A Thief Stands Ready To Raid Merchants

This concept is really all Silkroad has in terms of a story. You play as an adventurer, choosing several pre-made males, females and demons hoping to make their fortune on the aforementioned silk road. That is the extent of the story in Silkroad Online with the idea being that you have no pre-set destiny and are instead allowed to choose your own path on the road of riches. In doing this, SRO avoids many of the typical cliché RPG stories such as being the chosen one and/or saving the world, but foregoing a story altogether is not a proper substitute.

What it lacks in story though, Silkroad makes up for in graphical presentation. Simply put, the graphics are amazing, considering the fact that this game is free. The world is completely 3D with a graphical style reminiscent of that found in Guild Wars. Character models are also excellent and feature small, clearly visible details in armour, weapons and skin.
A Thief Stands Ready To Raid Merchants


The monsters are no slouches either, being drawn from Oriental mythology, ranging from tigers and bandits to Straw men and Demon Horses. It would have been nice if there was a similar range in terms of character models as you only have around ten to fifteen models to choose from.



As for the environments, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. The cities, though there are only three, are beautifully detailed with each possessing a unique design. From the traditional Chinese City of Jangan to the marble and jewel-encrusted Arabian City of Hotan, the cities are truly something to admire. The wilderness by contrast, is somewhat stale, with bland and repeating textures making for rather dull adventuring. Ever so often though, you come across an ornate landmark that shows that the developers put at least some effort into the aesthetics of the environment. This all comes at a cost as the graphics will bring even some high end PCs to their knees; particularly when in the heavily populated cities. That’s not to say though, that by running the game on low graphics you will abolish lag. Lag in this will game be an ever-present problem with periodic spikes at random intervals and often at the most inopportune times as well as a spike whenever you enter cities. A lot of this lag has to do with the amount of players on your server.



With that said, graphics only make up half of a game’s presentation. The other half is Sound and in this department Silkroad stumbles a bit. As far as music goes, the songs are varied and well done, but limited to the intro screen and cities. When in the wilderness, you will only hear occasional and often very annoying sounds of nature such as an irritating bird cry or the repetitive clopping of your horse’s hooves. SRO does feature a robust set of sound options however, allowing you to switch on or off the many sounds of the game, ranging from nature and alarm sounds to those heard in combat.



Presentation aside, Silkroad Online revolves around combat more than anything else and most of the decisions in the game relate to it. It starts right after choosing your character’s appearance as you’re given the choice of a starting weapon between two types of swords, spears or a bow followed by choosing a type of armour. The choice only affects your starting equipment, which can be altered soon after, but none the less, this will shape your early gameplay experiences.



After creating your character you are thrown headfirst into the world of Silkroad with little help or guidance other than a bare bones introductory quest that has you running errands around the city. These errands aren’t made any easier by the click to move system which, while acceptable in a top-down MMORPG, is cumbersome at best in the fully 3D world of Silkroad Online. Add in the non-existent path finding that will have your character stuck on every lamp and hay bail they come near and a by the numbers interface and you are not off to a good start. Sadly, that errand running quest is a highpoint as far as quests go in Silkroad as they quickly become repetitive combat quests with goals such as kill X of this monster or collect X of this item from monster corpses. Also, the game isn’t shy from piling on the requirements for a quest, requesting several hundred monsters to be killed for a small reward. This amounts to a lot of monster farming/grinding (killing monsters repeatedly) to gain experience levels and a small amount of gold compared to the amount you get from killing all of those monsters.



After completing a few quests it quickly becomes apparent how unfriendly SRO is towards new players. The game gives explanations that only scratch the surface of issues and while a help guide is present, it to gives little more than an overview. It doesn’t help that the text is riddled with translation errors that make many of the instructions demand several readings to fully understand. This is particularly true in the case of quests where, upon gaining a level, several new quests are made available to you and the quest givers are displayed in a small popup. The problem is that once you read the popup it disappears permanently, meaning that if you later forget one of the quest givers (there are usually several) it’s tough luck for you. This lack of information not only applies to quests however, as it hinders many aspects of the game. Equipment traits are another example of the overall lack of information. On a piece of equipment it may state that it possesses the Immortal trait, though, it gives no mention of the fact that this means the equipment can’t be broken when performing Alchemy (a method of improving equipment by combining other items with it). If confused about where to get quests, often the simplest solution to your problem (short of looking it up on a forum) is to grind.
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