes in this game!

Basically, the game’s class system is similar to the trio of souls that you can pick in Rift only in that game you have to pick one of the primary classes to get access to specific souls for that class. In ArcheAge, you get complete freedom in your choices from among 10 different skillsets. You can mix and match sets as to make the kind of character you want to play. If you want to play a Paladin, you pick the trio of Battlerage, Defense, and Vitalism. If you wanted a Demonologist, you’d take Witchcraft, Occultism, and Sorcery. There’s just so much to choose from and as a noob, I have no idea what direction to go.

Fortunately, of the 10 skillsets, they only allow you to pick from 4 to start out with, and you only get one. So I only had to choose from – Battlerage, Sorcery, Archery, or Vitalism, which equated roughly to fighter, mage, archer, and healer. I decided to go with Sorcery since I figured I’d eventually want to hurl fireballs at my enemies (I could take the healing stuff later).

Introduction

Finally, with MiaowMix set up with a unique look and wielding the power of Sorcery, I headed into the tutorial and introduction. I learn a bit about the history of the world I’ll be hanging out in. Apparently there was a group of explorers that called themselves the Library Expedition who went in search of the birthplace of magic. They didn’t like what they found and it ended up with them leaving the northern continent of Auroria and heading down to Nuia and Haranya.

That’s a quite brief synopsis of the story but it covers the highlights I think. Lucius the Bard provides the history lesson but the bottom line is they found this big hole in the ground and went in to investigate.

When they reached the bottom they found a door and beyond the door were things that weren’t too friendly.

Fighting erupted and lives were lost, and in the end they sealed the door and journeyed to the new lands.

Lucius didn’t make the story sound too good since I’m not sure it lead to a happy ending, at least not yet.

It’s a good tale with the result being that magic is returning to the North and Lucius is looking for people with potential to bring life back to Auroria.