User Profile for ekinney1

Clan Lord 508 (Mac OS X)

New Features - you just have to look for them  

I took a 2 year break from Clan Lord and gave WoW a try. WoW was a lot of fun with zillions of quests, auctions that were active enough to "play the market" and lots more items than Clan Lords, but WoW doesn't have the lasting power of Clan Lord. Now I am back to Clan Lord and even though at first glance they don't seem to be in the same class (no camera movement, simple graphics, not bad, but simple, no cinematics when you first start, etc) but I'm one of those people who liked the Warcraft II graphics better than WC III's 3D look. Three things I like better about Clan Lord are: 1) Low tech, low bandwidth - you can play this on an older iMac (OS X) or PC and it plays just fine. Dial-up with 3 players sharing a single dial-up connection still plays great. I have faster computers of course but it's nice that Clan Lord doesn't exclude players without the latest technology. 2) When WoW started I saw many elements of that seemed to be taken stright out of Clan Lord, which is good, games keep building on each other and getting better. But I really like Clan Lord's implementation of communication better. messages appear on the screen in a way that it is easier to see who is saying what and for messages from players off screen or completely out of the area there are associated visual or audio cues that make it easy to follow. 3) A smaller player base. There are enough players to actually team up with others and make friends, but there are not so many thta no one cares who you are. This is a co-operative game, and the players may have competing groups trying to push the frontiers of the known mapped lands, but generally everyone is welcome and appreciated. I have seen other reviewers say there are only 3 classes, sorta true, but I should point out that there are some sub-classes now (Ranger and Champion). because I took a long break, Im new again, so there may be other sub-classes I am missing because I don't know about them. To train a sub class you have to find the trainer, and they are usually moderately hard to get to; you won't find them sitting around the main town (Puddleby). It's hard to reveiw Clan lord on it's own merits, I find it easier to compare to other MMRPG, so here is another comparison - in WoW after an update anything new is mapped and discovered within a few hours. In Clan Lord there is still uncharted territory and there are continual effiorts ongoing to make it past some particularly difficult places, while every once in a while someone discovers some secret passage that has been practically right under our noses all along. Exploration and discovery really appeal to me in a game, and so I enjoy this aspect of Clan Lord a lot. Gripes: If I could change some things about Clan Lord I wish there were ways to carry more items (you can carry 32, plus some items fit into smaller bags so you can actually carry more) and I wish there were more quests. For those of you who expect me to list the graphics among my gripes, sorry all you 3D camera-angling polygon junkies, I like the graphics better the way they are. A nice hand drawn image appeals to me more than the jagged angles that are inherent in 3D games. There are a lot of Clan Lord fan sites, check them out, and you can play a demo character for free (but when you log off you lose whatever you have gotten), so it's easy to give it a try. Clan Lord isn't for everyone, but it does have the depth to hold a more thoughtful gamer's interest for years. [alert admin]

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Saturday, September 08 2007 @ 09:55 AM PDT

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