Playing this game was a matter of logging in, choosing a decent spot than afking. That's not fun if you actually want to play the game. Also, the fact that your characters won't pick any drops, doesn't help . I had a musketeer but I had to give up on him because I didn't have enough money to buy him amo for his riffle. It' also seems to be a very quiet world, it's like you're playing alone... Everyone is afk all the time... You will hardly find someone to party with. I remember there were PvP rooms on the first town but there was nobody to fight against. I think it's a good game if you just like to log in and let your characters play it for you, but  not if you just want to play it yourself,

You guys ever heard of Progress Quest?.. Well this game is just a graphical version of it.

Sword suffers from quite a few different issues that kept it from becoming a mainstream title.

1. The grind - This really is all that sword is about. One massive grind that you will never finish. You will always be grinding a new toon, for cash, drops, etcs.
2. Gear - A few people touched on gear, but didnt really cover it in detail. Sword is a pvp game that is extremely gear dependent. And when I say gear dependent I mean if Player A has a full suit of badass gear he can annihiliate 10+ opponents with substandard gear....simply because his defense rating is so high you cant reliably hit him, while he one shots you.
3. Content denial - Sword is based around colony wars and raids end game. However, on each server pretty much one clan and their "Pets" own everything. The raids are non instanced, so if you arent in THE clan on the server you are pretty much stuck paying for the items from these guilds at insane prices. These guilds also dump quite a bit of money into the cash shop on a weekly basis to keep their funds up. Allowing them to burn items till they get the perfect +8
4. One shot pvp - Do you enjoy dying instantly with out having any chance at all to react? No? Well then you just might wnt to stay away from sword. When you start out most people are going to be able to one shot your entire team. After a few months of grinding you might be able to get to a gear point where you cant be one shot... but even then it many times comes down to who gets their ability off first. This is not a fun pvp system.
5. Finally K2 is quite possibly the worst development company of all time. Originally the game was P2P, then on the second month of release RIGHT after people paid their monthly fee they switched to a F2P system with no warning or community notification till after the fact, and they refused to refund subscription fees they had just charged. Later one of the lead producers claimed that they had discussed this in depth with the community and everyone was cool with it from the get go....pretty much a bold faced lie. When it was brought up, threads were locked, folks were banned. K2 never communicated prior to releasing patches... you never knew if a patch was going to come in, or if it was just a normal maintenance. K2 would promise something was coming soon, and then 8 months later half of what they promised would sneak in.

Did I mention that they do their server maint at prime time, and when asked to move it to a more reasonable hour like every other mmo they basically told players to get boned?

Yes SOTNW is a pretty game, but the community (whats left of it) is poor, and other than having a game that will play itself hours upon hours at a time, its not worth your time.

Originally posted by Pyrostasis

Sword suffers from quite a few different issues that kept it from becoming a mainstream title.

1. The grind - This really is all that sword is about. One massive grind that you will never finish. You will always be grinding a new toon, for cash, drops, etcs.
2. Gear - A few people touched on gear, but didnt really cover it in detail. Sword is a pvp game that is extremely gear dependent. And when I say gear dependent I mean if Player A has a full suit of badass gear he can annihiliate 10+ opponents with substandard gear....simply because his defense rating is so high you cant reliably hit him, while he one shots you.
3. Content denial - Sword is based around colony wars and raids end game. However, on each server pretty much one clan and their "Pets" own everything. The raids are non instanced, so if you arent in THE clan on the server you are pretty much stuck paying for the items from these guilds at insane prices. These guilds also dump quite a bit of money into the cash shop on a weekly basis to keep their funds up. Allowing them to burn items till they get the perfect +8
4. One shot pvp - Do you enjoy dying instantly with out having any chance at all to react? No? Well then you just might wnt to stay away from sword. When you start out most people are going to be able to one shot your entire team. After a few months of grinding you might be able to get to a gear point where you cant be one shot... but even then it many times comes down to who gets their ability off first. This is not a fun pvp system.
5. Finally K2 is quite possibly the worst development company of all time. Originally the game was P2P, then on the second month of release RIGHT after people paid their monthly fee they switched to a F2P system with no warning or community notification till after the fact, and they refused to refund subscription fees they had just charged. Later one of the lead producers claimed that they had discussed this in depth with the community and everyone was cool with it from the get go....pretty much a bold faced lie. When it was brought up, threads were locked, folks were banned. K2 never communicated prior to releasing patches... you never knew if a patch was going to come in, or if it was just a normal maintenance. K2 would promise something was coming soon, and then 8 months later half of what they promised would sneak in.

Did I mention that they do their server maint at prime time, and when asked to move it to a more reasonable hour like every other mmo they basically told players to get boned?

Yes SOTNW is a pretty game, but the community (whats left of it) is poor, and other than having a game that will play itself hours upon hours at a time, its not worth your time.

I understand your frustration, but I did wonder about the highlighted part, because....you know YOUR "prime time," isn't everyone else's prime time, necessarily. First you have to consider where the servers are and then where most of the players are actually from. If you're playing a game with more Chinese players, for instance, they're prime time and ours....are almost completely opposite, so....yeah. :(  I'm just using China as an example...I don't honestly know exactly where on the international clock they are from the U.S., but I'm sure the "prime times" are FAR far from being the same.

its a US based game, with a US user base (and one euro server). The company and the servers are located in california. The server maint when I played was from 5-7pm cst last I played a year or so ago.

As a US company thats pretty bad.

Originally posted by Pyrostasis

its a US based game, with a US user base (and one euro server). The company and the servers are located in california. The server maint when I played was from 5-7pm cst last I played a year or so ago.

As a US company thats pretty bad.

You're right....that's pretty warped.

Well to be fair they did move their maintance time to arround midnight EST but still still bad if you are Pacific time.

The biggest problem right now with SotNW is the content denial by the top clan on each server. With players that have been arround a while and looking to grow into new raids cannot progress because the top clan will kill them. This reduces the game to mindlessly grinding alts because mains cannot progress. The content denial deadlock has gone on for over a year has lead to poisoning of community and overinflated economy where everything good costs billions of Vis.

Really if they fix the content denial problem it in turn fixes the gear problem and would improve the PvP. One shots are rare with equal gear. SotNW is really not supposed to be a grindfest with an over inflated economy. It is the greedy players in the top clans that made it that way.

 If they were smart they would let the NA version go in a new direction add some more quests and content that appeal more to western audiences, cause the core of the game is solid its a pretty game, and the frenetic pace of playing all three characters actually have to work to keep them alive in challenging combat can be a blast, but as it is, that doesn't progress you as fast as letting the game play itself AFK

This game wins the title of "Quickest Uninstall" for me. 

• It starts with some off-brand cheat detection (how do I know it isn't a dataminer in disguise?). 
• I made it to character creation and find that you get a monstrous 2 face selections for each class/gender (at least the ones I bothered to look at)
• Finally get in game and try WASD - no movement.  Arrow keys - no movement.  click on ground works, but who really wants their hand on the mouse all the time?
• A helpful popup told me to press F12 to learn the keyboard commands.  That might have been helpful if I could read korean/chinese/whatever the keymap was written in.

This game is utter trash - seriously it has nothing new to offer to the MMO genre. It is a cash shop farm boys wet dream and the AFK leveling just tops it off as total garbage.

Do not buy unless you want to waste time and boy you have precious little time left as the DAY OF DEATH AND DESTRUCTION IS COMING TO A SERVER NEAR YOU !!!!

I had a guy at a computer store right when I was looking at games try to recommend me this game.

The conversation went something like this..

Tech: Try Swords of the New World, seems great for a Japanese Game

Me: Japanese? Sounds more Korean....Japanese are Isolationists, all their MMOs have a sticker that read "For use in Japan Only" and they localize everything.

Tech: Oh play it, its cool.....you can level fast.

Me: How exactly do you level?

Tech: Oh its simple, you play on your own time...then leave your game on and have the game level for you....its awesome and I love the graphics..

Me: If this game is so great, how come I've never heard of it?

After a few minutes of chatting, as he was trying to push me into buying certain games...

I'm like "Well, I like Guild Wars. I don't have a lot of time and the game does not level my characters for me, but I don't need to spend weeks leveling a character."

We exchange emails, send each a few emails and screenshots...

Now this person can't shut up about Guild Wars I and waits for Guild Wars II.....and has Sword of the New World Uninstalled.

My rule for Korean Based games is "If its completely made in Korea, avoid it like the plague...Unless there is enough press about it that it escapes MMO and game sites"

I've been playing this game for two and a half years now.  I only play actively and don't AFK.  Combine that playing style with collecting and leveling all the various recruitable characters means that I don't have any Expert level characters.  While this does prevent me to participating in the highest level maps and raids, it doesn't matter to me as that's not what I find enjoyable about this game.

What I do find enjoyable is collecting and playing with the largest variety of characters that I have ever seen in any game, both MMO and console/PC game.  I currently have 40 different characters whose skills and stats are different from each other.  I'm not done collecting characters either as there are still over a dozen existing characters that I have yet to get (because I'm not strong enogh) and there are even more characters coming out in the future.  A second thing I enjoy about this game is collecting the various costumes, weapons, armors, and other decorative materials for all those characters that I've collected so far.

Those enjoy the typical WASD controlled MMO will most likely not enjoy this game but that's ok as this game isn't meant for them.  There is just no method of controlling 3 characters independently with WASD plus all your letter keys are needed to activate the various skills each character has.  The row with Q controls the skills of the first char, A for the second, and Z for the third.  We don't even have enough keys to accomodate all the stances (which controls the set of skills that are active for a given character) that has character has.  Sometimes, I wish our keyboards are larger so that we can do more things simultaneously.

So love it or hate it, this game is certainly different from the bland run of the mill, single person, WASD controlled, WoW copycats MMO that you see everywhere.

I actually liked this game.

1.  I was doing missions and its impossible to afk grind before level 50 because of the elite mobs.

2. There are some reallly REALLLY fun things to do. There are these quest item drops that take you into instances where you have to do things like protect a crystal from waves of enemies, attack the enemy bases, etc.  And they scale with team (which makes them super fun!!!)

3. I never really bothered with the grind because the gameplay was pretty fun.  It was fun getting characters up higher level because of the RTS style gameplay.  You guys keep saying its just like every other mmo but in here, you can have up to 3 chars at the same time which makes for some great fun tactics.

4. Varied classes.  Have you guys ever tried playing as Angela? I think that was the name of the girl.  She basically sets traps around.  From cannons, to walls, to spinning blades.  I had soooo much fun taking a room in a dungeon where the enemies respawned fast and I was basically turning it into a room of death with cannons, spinning traps, and walls.  It was basically like playing a tower defense game o.o  Also, theres the summoner Viki and CAtherine. Yes you grind a week for them but they actually play really fun especially a summoner Catherine (who summons dolls)

5. Fun combat and fighting.  This is about it.  Everyone keeps saying its a grind but I didnt really think about the grind at all.  I just go around killing stuff! , doing missions, etc.  Exploring the world and stuff.  When I was playing this game, I was in a pretty nice guild in the eu servers and I was having fun doing all kinds of stuff (especially with those mission items that take you to an instanced place.  Those were really really fun!)

What killed it for me?  RL issues lol.  Then when I got back into MMOs, I went to City of heroes and I also got a girlfriend! ^_^ I luvs her! She didnt like this game much so we went off to play other games together^_^

WHY do they call any of these games FREE to Play?  They certainly are NOT!

They should be called Free to START!

Please do not necro post in old threads.