Corum Online -> Psuedo-Open Beta

Hey all!

Long time between posts of late, I'm finally back in school and on a normal schedule again, so hopefully things should go back to normal. The MMO industry has been pretty quiet for new releases lately, it seems everything is getting pushed back, so hopefully they give me something to work with.

Todays preview is on Corum Online, a new game by Gpotato (publishers of Flyff, Space Cowboy, and Rappelz). Webby is http://corum.gpotato.com .

The basic points of the game are pretty standard; it has six classes: Fighter, Ranger, Sorcerer, Priest, Summoner, Hunter. They each specialize in a certain area, which is rather obvious from their class names. The website causes unneeded confusion because it names each classes "sp" differently, such as the Fighter's version is called "Aura", the Ranger's is "Chakra", etc... Aside from that, it appears there are 5 basic status points (immediate bonus to the games rating for me!), EGO, STR, DEX, INT, VIT. I've no clue what Ego is centered around, but the other four are quite obvious.

A notable difference from other games in regards to the priest class, is that it is ranked 3rd for physical combat strength, meaning it may make for a decent solo class. Also, the sorcerer has the ability to cast multiple spells at one time, such as; targeting one monster with a simple spell while casting a complex spell to deal with a mob of monsters. Downside is that this practice drains SP faster, but its decent trade off in my opinion. And lastly in this odd-ball category, the summoners text says "If the summoning power of a summoner reaches the extreme, then characters from other servers can also be summoned." I've no idea what that means, but summoning characters from other servers sounds pretty funky.

Moving onto some of the game's systems. There is large scale PVP, small scale PVP, and 1 vs 1 duels. The large scale PVP can be classified by a type of guild wars, in this case called "Dungeon Siege". You can take control of a dungeon, and have a guardian protect you and the dungeon produces equipment when it levels up (which happens naturally over time). The system sounds VERY similar to Ragnarok Online's War of Emperium (Guild Wars) feature. The game also has an alignment system, chaotic good, chaotic evil, etc... but that's all the info that was released about it.

The Open Beta (as long as you have a GPotato account, which is free to register), starts in 2 1/2 hours from this post time, or 24:00 PST. I'll be trying it first, then writing a complete review. For now, the stat system and guild wars feature will be exciting, and I'm always curious to see how each game implements questing and equipments etc.. See you all!

-RF