[h1]PlaneShift – A truly unique MMORPG game experience[/h1]
[h2]Suit your taste: pure role-play, skill grinding or hack&slay[/h2]
You will not find an RPG that has such a balanced mix of traits catering to every imaginable taste and variant of the RPG-experience:
If you love pen&paper or text-based online role-playing, you will find a world full of wonder to dive into, study its lore and take up your place amongst its inhabitants. In the game's main chat there are strict standards for in-character communication that will thus nicely suit your taste and foster entertaining events and fun chance encounters with other players from around the world.
Do you feel that role-playing should not simply depend on your imagination but that your character should be able to fulfill their role supported by actual game mechanics? Suit yourself and take your pick from the dozens of skills that the game is offering. Thus design your individual character traits, a trade and character background – free from limitations like character classes or the like that you might have encountered in other representatives of this genre. Craft and cook or fight and collect – go and create the individual character that you have imagined for your role-play. Fighting monk – check! Alchemical cook – double check!
Or are you more of a collector and a true dopamine junky? You enjoy the hack&slay approach, always looking for that perfect item in the spoils of your fighting? Yliakum – the world that PlaneShift is set in – offers hundreds if not thousands of foes that you can fight for loot. Items dropped have combinations of modifiers determining their value and special attributes, that might – given the right combination – make an item unique within millions of drops. There will be that special helmet, making your defence that extra-bit better, or the magic staff that ups your already considerable skills as a sorcerer by another ounce, that will give you the upper hand in any magic duel.
[h2]Decades of development[/h2]
Starting in the late nineties, the game has gone through nearly three decades of development history to look back upon, with ups and downs, sometimes following and sometimes countering the latest trends in video gaming. With that many years, it beats most of the other freely available games, programmed by volunteers, hobbyists and enthusiasts, that might have died an early project-death and remain incomplete and lacking.
Currently the game client has been redesigned from scratch to migrate from its original open-source 3D-engine to the commonly used and more powerful Unreal engine. In tow with that came not only more competitive graphics and art renderings, but also a geat extension towards a seamless and open-world map, rich in detail and of a size that you can literally loose yourself in. New towns and dungeons followed suit and the world is ever expanding.
[h2]Unique lore within an exceptionally creative game world[/h2]
Imagine a hollow world, inside a gigantic stalactite, home to a multi-racial populace; picked, saved and thrown together from their doomed homeworlds by a band of gods that run this new world's fate and determine its ultimate destiny. There are short dwarfs and tall and lean elven races, but that is already the limit to standardised high-fantasy and Tolkienian borrowing that you will be able to find in Yliakum. Beyond that there are also the horned and powerfully built Diaboli and their mongrel offsprings called Ynwnn, the human-like Ylians endemic to the stalactite and, the silicate-based and genderless Kran created and chosen by the god-in-chief. There are waterdwelling races from the aquatic bottom of the world as well as winged inhabitants of airy heights.
Find lone huts and wild tribes of sentient beings, laboratories, underground cities and libraries full of books, explaining history, politics, past episodes and events as well as every race's very own culture. Read up on plants and animals that populate this strange world. An unrivalled, immersive experience!
Get to know the world by going on quests for the characters you meet, or design your own events and stories by taking on an apprentice, marrying another character or leading a solitary life as an explorer of the unknown. Join one of many guilds in which player characters band together to share knowledge and experiences, battle the most powerful beasts of the lands or just enjoy fun and banter together.
Guilds may own proper houses located in the cities of the game world to share a space amongst their members, use and decorate it together. Some guilds are again brought together under the common roof of an alliance organisation. Alliances as well as single guilds might fight battles and wars against one another for glory or dominance.
[h2]Selected game-play features[/h2]
Improve your character's health and powers by investing into your physical and mental capacities, or improve your skill to train your body and get even tougher and healthier that way.
Hone your fighting skills with an assortment of weapon types, blades of all sizes, spears and staffs, clubs, maces, hammers, axes, bows and crossbows. You may also find it more suitable to fight barehanded and thus – in time – turn yourself into your weapon. Seek protection behind a shield, and armour yourself with suits of different weight and tenacity: leathers, chain mail or plate.
Take a plunge into a unique world of magic, divided into six separate schools – or Ways – of magic, each with a different focus and strength: The Azure Way teaches the workings and the control of the mind. The Blue Way is liquid, untameable and transient while the Brown way harbours the more solid forces of mother nature. Crystal Way seeks to apply the energy received from the worlds single source of light and heat. The Red Way is fiery heat and entropic chaos where the Dark Way is a powerful draught into emptiness and despair.
Create items of quality determined by your own crafting skill and the quality of your raw materials. Provide for yourself or work in order to sell to other player characters or non-player merchants: Craft diverse weapons, shields and armour, magic jewellery to boost its wearers skills and powers. Cater to your friends by baking, cooking and brewing tasty treats. Provide help and support to those in need as a herbalist or alchemist.
Entertain the world with your self-composed and performed music, as an actor of your own play within the game, a writer of stories or scientific discourse or as a map-maker of fame.
Find an animal companion to assist you in your daily ordeals or one that can be saddled as a mount and take you to far-away places much faster than your own two feet.
Collect resources by harvesting plants, mining ores, or spending time at the banks of rivers and lakes as a fisher.
Take on several hundreds of minor jobs and epic quests that will lead you on to learn a craft and explore the world. Of course they will reward you with riches or items that can be hardly obtained any other way.
[h2]Open development, open community[/h2]
The developer and game masters' team is always working to provide roleplay events on a weekly basis. Development is transparent and welcomes player input and contributions. The active community will welcome you with open arms and provide any help you might need to find your way into the game world. Even if just a few souls are around you will find warmth and friendship amongst the players of this really grown-up game. Come and join us and see for yourself!
PS: [i]A personal remark: I find it strange that I have to "disclose" getting a free game for free.
Apart from that I have played this game not for some hours but for nigh 20 years before it was available here.[/i]
