The Chronicles of Spellborn: New Launch Overview
MMORPG.com Chronicles of Spellborn Correspondent Patrick S. Marshall has written this post-launch update on The Chronicles of Spellborn, giving his opinions on what the game needs in order to continue to thrive as it sets to roll out in North America and the UK.
A little bit over a month ago, The Chronicles of Spellborn had its launch in Europe. Soon, it will be North America and the UK's turn. So it is about time to have a little round up and see what has been done since the beta and what the Devs have been up to in the last few weeks while Europe was live.
Yes, there are still some bugs. With that said though, the Developers are vigorously chasing them down one by one and decimating the little annoyances. Some minor fixes and some bigger ones have been patched in since serverstart. The French and German localization has gone a long way and looks very decent now. The infamous fame-hole in the late teens of the character-levels has been worked out and the first group-instance also had a bit of a revamp. The high-house-quest chains work more or less failure free, and while the starting area is swarming with players trying the first seven levels gratis, it did feel a little bit lonely after the starting area, in the first couple of weeks. But steadily, the population of the enclave of five sacrifices grows and you get your share of PvP in the specified areas and PvP-Servers, find some companions for a couple of quests or to socialize. So life settles in on the shards that drift through the deathspell storm.
While there are still some points on the playerbase wish list that need some looking into by the Devs (ranging from better control over the UI to content and features), you never get the feeling that the Devs aren't working on something. Atmospheric, intriguing and very promising would be the best way to describe TCoS at its current state.
What the game really lacks is proper advertisement. In Europe, the box was almost impossible to find, even in bigger malls and gamestore-chains, but then again, there is no real need for the box since you can always download the free client and then upgrade your trial-account. But still, the game is in need of a little bit more recognition, and it would deserve it too.
The bottom line is that the game could use some more players, especially on the international servers, which are considerably less populated than the French or German servers, since the UK is separated from Europe publisher-wise by a territorial IP-ban (Acclaim is publishing TCoS in the US and the UK - Frogster does the rest of Europe and Asia).
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It's a shame too, as I can't stress enough that, in my opinion, The Chronicles of Spellborn deserves a larger player base. The game delivers essentially what the Devs have promised, which is not very common in the computer games industry anymore. And taking into consideration the fact that the studio TCoS was developed in is by no means one of the biggest, they did a fine job and still do. It is a credit to that team and their dedication that we have seen patches, hot-fixes and content brought out regularly over the last weeks.
So, if you are looking for something new that stands apart from the mainstream repitition based games, check out The Chronicles of Spellborn. It's free to try and worth paying for.
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