Luminary Review

Luminary Review

Developer: AeriaGames

Here’s a little secret about MMO games. What makes them good has nothing to do with design or gameplay; it’s all about the chat. Levelling up? Just a way to impress members whom you think are of the opposite sex. Exploring the world? Merely showing off to them your hard-earned armour and items. A tad cynical you might think. This view actually makes a game like Luminary, a free online downloadable MMO from AeriaGames, difficult to review. If chatting with other users, a pastime not directly controllable by the developers, keeps people playing, then the quality of your gaming experience is entirely dynamic. Manage to find someone to adventure and trade with who can speak to you without resorting to spiking their sentences with nonsensical numbers? Maybe they’ll be kind to you. You might actually enjoy Luminary. It, like all MMORPG’s that have come before it, relies too much on players being social in the absence of original game design such as unique worlds or interesting characters and quests. Rather than spend the time developing these features, creators of MMO’s concentrate on giving their players the ability to chat with/abuse each other with the minimum of fuss. In other words, push the game itself aside so they can blah blah blah. It almost seems as if the game itself is of secondary concern.

Alright, perhaps not all MMO’s are like this. Retail, subscription-based titles like World of Warcraft and Warhammer Online, with their franchise-orientated history in gaming and legions of battle-hardened hardcore gamers, tend to focus on territorial combat and levelling up; actual features that are designed with the aim to balance gameplay and maximise gamer enjoyment. But in the more open world of free online gaming which can attract, albeit briefly, anyone who has an internet connection and some free memory to burn, this commitment to sustained gameplay is not so present. Remember Second Life?

So, Luminary is more about getting people talking than playing a game, which all things considered, is fair enough. It is free, after all. But does it do this efficiently and effectively? After a surprisingly lengthy download and installation process, the first thing the game does is ask you to choose your avatar: what your player will look like in-game. There’s really not much you can do to customise them, having only the choice of four basic characters to pick from. On top of that, the only difference to separate you from the hundreds of other players is merely what type of armour or weapon you happen to be holding. There is the option to gain and train steeds, which will separate you from the crowd, but apart from this, the control over your avatar’s appearance is still limited to basic item swappage, avoiding the whole geek-pleasingly obsessive level of customisation of say, Guild Wars’ colour dyes.

This designing of your character’s appearance is all perhaps a bit pointless in gameplay terms, but when it comes to showing off to other players, Luminary falls a bit short. What’s the point in that when everyone looks basically the same? On the other tenant of the MMO: the chat system. How simple is it to use? Well, it’s easy and at the same time, not-so-easy. It works pretty much like any other: global messages can be sent via a type-in box at the bottom-left hand corner of the screen, and there’s also a proper Private Message system in place too. The only drawback to this is that it’s all so thoroughly obscured by all manner of on-screen window dressing. Information boxes frequently pop up to obscure it, reminding you that you can store money in the bank, or how to grasp the ins-and-outs of the trading system. Particularly in the slow (but admittedly comprehensive) tutorial, you’ll constantly be distracted from the social element of Luminary; something features like market trading and sending messages at the postbox are supposed to encourage. While the start-of-game tutorial does help you understand the concept of an MMO as a newcomer, it isn’t half long-winded and pedantic: presenting you with screeds of instructions that you have to read closely and then follow before the game allows you to proceed. Also, Luminary’s dropping you in at the deep end with all the numbers and terminology of the global market is pretty daunting for an MMO that sidesteps hardcore combat to lead players in gently. This global market system is Luminary’s main selling point and its claimed difference to other MMO’s of the kind, and it does help to encourage socialization between players. However, the global market system is initially outlined to you in such an overload of menu screens, it’s somewhat discouraging to stick with it and take it to heart as you play. Perhaps many players will miss the importance of the system or skip it entirely, simply because of the cumbersome way it’s presented the first time around.

While the game doesn’t do anything wrong, it doesn’t seem like a proper MMORPG. It’s more of a glorified chat vehicle, with bits of gameplay half-heartedly thrown in front of its path. Luminary is more of a training simulator for real -i.e, not free- MMO’s. Relaxing and sociable it may at times be, but it’s not really for fans of the genre. Perhaps this comparison to hardcore MMO’s is unfair, and if you’re not one of those fans and are new to the whole thing, Luminary is an easy-going and commitment-free game to start with. Just don’t expect to stick with it for too long.

Three Stars (Out of Five)

Stuart ‘LizardGenes’ Lindsay