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Horizons: Empire of Istaria

By: Vince "Moesha" Massa
Date: Thursday, January 22, 2004

Next to First Person Shooters, massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) top the list for games in development and slated for release in 2004. Coming out at the back end of 2003 was an offering from Artifact Entertainment. We first got acquainted with Horizons in May of last year at E3 and then got more up close and personal during the beta process in the fall of 2003.

You might be big, but my thingie is sharp!

This does look rather nice... in that Goth kind of way.

At E3, Artifact Entertainment told us that what set Horizons apart from the huge group of MMORPGs flooding the market, were several things. First, the game has a large number of starting player races that include the typical MMORPG stand by of Humans, Dwarves and Elves but players can also choose to play as Lizard men (Sslanis), cat people (Saris), Half Giants or, in a first for the MMORPG market, Dragons. Second, the game would cater to gamers who enjoyed slaying monsters for fun and profit and to those that enjoyed creating items and selling them to others in-game though a robust (and extensive) series of craft schools. Third, while the game would not feature a Player vs. Player component, subscribers would not miss this challenge since a series of server wide world events would give players plenty to keep themselves busy. While all the claims sounded promising at E3, we had to admit this was E3 after all, and the whole point of a gaming trade show is to make products look and sound as good as possible.

As a quick refresher, players enter the world following a great war with an enemy known as the Withered Aegis. The war left the land with blighted areas scattered about that still spawn undead. Many towns and structures were destroyed and lay in ruins or are in need of repair. The once great Empire is on its knees and needs your help rebuilding the infrastructure, regaining the lost crafts and helping beat back the ravaging undead hordes to their master's doorsteps. The player takes on the role as one of the Gifted who show great power and the potential to help restore the Empire. Choosing from one of nine player races, four base adventure schools and three base crafting schools, the player enters the Empire of Istaria to make his way in the world.

So, now that Horizons is out and I have been playing for a month, the questions have to be asked: Does the game live up to its creator's claims? Were Artifact Entertainment's efforts enough to cut the MMORPG mustard? Read on and find out.

When Horizons arrived on store shelves on December 9th, I was at my local Electronics Boutique to pick up my preordered copies (one for me and one for the wife, of course) along with the strategy guide. After opening the boxes at home and starting the install, I took a minute to leaf through the manual. The terms 'minute' and 'leaf' apply here because the manual is one of the smallest I have ever seen for a MMORPG (a mere 26 pages). I could not help but feel grateful for my time in the beta and for the foresight to get the strategy guide. If I had no prior experience with the Horizons through the Beta or did not have more resources to call on while playing, I would have felt lost. Granted, the game has a comprehensive tutorial when you first create your character that covers movement, camera control, hotkey setup, how to harvest resources and craft items in your chosen school and inventory management.

Also, players encountered in the game have done an excellent job of helping new players out when trying to understand how something works, but there is no substitute for a good manual. A person who shells out 49 dollars for the initial product, pays a monthly fee following the initial free month, should not be forced to spend time online looking for more information about prestige classes or to fork out the 17 bucks for a strategy guide. Better documentation would have lowered the aggravation level many new players experience and provide a better game experience from the start. I would recommend that as a new player; get involved with a good, supportive guild as soon as you can. Your guild will be your best resource for learning the game, getting items crafted, and having people to group with.

Logging onto the game is accomplished through a web page. Double clicking on the Horizons icon on your desktop launches a web page where you choose which of your characters you want to play, after that the main game executable is launched. While a web interface raised a few eyebrows among veteran MMORPG players as a questionable way to access the main game, it does offer the ability to monitor your account, receive notices about upcoming world events, review notes from the publisher on patches, check server status, and manage your characters.

Graphically the game looks very good. Terrain is diverse and varied through the land of Istaria, from lush rolling hills to dry scorching deserts and spooky blighted areas where the ground is cracked and evil green light seeps through. If you have a good graphics card and a fast machine, you can crank the graphics, climb a mountain, and see for what seems like miles into the distance. The world itself is quite large and as you run around exploring you will notice, quite a few of these areas are unpopulated. You will some times run for 5 to 10 minutes without seeing another player or a monster. While this does help to convey the impression of a large game world, it can also be boring. I hope that as time goes on, Artifact Entertainment will fill in the vacancies with new structures or hordes or slavering monsters thirsty for adventurer blood.

Characters in combat perform a small number of move animations dependant on the type of attack you execute and the weapon you are using. Spells have nice lighting effects associated with them and as you increase the level of the spell, the animation grows larger and more elaborate.

One of the best spell animations is the resurrection spell. White light swirls around the player's corpse lifting it, rotating into the air. You hear the rushing of wind mixed with a cry of anguish from the player as the body is infused with life. It is a very dramatic animation and fits well into the epic fantasy setting.

One final note about graphics, there does appear to be a memory leak that degrades the game performance if you play for four or five hours at a time. (Uh oh... -Ed) Usually exiting and rejoining the game is enough to correct the problem, but sometimes a complete system reboot is needed. Of course that could be my system.

This thing is huge!

The lurid settings of Istaria...

Sound is done well enough with spells sounding both mystical and arcane and swords that ring with the clash of combat. (What the hell is he talking about? -Ed) Environmental music changes based on the geographic area and situation and helps add to the game experience.

Character creation allows you to create your character and customize things like height, weight, eye color, hair color, and facial shape. You may also choose one of four base adventure school and if you wish, one of three base crafting schools as well. If you find yourself having second thoughts about what adventure or craft school you should choose, don't worry, Horizons does not lock you into any single profession as you can change at any time.

Dragons have their own set of adventure and craft schools. Players who are looking for a different play experience may want to strap on a suit of scale and some wings and try life as a wurm. I have not played a dragon yet so the experiences I base this review on are based on my biped adventures.

The in-game interface uses a series of menus that are accessed using hot keys or through a glowing blue jewel in the corner of your monitor. The jewel interface works well and is non-intrusive. The innovation I like the most is that you can have up to ten hot key bars on your screen at once. Each bar contains ten slots that you can assign spells, skill abilities, or customized command macros. Menus are reconfigurable and hotkeys are remapable allowing the player control over their interface.

Once I had my interface configured, I could turn my attention to combat. Depending on your current adventure school, your character has different abilities and spells that may be used when the player sees fit (active) or will be used automatically (passive). Abilities and spells, when used, are timer-based. More powerful spells or strikes require longer amounts of time before you can use them again. This forces you to use some tactics if you want to prevent your opponent from turning you in a freak Kentucky Fried Chicken ad.

As you advance in level, you gain new skills, abilities, and points in the skills your adventure school uses, such as one and two-handed slash, armor use and so on for fighter types. Once you have gained enough levels and have enough points in the appropriate skills, you can join a prestige school. Prestige schools are hybrids of base adventure or crafting schools that allow you to create specialized characters like paladin, sorcerer, berserker, weapon smith, spell crafter etc.

I started with a warrior and while I was able to chop up bad guys once I closed the distance to them, I really wanted to be able to sting them with a spell from a distance as well. I did some reading in the strategy guide and found that after hitting level 20 in the Warrior school (and there by raising my Two handed Slash skill to 200) I could switch to the Spiritualist school for 15 levels (thereby raising my Spirit skill to 150), and then made the switch to the Reaver adventure school. It was at this point that I really began having fun with the game. As a Reaver, I could cast spells like Ethereal Leech (steal life from enemies and heal myself), while gaining combat abilities like Ethereal Blade (which allows me to attack and ignore the enemy's armor for a short while). In short, I found a class that focuses on the way I like to play and makes the game more enjoyable for me.

As mentioned before, you can switch schools at anytime without losing the levels in your old school. While I am happy with the class I chose, this allows players to dabble in other areas of the game if they find themselves getting bored although it will reduce some of the experience you get for killing monsters. Alternatively, it allows players who like to turn their character into a walking Swiss army knife who can cast a debuff spell on a monster, wield a two handed sword and then heal themselves after the battle is over. For some the trade off of greater utility in combat vs. higher experience payoff is worth it.In a nutshell, the game allows you to play the way you like. Are you a die-hard player that wants to raise your fighter as far and fast as you can or do you like to tinker with your character to maximize the benefits gained from multi-classing? Horizons allows you to make that choice to a degree more than any other MMORPG so far.

Horizons includes one of the most the most rewarding crafting systems in a MMORPG today. While Star Wars Galaxies (SWG) crafting system is similar in the variety and depth provided by the system, Horizons leaves SWG in the dust. Crafters harvest their resources (like SWG) but then they refine them in to components used to create more complex items. Prestige crafters are needed to build player houses, repair structures that were destroyed or damaged in the great war or create other resources to aid the fight.

In other MMORPGS when you buy a house, it appears out of thin air. In Horizons when a plot of land is purchased, scaffolding goes up and the structure takes form as the crafters ply their trade. This type of constructing goes well beyond the systems in other games that, in effect, reduce the crafter solely to an item photocopier, spitting out swords or helms and little else. Crafting provides an outlet for those people who wish to help reclaim and rebuild the world of Istaria without strapping on a sword.

Artifact made the point that Horizons would forgo PvP combat in favor of 'world events'. They said world events would help keep people interested in the game with fresh content and activities for players to take part in. The logic here is that if you have a goal that players can aim for in the form of quests, solving riddles or whatever, they will not need to throw themselves at each other in combat over a castle, plot of land, or magical widget, repeatedly, like two preschoolers fighting over a toy, just for the glory of having it.

Right after the launch, the first server wide event set in motion a series of quests that lead to the recovery of a journal and the information that the Withered Aegis had enslaved an entire race of Satyrs and are somehow controlling them to mount attacks on the recovering Empire! It was also learned that there are four collapsed tunnels somewhere in the Empire that once reopened, lead to portals. Where these portals lead is unknown but it is clear the Empire will have to come together to reopen these passages. So this is where we are currently in the game today. The crafters are working like mad to gather the resources needed to open the first tunnel. The fighters are guarding the tunnel entrance so the runners carrying resources for the crafters can come and go without falling to monsters that guard the entrance.

Go on, take a dip!

The undead are upon us!

As we have progressed and opened more and more of the tunnel, the Withered Aegis has not been sitting idle. As the players work to undo their fiendish plans coordinated groups of high level undead have been assailing the tunnel as they try to wear down the defenders and kill crafters and resource runners alike.

So what is the payoff you ask? First, it brings together two kinds of players (the fighter and the crafter) that normally only interact when one needs to buy an item from the other. Second, each type of player is doing what they enjoy, getting experience in the process, while working towards a common goal: opening the tunnels. Third, players who are not high level enough to defend or lend crafting skills can act as couriers as they transport resources. Fourth, the rumor mill has produced the biggest payoff yet: If we free the satyrs, there will be a new player race that people can create characters with and play.

Most other MMORPGs add new races through an add-on you purchase; I prefer the idea of being able to unlock other races or affect the game world by my actions and endeavors in game. While world events themselves are not new (Asheron's Call had server events) they were nowhere near as cool as what Horizons has offered up so far, and this is just in the first month!

As with any MMORPG at launch, you are going to have problems. Horizons has had its share with login and patching issues, problems with account setup, crippling lag in some areas and during peak times, ability and spell button not refreshing after use and substandard feedback from Artifact Entertainment on problems and their estimated fix schedule. Also during the first two weeks, server over-population caused people to get messages that the server was full and they could not log in. While this prompted players to migrate to less densely populated servers (myself included), it pissed off quite a few people.

To their credit, Artifact has made huge strides in keeping the community informed on what current problems they are aware of and of actions they are taking to fix them. Also, the server density issues seem to be a thing of the past (knock on wood) and I have not gotten a 'Server is full try again later' message since mid December.

Were Artifact Entertainment's efforts enough to cut the MMORPG mustard? Horizons takes a two handed battle axe and cuts the mustard, the plate holding the bread, and continues right on through the kitchen table leaving it in two pieces! They have created a game that allows the player to create the type of Player vs. Enemy or crafting game they like. Even with its current short comings, I am having a great time in the game and cannot wait to jump online whenever I have a chance.

What remains to be seen is if Artifact Entertainment can continue to squash the bugs that have become (mostly) par for the course on launch of a MMORPG. Also, we will see if they are able to deliver the caliber of server events that add the sense of community and excitement that we have seen so far. If they are able to do this on a consistent basis, they will have an engaging and rewarding MMORPG experience and will be able to go toe to toe with three highly anticipated MMORPG titles advancing on the market this year: World of Warcraft, Lineage II and EverQuest 2. Only time will tell if any of these three titles can steal the thunder of Horizons' unique crafting system, prestige classes and clever world events.

One thing is certain: Horizons has done a good enough job so far to win subscriptions from myself and four other players I know. We all agreed that the features Horizons offers are enough to warrant canceling our Dark Age of Camelot subscriptions. Now excuse me, I must get back to the Bounty server as the first tunnel is nearly complete and I want to go through the portal and greet whatever awaits us on the other side. Somehow, I know it will be undead, have many teeth and will be pissed as hell to have company. I can't wait!!