Perfect World International is a free-to-play MMORPG that seems like a good alternative to World of Warcraft for those who don’t want to pay a monthly subscription. These are my first impressions of the good and the bad of the game.
The good
Perfect World is very newbie friendly. They provide helpful hints to guide you through the first few levels and teach you the basics of the game. They also give you an item called the Supply Stash which gives you a useful item every 5 levels. At level 5, Supply Stash gave me a token that I could trade for a nice weapon that was way better than the one I was using at the time.
Another good thing is that money is easy to come by, even at low levels. Many people don’t even bother to pick up the loot that monsters drop and just leave it lying around. After a short time, anyone can pick up loot from the ground. Simply by collecting this unwanted loot and selling it to trade NPCs you can get a good amount of coins.
Two useful features included in the game are the Find Quest button and the Coordinate Wizard. In your quest window, you can click the Find Quest button to show you available quests that you haven’t accepted yet, as well as the NPC giving you the quest. The Coordinate Wizard is a button at the bottom of your minimap that has the coordinates of all the NPCs in the area, and you can double-click an NPC’s name to automatically run to them.
There seems to be a wide variety of cool pets and mounts in the game. My Venomancer has already been through 4 different pets at level 15, because I keep finding new ones that I want. I started out using a wolf, then moved on to a Small Sawfly, then switched to a Dark Wanderer (looks like a Nazgul from Lord of the Rings), and now I use Crystalline Magmite (a big glass golem). Every day I play to see someone run, ride or fly with a new pet or mount I haven’t seen yet.
One of the funniest things I’ve found about the game is that you can double jump really high and take no fall damage. I’ve already had enough fun jumping off big cliffs and jumping over buildings, trees, and other structures. There have even been two quests that require you to do multiple jumps to get to the top of a building and reach a chest.
The bad
There are some bad things in the game, some that can be fixed and some that can’t. Your inventory is painfully small; you only have 32 slots to carry all your things. If you were planning to gather the necessary crafting materials while doing quests, you will run out of space very quickly. This was by design, because you can buy inventory stones from the cash shop that will increase the size of your inventory, up to a maximum of 64 slots.
One weird thing about the default control settings is that the mouse scroll zoom is inverted (scrolling up with the mouse scroll button will zoom out instead of zoom in). Fortunately, this is easily fixed by clicking System->System Settings->Game->Basic and then clicking the Zoom checkbox in the Attacks category. Be sure to click Apply and then Confirm to save your settings.
A puzzling omission from the game is an autorun button. This is a pretty standard MMORPG staple that wasn’t programmed into the game. You can click a point far in the distance to run for a long time, or you can open the Map screen and Alt-click anywhere to move automatically, but I still think they should have included an autorun. button. Note: You can still move normally with the standard WASD setup, it’s not a point-and-click-to-move-only control scheme.
The bottom line
All in all, I think Perfect World is a fun and free alternative to World of Warcraft. It might not appeal to everyone, but I’d say it’s at least worth downloading to check it out.
