TK onlne - The second day

Well it is day two of the TK online test. I got to play a full game. Only a practice game, but a full game none-the-less. It gave me a better picture of what this game is. There are other units you can get. As you upgrade your gear you can buy summon spells which summon groups of units. These are time limited but you can use them over and over, even if you have a full compliment of units. As far as I can tell if you wanted to be patient you could summon tons of units and swarm your opponent. This makes an interesting strategy where some people keep the enemy busy while you have someone in the rear protected summoning a ton of units then sweeping in and wiping out the enemies base.

I tried a couple of play modes. Death match plays for an amount of kills. These are player on player kills. Not deaths from random mobs. Also siege mode which requires you destroy the enemies base. Both are interesting. The siege mode is a long slog with many human players because it takes awhile to dig away at each team's base. Your heroes aren't that strong and expect them to die a few times. The healing potions are not that powerful. Taking one isn't an instant save and they're better used when resting between fights.

I shot a video. Its uploading now. When it is up I'll attach it. It shows some gameplay during a siege match. I'm summoning units and heading forth to attack. The heroes abilities seem to be hit and miss. I use some..but other ones don't always seem to fire when I try them. I need to pay closer attention to error messages to see if there is something up with that.

Defeating the bases are a challenge. Each base is guarded by pre-set towers. They're a little strong and if you go at them alone, probably you will die. You should take some generic units and summons with you. Each base has some buildings that spawn units who rush forward and attack. You can bolster them with summons to make larger armies. The units you summon are controllable, the base ones are not. While doing all of this you should also try to manage your inventory and crafting. It is a pretty tense game during a busy fight trying to manage everything. However, that is what makes it exciting.

Had some issues with the video update last night, here it is:

Tk online First Impressions

Sent from my iPod.
I logged in promptly at 4 as I didn't have a lot of time. Game is fun
but not an RTS. It is more of a diablo or dungeon siege light, but
with deathmatch. The game is also almost entirely in well written
English, except for a couple error messages. Which means I don't need
to provide any play instructions. I will provide screenshots and
video later as I'm on a bus.

Back home now. I'll add some screenshots here. I will try and do a video shortly to show you what the gameplay is like. Its fairly straightforward. Click the enemy you want to die, pop some potions activate a special ability or two. There is a simplistic crafting system as well you can use to make items for yourself. You gain gold as you kill enemies and there are regular infusions of gold you can use to buy these things. There is an interesting system with 2 characters. Your main fighter and an "aide". His job is to run around and buy this material for you. You control them independently.

TK online update

Well, I got an e-mail telling me there will be some kind of "double point" bonus during the test. I'm not sure if that means experience or what. It did also include a working link to the download client. You can get it here. Log-in, click download. Even works in Firefox. No IE required. The page doesn't look formatted properly, but it works. Not big around 320MB or so. Once its down, run the install. You actually get an English install choice. You can run it when it is done. There will be a launcher, click update and then start the game. You can't play now, you can get the log-in screen. It will fail to connect, but with English log-in prompts and an English error message. This game just gets weirder and weirder for a Korean game. I'm all for easy, but its certainly breaking the mold. I don't know how much will end up being in English, I suspect they didn't write any of the flavor text in English, but maybe some menus and other options might be in English. If enough foreigners check it out maybe we could convince them to translate the flavor text.

TK online Group Test

Awhile ago I commented on two seemingly defunct Korean RTS games. One of them, TK online, has come back to life. I was surprised to see an email for them in my inbox. They've announced a group test from October 15th to 25th. Running from 4 pm to midnight every night. Good news is that even though it is a stand-alone site, you don't even need an ID to make an account. It just verifies your e-mail address. So get signed up and try it out. It will start tomorrow night.

First head over to the official site and click the registration link under the login box on the left. If you are not familiar with what the registration link looks like, its on the left, black button labeled "회원가입". After doing so you will get this lovely pop-up to the right. The upper button just shows us the poster, the lower button starts the registration process. You will then get our standard ToS checkbox questions, click the left most check boxes after each one. I don't know what the right one does, but I expect its the "I don't agree boxes". On the next screen you'll input a name (use Korean, make anything up if you want), then you will have to enter your e-mail address on the next line. Then press the gray button. After pressing this, the site will send you an e-mail. Go check it and get the code, put that code on the last line and press the ever familiar and wonderful "확인" to continue. On the next page you're going to pick out a few miscellaneous details, like your user name, password, gender, age, and "Do you want to get our spam/updates" radio button. After setting all those obvious fields press "확인", and that is it, finished. Fantastically easy. You can log-in now if you want, but you can't download the client yet. It just generates that same pop-up about registering. Even though I'm logged in. Perhaps the client download will be available tomorrow night. If not, its going to be a very boring group test. So for now, I have no screenshots or videos that I can show. Not my own anyway, I found a couple random ones on the site. Though these shots make them look almost like different games. I think there is a persistent hero that levels up in all your games that you play. You can get items, etc for him.