Sword of the New World: Granado Espada
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ESRB:
Alcohol Reference,Fantasy Violence,Suggestive Themes
Publisher: K2 Network Genre(s): MMORPG Home Page: http://www.swordofthenewworld.com
(Even more) Rough spotsTranslating MMOs from one language to another is a difficult task, but Granado Espada's English translation desperately needs an editor. The language used is stiff, unnatural and riddled with small mistakes. You can usually figure out the intent of a piece of text, but it just feels rough and unfinished. Translation also means that any improvements to the Korean original will move to the western version with a considerable delay. Cash Store is also bit of a joke. Even if you accept the concept, the pricing is set to a level that is borders on fraud. 10$ equals 1000 gold, with small discounts at when you buy in bulk - for example, 40$ gets you 5000 gold. For 1000 gold you can buy 20 copies of an item that gives you +15% to all your attributes - for one hour. Or you can get teleport scrolls that can save you from a sticky situation - 20 copies for 1000 gold (10$). If you truly embrace the concept and put all the items Cash Store offers to full use, the price of playing Granado Espada sky-rockets rapidly. It feels like K2 Network wants both to keep the cake (the monthly subscription fee) and eat it (Cash Store item purchases). While the Cash Store currently offers nothing game-breaking, there are no guarantees that such things might not be added later. The Korean version already includes items such as purchasable temporary 100% experience boost, or limited-time passes to a "premium dungeon", making Cash Store purchases almost mandatory. Group mechanics also seem to be very poor. Everything in the game is based around the semi-automatic play of the MCC, and grouping with another set of three characters is exactly as exciting as playing alone - not very. This probably explains the lack of interest for the players to socialize. In fact, most players I ran across myself appeared to be gold farmers grinding Vis, based on their completely silly character names and the amount of Vis selling spam floating in the chat. Museum hardware is fine
Visually Granado Espada is very nice, right down to the animated... attributes of the pretty ladies.
The game looks pretty good due to great care that has gone to the models and textures. Some spots betray the fact that the polygon counts are fairly low, but the developers have "faked" many things with great skill, resulting in a very good looking game. Animation is not quite as good as the rest of the art but it's perfectly passable without any major distracting flaws. As a positive surprise, even with maximized visuals, Granado Espada runs perfectly fine on almost any PC. Our high-end test system shifted the game at 80-150fps without breaking a sweat, and we had to go pretty low before the game started to have playability issues even with maxed out settings. The fairly low-spec YouGamers recommended system with an ATI Radeon X1600, or similar, and a 2.8GHz CPU can run the game at maximum settings using a 1280x1024 resolution at 40-50fps, with occasional pauses when loading new textures; these pauses are present even when playing with far higher spec system. You also won't need tons of RAM as everything works fine even with just 512MB, with the disclaimer that you have to bump that to 1GB if you use Windows Vista instead of XP.
There are plenty of graphical options to degrade visuals, and it appears that the game has been developed to be playable on just about any old PC, probably due to the fact that many Asian countries tend to be several years behind cutting edge when you look at the average gamers PC. While the manufacturer's minimum spec is extremely low, we found it to be fairly realistic. The game is be quite playable with low settings on the weakest system we had to hand and while I can't recommend anyone to play anything on a NVIDIA GeForce 4 MX, something like a NVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti4200 will run Granado Espada just fine. The only notable drawback with the graphical options is that you have to log out of the game to alter settings, so tweaking things to a good compromise takes some effort.
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