Peria Chronicles: The G-Star Preview
Peria Chronicles, one of the highlights of this year’s G-star expo, is an upcoming Korean MMORPG. Due to be released in 2017, the game has been in development for the past 5 years with multiple titles (e.g. “Project NT”) and multiple game systems.
During this year’s expo at the Nexon booths, a prototype version was available for playtesting, along with a huge lineup due to the hype for the game. The prototype version had a number of bugs as expected, including UI errors and awkward controls. The version at the show was also lacking most of the terrain editing and other promised features, only having the ability to simply place rocks in a lava environment. The lack of polish will hopefully be gone by the time the OBT is announced next year.
The basic combat of the game is a mix of Hearthstone and Pokemon, where you draw cards from a ‘library’ of cards (or deck) and summon creatures (a.k.a. Kiranas) at a mana cost. You can summon unlimited amount of these Kirana creatures, as long as you still have cards in your hand and mana to summon them. When your mana runs out, you discard the remaining creatures from your hand and gain a bonus effect from discarding them. If you run out of creatures instead though, you can click the deck to draw more cards to play (at a timed interval).
The player character can also be ‘summoned’ and used to attach separately for players who prefer to focus on solo combat (this does not use mana or cards either). Finally, the discarded cards and the deck is shuffled and brought back for another round with any remaining mana carried over.
On top of this basic mechanic, there are a number of strategies that involved the use of location and positioning. The prototype featured a ‘Teleport’ card, where the player could teleport themselves and their creatures behind the monster. Hopefully, these various possible strategies will be explored further to help differentiate the game from other games (e.g. Hearthstone) before the game is released.
There are also rumours of skill specialisations and deck limits so that player cooperation is required to grow any guild or city area. Coupled with beautiful cell-shaded graphics and full customisation of every character and pet, Peria Chronicles is probably the most unique upcoming MMORPG, especially in a world full of WoW-clones and boring RPGs.
Here is a playthrough video by This Is Game:
