During PAX East 2012, the fine folks of Perfect World Entertainment give us a live demo of the upcoming open world Action-MMO, Raiderz. Find out how wielding body parts that fall from enemies can change your class and skills on the fly. The video below should give you a decent overview of what the game is all about.
Bill's Take
I only got to spend a brief amount of time with Raiderz myself, but from what I could tell it really seemed to nail the "Monster Hunter" feel, in a true MMORPG setting. For those not familiar with Monster Hunter (and I digress that it's been a while since I played one), it's a series of games where players literally spend their entire time hunting monsters and taking their parts as trophies. That's essentially what Raiderz is aiming to do, only on a massive scale. And it looks really fantastic so far. The combat is smooth and effortless to get a handle on, with little or no animation locking while in-combat either. You can and will be expected to move and avoid enemy attacks.
What's really interesting is that while you will pick your class at the start like any other MMORPG, depending on the objects dropped by enemies, you can temporarily change your class by picking up said objects. You'll see crabs in the above video drop parts of their body, and when you wield them you shift to a two-handed hammer wielding warrior even if you spend the rest of your days as a finger-waggling mage.
I also really liked that apparently the majority of the world and encounters are out in the open. Big bosses are out in the open world right alongside normal quests and towns and cities. I wonder how "farming" will be handled, but then maybe that's the point. All in all, I really liked what I saw at PAX East from Raiderz and can't wait to give the game a more in-depth look when it hits closed beta in a few months.
