Pumping Irony

Welcome to World of Holic! I smile with a roll of my eyes as I see that greeting every time I login to Holic. Despite that single line of text making us think of the irreverent World of Warcraft, Holic shares nothing with the current behemoth of the MMORPG sphere. When you get right down to it, Holic is your typical Korean F2P title which is highly focused on grinding, similar to Silk Road, but it does have a few neat features. Mainly I think for me it’s been not only the whimsical nature of the game but also the community that has kept me playing. I’ve encountered no bots yet, and only two spammers who were reported quickly to the GM. Even though the game with its anime-inspired cartoon graphics and pastel colors will appeal to kids, a fair amount of adults also play. The chat is always busy and in general people are helpful with answering questions, or responding to revive requests, and grouping up for grinding or dungeons. Also despite playing the “Holic USA” version of the game, I regularly encounter conversations in Spanish, and even a few in French, Deutsch, Portuguese and Filipino so far. Most non-US players can easily switch to English. The reverse cannot be said of US players, myself included, unfortunately.

In my Guidelines post I mentioned I would play a healer class (if available) in the F2P games to hopefully get some idea how popular grouping in the game is, so without further ado, here’s Twikki (yeah, just had to go with a cutesy name) my male Koshare Priest at the Holic login screen.

Characters and Customization

There are two races in Holic: the Seneka, who are humans, and the Koshare, a cute, furry, short race. Each race has both male and female, though Koshare are nearly androgynous in appearance. They’re relatively rare — most players seem to use Seneka — but other than clothing I have a difficult time telling a male Koshare from a female.

Six traditional fantasy classes are available as well: Warrior, Mage, Priest, Rogue, Monk and Hunter. All the classes do pretty much what you would expect them to from your experiences in most other games. The Hunter class was added post-launch after complaints of a lack of a ranged class, and seems to essentially be a range-based Rogue, minus the sneaky attacks. The Monk class is actually the one that throws me a little off-guard. It seems to be a sort of combination of Warrior and Rogue; very strong but also very fast attacks, plenty of dps and even a self-heal.

Character customization is limited to choosing your race, class and gender then customizing your appearance. Hair style, color and facial appearance then your starter shirt and pants. Each of those has 6 or so different choices, and no sliders for more detailed customization.

After creating your new character, you’re treated to a cinematic using the game engine which flies over the countryside while you listen to Madame Enfant, the Apprentice Instructor, narrate the beginning of your Holic story and eventually landing you in the starter town of Nakuru where she gives you a pendant. The cinematic ends and the game world begins in Nakuru standing in front of Madame Enfant who glows with a big quest indicator to get you started on your journey.

Character Advancement

Advancement is automated; you won’t manually assign points into various attributes to personalize your character. Every time you level, all your attributes are automatically increased per your class and any new skills are learned immediately, no traveling to a class trainer. This effectively means every player of any given class is identical to every other player of that class, right? Yes and no. Everyone will have the same attributes and skills at the same level, but you personalize your character through gear and enchantments and upgrades, which could be considered Holic’s version of crafting.

Your gear comes from three sources: armor, weapons, and accessories. Each of these upgrades every so many levels, with armor being the most spread-out of all.

Weapons start at level 1 obviously, with upgrades available every +4 levels afterwards (5,9,13, etc.) though occasionally one or two classes may have a single weapon become available during the interim levels.

Accessories are jewelry, and become available at various levels with upgrades every +5 levels. Bracelets start at level 9, necklaces and rings at level 11, and earrings at level 13. A full set is one necklace and two of everything else.

Armor starts with shoes at level 1, a shirt at level 5, pants at level 9, then gloves at level 13. Better versions are available every +15 levels so you could be wearing the same gear for quite awhile.

Plenty of cosmetic items are available as drops — also sellable in the auction house and player shops — and in the item shop, called Holic Square, with which to customize your character’s appearance and abilities.

Accessories, Armor and Weapons will have either one or two enchantment slots available, and cosmetics have one. The catch is that you have to match the enchantment level with the item level. Twikki is level 25 now but still all cosmetic drops are level 1 items so I can only use level 1 enchantments. I’ve seen enchantment stones with levels of 1, 13, 25 and 40 thus far so much like the armor tiers are spread out, so are enchantments. Applying an enchantment to a weapon gives it a glow, the color depending on whether the first enchantment is a physical or magical attack bonus.

The way enchanting works is you gather stones either as a rare drop or trading from players. You bring the stones to the enchanter NPC where you tell him which item to enchant with which stone, pay his fee and you’re done. You can also compound stones, where you take three stones of the same type and combine them into a single stone that has double the bonuses of the three separately, though there is a risk of failure and losing all the stones. I suspect I could go back and re-compound with three compounded stones but I haven’t managed to collect that many yet. Or perhaps combine one compounded stone with two normals? I haven’t had the opportunity to fully delve into the enchanting system to see how deep it is yet, unfortunately but since it’s the primary means of custom advancing your characters — in addition to their gear — players put quite a bit of emphasis on it.

I have encountered four types of stones: Physical Attack, Magical Attack, Physical Defense and Magical Defense. I’ve seen players link a “Mixed” stone in trade chat (yes, Holic has item linking!) and players saying those are the best stones that exist but I’ve never seen one yet so they must be even more rare than strengthening scrolls.

Ah, scrolls! They’ve been a far rarer drop than stones during my time in Holic and they are used to upgrade items rather than enchant. From what I understand I can, for example, strengthen Twikki’s staff to +1. If I have more scrolls, I can continue to re-strengthen to +2 and so on but the chance for failure increases with each new level. Failure will break (destroy) the item. Successful strength upgrades will also add sparklies to your weapon in addition to the glow from its enchantment. The color of the sparklies depend on how high the bonus is.

The enchantment vendor also sells an Enchant Eraser that will remove an enchantment from an item so you can apply a different one, but you do not get the stones from the original enchant back. He also sells “broken scrolls” for upgrades, which are most likely not as good as the normal scrolls. His items are also rather expensive, at least for my funds at level 25.

Graphics and Sound

As you’ve already seen from the screenshots, Holic has a “cutesy” anime-inspired art style. Performance-wise, I have all options set to maximum with 4x anti-aliasing and average 80-120fps in the wilderness and 60-90fps in towns. Holic achieves this framerate, however, by having a relatively short draw distance for mobs. Other players will usually render slightly farther than mobs, though Holic uses a technique I’ve seen in a handful of other F2P games where rather than reducing the model and texture quality of players at a distance it instead only shows half (or less) of their animation frames until those players are closer to you where you see all their animation frames. This gives a sort of “claymation” sense when watching players at a distance run or fight. I’m not a 3D graphics programmer but I’m not certain merely limiting the number of animation frames rendered has much of a performance benefit compared to reducing the actual graphical quality.

Overall the scenery, architecture and mobs fit very well with the cutesy cartoony theme. Holic uses SpeedTree for its foliage, which was also featured in Age of Conan and more recently Fallout 3 and Gears of War 2. SpeedTree renders very nice-looking trees and shrubbery with excellent performance. I think (ie. purely guessing) that SpeedTree also handles the distance imposters for its trees because Holic (and what I remember of AoC) has its distance imposters exactly where the tree will render, and in the same general shape. Other games such as Guild Wars and Lord of the Rings Online have manually-placed distance imposters that are not always quite in the same precise location as the models they are representing. Minor, but very noticeable when you’re traveling and paying attention to the scenery as the shift from imposter to model occurs.

Holic’s sound effects are perfectly adequate. Not stunning, but not annoying either, though I’m not crazy about the sounds of the various mounts I’ve seen, including my own. Other than mounts, I’ve been content with the game’s sound effects.

The soundtrack also fits the visual style in being very bright, upbeat and whimsical. Exactly the type of music you’d expect to hear from a game that looks like Holic. Think your average Final Fantasy or Wii soundtrack and you’ve got Holic.

UI

The basic UI layout is the “industry standard” for MMORPGs ever since Asheron’s Call 2 — the same layout the kids now think Blizzard designed and everyone else copied — so players will immediately be familiar with where everything is and what it does. Chat window in the lower left, mini-map in the upper right, hotbars in the center, and so on.

I will say that the overall “theme” of the UI is fairly minimalistic. Most MMORPGs will make the UI frame artwork match that of the game, but Holic’s UI theme is more like that of a desktop environment. I could easily picture a GNOME desktop that looks identical to Holic’s UI theme. Regardless, it’s very clean, easy to read and use, but it may come across as “boring” to gamers expecting fancy art for all the UI frames.

As part of the UI, I’ll mention the in-game map as well. It’s also very clean, nice-looking and easy to read. All NPCs are indicated on the map, with mouseover tooltips, and also shows specific icons if that NPC either has a quest available or completed. Players can also click any part of the map and save notes, which are indicated with an icon too! Also the map is not full-screen and has a degree of translucence (I don’t recall an option to adjust the opacity level though) so you can still travel with the map up. Openedge might actually approve of the map for that reason!

Fonts for the UI frames, names and chat are nicely done with a drop-shadow and extremely readable, which is a rarity for F2P games which all too often “feature” very blocky fonts that I personally find irritating and difficult to read. Holic does have a filter for the chat window and it functions like Guild Wars where all the various chat channels are tracked and toggling one on or off will display or hide it rather than only tracking channels that are enabled like every other MMORPG does. I normally keep the trade channel off in GW (and Holic) but if I want to see it I can click it on and all the trade chat in the buffer pops up so I can scroll through it. I find that a nice touch.

Gameplay and Controls

Holic consists of fairly standard Diku-MMO gameplay, no surprises. Quests are available and are readily indicated by the standard question mark and exclamation mark icons. Quest NPCs also glow in addtion to the icons. A green glow indicates a normal one-time quest while a red glow means the quest is repeatable. At each login and each level-up and Quest Tip icon flashes near the mini-map (also available from the quest log). Clicking it shows a character who informs you of any available quests and the map coordinates of the NPC who gives it. Hotbars work the way I expect them to, and by that I mean using the 1-0 keys not the F-keys like so many F2P games do. Maybe that’s just a cultural difference, I don’t know, but I’m not big on F-keys for anything other than very occasional special uses so Holic suits me perfectly in that regard. The obligatory click-to-move system is in place but Holic also has probably the best WASD controls I’ve yet seen in an F2P game. Controls are very responsive, a fast rate of turn for the A-D keys and the strafe keys work like a Western gamer expects them to. Even auto-run and a run-walk toggle! My usual preferred method of control is setting auto-run then holding the right mouse button to steer, and Holic supports this perfectly. Holic does have a jump but unfortunately it is just an animation and not a legitimate form of movement. If the terrain won’t let me walk off it, it won’t let me jump off it either. If there’s a fence blocking my way, I can’t jump over it to continue my travels. Being a Guild Wars player, this doesn’t really bother me, and at least I have a responsive jump animation set to the spacebar rather than GW’s /jump emote. Holic gets negative points for not allowing players to change the keybinds; you’re stuck with the default controls. Most F2P games I’ve played are the same, but I thought it a letdown that Holic has a higher degree of polish than most but failed with keybinds.

Like most F2P games, pets are popular in Holic and every class gets one. The first pet is a sort of cartoony robot called a Dallgosian and becomes available through a quest chain at level 12. At level 30 another quest chain rewards a Golden Boar pet which is much stronger in combat. Occasionally a pet cosmetic item will drop allowing you to personalize the pet and vendors sell pet health potions (heal spells don’t work on them) and cosmetics as well. A few other pets are exclusive to the item mall, and GMs have access to a few event-only pets they can hand out as rewards. Pets get their own XP as long as their level is less than that of the class using it. For example, Twikki’s Dallgosian is level 21 but his Monk sub-class is only level 11 so the pet will not earn any XP while playing the Monk unless the Monk achieves one level higher than that of the pet.

Holic also has mounts, and much like pets, some are available publicly and some only in the item shop. At level 20 a quest chain rewards you with a Peugeot, a cartoony ostrich mount. The Peugeot also has a ride limit of level 20 so if your sub-class is lower than 20, he cannot ride the mount. A mount vendor sells other mounts for very high prices, but those mounts can be ridden by a level 1 class! The item shop also has a few special mounts available. Mounts also “level up” but they do so by being ridden, not through gaining XP. When riding a mount, any damage taken from aggro mobs goes to the mount. If it’s health reaches zero, you’re dismounted. So you’ll often see players mounted as much as possible (even AFK for hours) to level their mounts. NPCs, etc. can all be interacted with while mounted — *evil glare in Turbine’s direction* — and some mounts even allow you to use your basic auto-attack, but no skills.

After level 10, Holic imposes a death penalty of -5% XP. Upon death a 15 minute timer starts counting down, giving that much time to ask if a Priest would come revive (resurrect) you. Most Priests I’ve encountered are very friendly and willing to travel to revive, and many players pay for it as well. Twikki finally achieved level 25 and got his Revive spell and has been happily reviving dead players I’m able to reach. -5% doesn’t sound like much, but consider how steeply most F2P games increase the XP per level and it becomes obvious why players would rather wait and try to get a Priest to revive them rather than recalling to town and losing that XP.

Every NPC has a voiceover and an animated cut-scene to interact with them before switching to their quest acceptance dialog, vendor shop, or whatever, which is also a nice touch of added polish to the game.

Quests give great XP rewards, which is why I always try to do them in addition to the normal grinding, though a lot of players just skip quests. Their loss… Recent quests have been awarding 55K XP each. I’ve been getting 1490 XP per kill on mobs two levels higher than Twikki, which equates to grinding an additional 36 mobs for that same 55K XP. Why players don’t pick up quests is beyond me. Any way I can get an additional benefit (XP, money, items) for something I’ll be doing anyway (killing mobs) and I’m on it, whether I care or bother to read the quest text or not.

Factions and Guilds

At level 20 your character has the option of declaring his allegiance to one of the two factions, the Primus Union or Ganav Libero. This is a permanent choice and cannot be undone later (no EQ2 betrayal system here). Once allied to a faction, you then have the option to join a guild, which are also allied to that faction so players of opposing factions cannot join the same guild. There is no restriction to grouping with players of the opposite faction, however. Currently there is no PvP system in Holic so declaring your faction mostly just gives you access to extra quests to help level and the obvious benefit of joining a guild.

Unique Features

Class Revolving. Holic does not have a true multi-class system like you’d see in say, DDO or Guild Wars where your character can have two (or more) classes and have various abilities from those classes available at all times. Instead, Holic lets you choose a primary class to start off then at level 10 a quest becomes available to choose a sub-class. Using the new “Class Revolving” ability changes your character to the new class, so you only actually play one class at a time. The hotbars change over for the new class’ skills and the “paper doll” changes so you can get gear specific for the sub-class. The revolve ability has a one minute refresh so there’s no “dps with Rogue, insta-switch to Priest for heals, then insta-switch back to Rogue” in Holic. However, any buffs from one class will carry over and that’s where most of the benefit comes in. Additionally, the sub-class gets double XP since you’ve already done the quests at those lower levels and are left with only grinding mobs to level up. If I understand the system correctly, the sub-class is the lower level of the two so even if I started Twikki as a Priest primary, should I level his Monk sub-class higher, Priest will then become the sub-class. I’m told Monk/Priest is actually an awesome combo since Monks are so self-sufficient, then while grinding either solo or in groups the Priest sub-class gets 2x XP to level faster since it has less dps and more down time. Additionally, I can visit the Class Manager NPC at any time to choose all-new primary and sub-classes! All levels are saved so if today I changed Twikki’s primary to Hunter then next week back to Priest, he’ll still be a level 25 Priest. This effectively means that a single character could eventually play as every class in the game!

Combo Relay. I haven’t seen this in action yet but it sounds almost like a combination of LOTRO’s Fellowship Maneuvers and Final Fantasy’s super attacks with summoned monsters (were they called “limit breaks” or something?). The way it works is you need a combo of seven unique colors corresponding to an offensive ability. Each skills of each class are divided into various schools, or colors, of combat or magic. For example, the Priest’s offensive abilities come in white, purple and yellow while his defensive abilities are green. The Monk has offensive skills in the black, blue, indigo and orange schools. Successful attacks will bring up the combo relay UI with seven dots, each filled in succession with the color of each attack that hit the mob. To complete the Seven Sign combo, seven unique color attacks must successfully strike the mob, then apparently there’s some fancy Final Fantasy-style animation to correspond to the bonus damage. Any repetition in the colors will reset the combo to the first dot, ie. if the group had yellow, blue, white, orange then someone executed another yellow attack, the entire combo goes back to the first dot, which would be yellow and and group attempts to do it again.

User Generated Content. Yes, you read that correctly! Holic supports some limited user-generated content in two forms: UCQ (User Created Quests) and UCD (User Created Dungeons). Visit either the UCQ or UCD NPC in town to pick up or create a quest or dungeon, respectively. Both are very easily done. To create a quest, simply input the quest level and a drop-menu fills with mobs of that level. Select if the quest will be a kill or collect quest. For kill quests, just input the number to kill for completion. For collect quests you actually get to name the custom items the mobs will drop, so I can say collect 5 Toejam Tofu of Terrors and suddenly the mob I picked will have a chance to drop an item called Toejam Tofu of Terror! The game will auto-assign a reward for completion, a package which when opened is usually either an appropriate level of health or mana potion, but you can also take an item from your inventory as an additional reward for completion of your UCQ. For UCD dungeons, the creation is even simpler. Choose a level bracket, then one of the pre-generated maps, and a difficulty level to determine the number and difficulty of the mobs and boss in the dungeon. UCQ’s don’t give anywhere near the same XP reward as a normal quest but in my eyes something is better than nothing; they’re certainly welcome if I’ve run out of quests at my current level but still want some additional reward or incentive while grinding.

Human Cannon. In addition to traveling by foot or mount, the town of Lunatia features a huge cannon that will quite literally shoot you across the world to whatever destination you select. The higher your level, the more destinations become available. I had thought the Human Cannon would essentially be a teleport where once I’ve selected the destination and paid the fee that I would watch a load screen and appear in the new location. Nope! The camera switches to an in-game cinematic that scrolls back and over the cannon as your character climbs in then *boom!* your character goes flying rapidly across the entire world in an arc, finally landing in a somewhat rough tumble at the destination. While flying you have full camera control to scroll around and check out the scenery.

Localization

This is where Holic falls short. Not so much in terms of Engrish or having barely legible text, no word wrap and crazy international characters though. The translation itself is fine and reads perfectly well, but is often littered with typos. The intro cinematic’s sub-titles uses “loose” when it meant “lose” (one of my pet peeves). The health potions for pets in the vendor are labeled for “pats” not pets. Stuff like that. The only trouble it has with international characters is with apostrophes, which somehow get translated into three characters, one of which is the generic outlined square I see so often in Asian games. Typo’s and apostrophes are the extent of the localization failings but again, on an overall level Holic shows an extraordinarily high level of polish so these stand out even more to me. Perhaps it’s just the pickiness that results from majoring in English rearing its head, but I place a high value on using the correct words and their proper spelling.

Community

Most of the time I dread logging into an F2P for the first time because so often I appear in some starter town littered with player shops and chat spam from bots and gold sellers. Holic does have player shops but no spamming. The two times (same day and same character, actually) I saw a gold seller spamming chat, the players complained (I finally found that there is in fact an /ignore command) and a GM gave the spammer the boot. Players are helpful, talkative (even though it can be obvious when the younger players have come online) and very social. Players group quite a bit for questing, grinding, and dungeons. With Twikki being a Priest I’ve had no problems finding groups, and after level 20 received quite a few guild invites which I could not accept because I’d not chosen a faction yet. (I chose Ganav Libero last night and joined a guild of mature English-speaking players.) Even the GM will join the general chat at least once per weekday to not only answer a few questions but just to chat and be social with the players. You certainly don’t see that in other games!

Grouping is also the preferred means of leveling. XP is still divided between players but since F2P games have a faster respawn, that actually works out where it doesn’t so much (actually, at all) in Western games with their much, much slower respawn timers. Grinding world mobs I find players will often get in groups but everyone solos their own mobs. In dungeons the mobs are tougher so the groups will focus their attacks more. For a healer, since most classes dps so much and have enough armor with defensive enchants (I think most classes, even priests and mages, can use shields too unless using two-handed weapons) that healing is extremely relaxed and I just glance over to the group UI every once in awhile to check if anyone needs a heal or not, otherwise I just continue grinding.

Item Shop

Holic’s item shop is called Holic Square which uses nCash (same as all Netgame’s titles) and does not sell any “gear” whatsoever. At first I thought even the popular “stamina saver” type potions so popular in other F2P games didn’t exist but I did find their equivalent, essentially super-powered health or mana potions. Most of the shop is fluff items like special cosmetic clothes or the special mounts. In addition to that, I would guess the best sellers are the various Premium XP packs. There are four types: Solo, Party, Multi and Super. The Solo and Party packs run $8 USD and give +15% XP (solo-only or party-only), +20% to gold drop value, and a -30% XP to the death penalty. The Multi pack costs $10, works both solo and while grouped, and gives +20% XP, +20% gold drop, -50% to the death penalty and +20% value to vendored items. Finally the $15 Super pack offers the same bonuses as the Multi but adds a 20% discount when buying vendor items, +20% pet XP, +20% increase for health and mana, and instant access for both NPC shops and banking rather than traveling to town. All the packs have a duration of 30 days. Other items I suspect might be popular include tags that will double the chance of success rate for compounding enchant stones ($1) and strengthening items ($4). $5 will get you a tag that will prevent weapon breakage if the enchant or upgrade fails. Changing your hair or face will run you $4, though I don’t know if that one gets much use. Mounts are by far the most expensive item, but they’re permanent so maybe it evens out. The Koko (bouncing chicken-thing?) costs $20 and the Skyleaf (a green Nintendo-ized flying manta ray?) is $25. I think the item shop mounts might be faster than the normal ones, though and have a higher level cap. Over the holiday season Holic also featured an $18 Rudolph mount. As far as what I see in-game and in chat, it seems most Holic players like the cosmetic clothing first, and mounts second. The Premium XP packs probably see a fair amount of use but I have never seen anyone so much as mention the health potions. That may change once the PvP system goes live in…

The Future

Holic has been out for almost a year now, and has added a little new content plus the Hunter class. However, Holic 2 is in beta and expected to launch this month or next. Despite the name sounding like a sequel, from what the GM has said in chat it sounds like a huge expansion-style update to the game. A new race is coming, more world zones and dungeons, and a factional PvP system finally! I’ll look forward to seeing how that pans out in the near future, but I fear it will fall into the F2P trap of become a matter of those who bought the health potions in the item shop vs. those who didn’t.

Final Thoughts

I’m still shocked that I enjoyed Holic as much as I have so far. I like to explore, but Holic has a fairly small world (not that I’ve seen much of it yet). I enjoy “fluff” such as housing, crafting (even if I don’t craft myself), and other opportunities to feel like I’m living in this world vicariously through my character and determine the course of that character’s life. Holic is much more a “game” that is about fighting monsters to level and gear up while playing and socializing with others but no “virtual world” or “virtual life” or “role-playing” feel to it. Not my usual cup of tea but for some reason I’ve yet to identify, I kept coming back to Holic nearly every day to kill mobs and chat and will probably continue to do so on and off.

[Holic Screenshot Gallery]

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 8th, 2009 at 4:52 pm and is filed under F2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.