Review: Horizons: Empire of Istaria
by Fyrn

It is MMORPG Hell indeed right now, new MMO Games keep popping up and are going to be released in the next months, and one of them is Horizons: Empire of Istaria. The game development was originally started by Artifact Entertainment around 1999 with private funding and promised a lot of groundbreaking features like massive race wars. Now it is 2003, in these 4 years the development team and with it the game changed rather drastically. The original inventor David Allen left the team and from that point on the original idea of horizons was changed to make the game enjoyable by a broader range of customers, or just because it was impossible to realize the original layout, we don’t know the details. But nevertheless, Horizons grew fame for the extensive crafting and world shaping features it still promised after the drastic changes: Complex crafting to a degree never seen before in a MMORPG, complete player driven economy, the ability to actually impact the story and lands of Istaria. While most of these features were realized, the game was afflicted by bad beta previews and the impressions left by for example the US Beta Forums. But in the end all of these were Previews, with emphasis on ‘Pre’, were based on the Beta and the game has evolved a good bit now, a few days after the European release. And we all know that MMORPGs are steadily evolving. Oh and who can name a MMORPG that had no start up problems? Thought so. Enough introduction, on with the core features of this magnificent game.

Crafting

Horizons raises the ability to create own items in-game to a new level, while you could buy resources and craft items in Dark Age of Camelot and other games it has been merely an alternative to just buying items from merchants or looting them. In Horizons however you can not loot items from monsters, nor can you buy them from merchants. How the heck is that going to work you ask? The whole economy is player driven! There are few things you can buy from NPCs like starting items, few resources and so on. You most certainly couldn’t equip yourself completely just from NPCs; except one NPC: The Consigner. Players can offer their goods for sale to other players at consigners that are present in every city; the consigner takes 10% of the price the player asks for. This system worked very well in the Beta and continues to work more than well after release.

As for the Crafting process, you start off by joining a crafting school; I will take blacksmith as example here. Blacksmith is the beginning school for weapon smiths for example, all you have to do to become blacksmith is walking up to the Blacksmith Trainer and greet him, click on his invitation, and there you are. The trainer will also offer starting equipment for free, including your first few item formulas to refine resources and craft your first items. A Blacksmith gets for example a Mining Pick, Smelting Tongs and a Smithing Hammer, as well as formulas for Metal Bars and Bronze Short Swords. After scribing the formulas and equipping your Mining Pick you walk to one of the Copper & Tin Ore mining places and pick away on a vein, gathering Copper & Tin Ore. Once you have the amount you want or your inventory is full you can go to a nearby machine building, where you will find several Anvils and Smelters. The second step to create your item is to refine the resources, by crafting a Bronze Metal Bar in this example, so you click on ‘Create Item’, select ‘Bronze Metal Bar’, and select a quantity that is doable with the resources in your inventory. In order to be able to do this you have to have the Smelter Tongs equipped and stand near the Smelter, then you can proceed by clicking Create. Now you should have Bronze Bars in your inventory, which stack just like Ore, and are ready to proceed to step three. Step three is creating the real item: A Bronze Short Sword in our example, so you step up to the Anvil, equip your Smithing Hammer and click Create Item again, this time selecting the Bronze Short Sword. Now you can apply techniques to the sword, such as bonus to one hand slashing, or strength and so on. You can also customize the item, customization however was not enabled in the Beta, and I didn’t get high enough to be able to see it in the release yet, so I cannot comment on it here.
But this should give you an overview of how Crafting looks like in Horizons. On with fighting with your newly created Bronze Short Sword.

Combat

Combat in any MMORPG to date has been rather boring; it has mostly been a ‘Select monster, cast spell, cast spell, cast spell ..’. Horizons doesn’t break this manner but at least tries to, in Horizons you can, like in many other games choose different Styles, Attacks, Spells, Buffs and so on while your combat is going on. You also can move freely and control your combat to a degree never seen, but the feeling of repetitive brainless kill kill kill action still comes up once in a while. The only thing that might change this are the events, the story of Horizons is supposed to evolve through players actions. Events such as the besieging of a city by a monster army have already been held in the Beta, not really impressive, but a lot more impressive things might come now that the Game is released.

As Adventurer in Horizons you have several different types of ‘Attacks’. Those are Abilities that you get for the School you are in, and can only use while that school is active and spells that you get from Spellcrafters/Scholars. Abilities can be useable like spells, or active all the time, they include stances which are like auras, taking away a % of one thing and giving you a bonus % in another.

However, as the live teams of Game Network and Artifact Entertainment start their events you will get exclusive reports as addition to this Review. On with the more interesting Community Building, and Building in general.

Community Building

This is one of the real strengths of the Game; to my knowledge the only other game giving you the ability to actually build houses yourself has been Ultima Online. Now in Horizons, in a real 3D World, you can do even more than just building your ordinary house. The land is cluttered with plots for sale that can hold many different types of structures, there are whole pre-set player cities that consist of a huge amount of plots and destroyed community buildings. Player Buildings include the casual House, which has models like Human Medium House, Dwarven Small House, Huts and many many others. Or a player can, if his plot allows this, build a Shop and put NPCs in it that sell goods. Only these buildings would be a rather boring view you think? Not a problem, there are plenty of decorations for your garden as well. Stuff like fountains, Trees, Tents, Stone ways...
Just stuffing a player town with houses wont do though, you should rebuild the destroyed community structures that are in every of the player cities. Town hall buildings that will spawn Trainers, Lighthouses on cities that are at the water, and so on. Also some of the cities have Artefacts that give for example Magical bonus to all players.

You still feel unsatisfied? You want a really large scale goal for your guild? How about building a whole city, with a castle? Not a problem. While that was not available in the Beta, Castle plots have been spotted in the Release already, so that adds to the list of features promised and delivered.

Even if you’re not up for building your own buildings, you can build away. Players can leave amounts of coins at their buildings for people who contribute, so you could work your way up as a freelance mason or carpenter. And then there are the real community buildings, which include the artefacts found in player cities. Those are for example Bridges that need to be built in order to cross from an island to the main lands. From rebuilding destroyed bridges, to freeing subjugated races.

Subjugated Races

Some thought this would be just an excuse for Artifacts inability to include those races in the release, but it adds nicely to the game play if it’s implemented. No one knows if it actually already works, because no one got that far yet. The idea behind subjugated races is that there are races besides the 9 living player races that have been subjugated by the withered aegis to serve them, when you happen to come across them as a player, they will most certainly attack you. So they are your enemies until the race is freed. What it takes to free a race is yet undetermined, and more information on that will be released as the game continues. When freed, a subjugated race will become available as player race.
We will keep you updated on this as well as information becomes available.

Graphics and Music

Not much to say about the Music and Sound Effects, they are just plain great. The Music changes in combat, cities, undead areas and so on. It really fits the environment.

The Graphics Engine however has its problems, on my machine I am at an average of 13 frames per second. In non-structured wilderness the frame rate is somewhere around 15 at a medium setting and a resolution of 1280x1024. The resolution however does not impact performance on my Radeon 9500pro. And if you think it might be my CPU or Memory, it most certainly isn’t, a lot of people with high-end machines have been complaining about performance issues, memory leaks, and other graphics related problems. The game is not unplayable, but not perfect like this either. I hope they are addressing this as soon as possible because it is a real drawback.

Conclusion

While I could ramble on about this game and its features for even longer, I will stop at this point. We will keep you updated on the game with a second review after the game has been live for a good amount of time, as well as you can probably see player diaries in a short while.

My conclusion is that Horizons: Empire of Istaria is one of the most promising newcomers to the MMORPG genre. While it has its start up problems, as well as client side performance issues, I am very certain that these problems will be eradicated sooner or later. In the end there has not been a single MMOG that launched without problems, and there also has been no MMORPG that hasn’t evolved a lot a few months after release. The same will happen with Horizons in my opinion, and we will keep you updated on the progress.

The land and its Story, the content, and the very promising features that are already implemented and will be implemented make this a game very well worth playing. Your best bet would be to wait about a month and check back for more information if you really want to enjoy the game. If you are anxious to play a new MMORPG right now, Horizons is one, if not the best choice. That is why this Game earns a solid 7 as of now, but will probably rise in a second in-depth review.

Another closing comment worth writing is that Game Network does not have a Support website like Artifact has for the launch. This slows down the support, but in the end it has just been 3 days since release and I myself did not need to contact the support once yet.

Review Machine:
AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1.0GHz
Radeon 9500Pro 128MB
640MB PC133 RAM
Network Connection: 1.5MBit down/256KBit up