Today I will begin my first look at the in-development MMORPG known as Zentia, currently in its closed beta status, by creating a new character and running through the beginning stages of the game. Zentia seems to be a fantasy based MMORPG developed by ChangYou. Opening up the interface of Zentia to begin greets me with a friendly user interface, fairly easy to use, with little hindrance in modifying the settings to run the game the way I want to. Starting my new character greets me with a cheery anime/cartoon graphical style, seems kid friendly.
For my new character I want to create, I have chosen the Dark Revenant character type, with the character name Mr-Tee. I start off in an introductory area, a tutorial island of sorts, with some tutorial characters and a little popup that starts to walk me through the first actions I will be undertaking in this new world of Zentia. The tutorial begins with simply explaining the point and click movement and camera interface, and quest collection and turn in system, all of which are very streamlined.
My real quest given to me by the Longevity Immortal (one of the tutorial characters) requires that I chase down and kill a spirit bunny. The purpose of this mission is to teach me the navigation system. An interesting feature of Zentia is the autopath system, where clicking an objective within the quest log lays down a series of yellow arrows guiding the player to their target. This is a unique feature, not often found in other MMORPGs to my knowledge. After using it just a couple times for the purpose of this simple mission, I feel as though I’m already in love with the autopath system. Personally I have spent many long ours wasted away searching for a particular quest giver I’m tasked to turn in or creep I’m supposed to kill, to in WoW or other similar games.
Another great automatic feature shown to me next is the ability to press the “Z” key on your keyboard to have your Zentia character automatically run to, and loot nearby corpses. Retrieving a fox tail from the newly spawned spirit foxes for the mission I have just received from the Luck Immortal (another tutorial NPC) gives me an example of this auto-loot option in action, another cool time saver. Finishing the quest sends me to the first real area of the game, wrapping up my short introductory period with my new character in the training island.