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| · Mabinogi - Intro & Features |
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3/11/2008 |
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| Title: |
Mabinogi  |
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| Genre: |
Fantasy MMORPG |
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| Engine: |
Pleione Engine |
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| Platform: |
Windows (98/ME/2K/XP) |
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| Status: |
Open Beta (Mar 6th, 2008)  |
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| Developer: |
devCAT (Nexon) |
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| Publisher: |
Nexon |
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 Features |
 Mabinogi is a role-playing game set in a fantasy world. Mabinogi offers a multitude of skills to develop and a generally high level of diversity among players, skills, and environments.
The game engine features cell-shaded graphics, which enhance the anime-looking characters. The game world is developed continuously, through the release of important patches (referred to as 'Generations' and 'Chapters') that introduce new areas, features and advance the storyline. The user interface is familiarly simple and designed in the likeness of Microsoft Windows' task bar, allowing the player to access most game panels with ease (experienced players can also make use of keyboard shortcuts, to simplify certain tasks).
Commercially, Mabinogi is built on a hybrid Value Added Services model (which varies slightly on each game localization), that allows free but limited gameplay and the subscription of paid packages, purchased through the game service shop, which unlock the full game experience.
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· Character Creation & Grow-UP |
 Characters are created by using Character Cards (additional cards must be purchased from the game service store). There are two kinds of cards, basic and premium (a newly created account has one free basic card). Premium cards give the player a wider variety of hairstyles, eye and mouth shapes and also come with more elaborate clothes than the basic type. Players can also choose from three available races: human, elf (since Generation 5, Chapter 2) and giant (since Generation 6, Chapter 2). When creating a character, one may choose an age between 10 and 17 years-old. The character will advance one year in age every (real) Saturday. Different ages yield different initial stats and affect the amount of stats raised when levelling up. |
· Rebirth |
| Rebirthing is one important factor of the game. Unused Character Cards can be purchased to rebirth existing characters instead of creating new ones. Rebirthing allows the player to change the character's age, gender, appearance, and reset the character's level back to 1 while keeping all previously learned skills. When a character reaches the age of 25, aging will not be rewarded with Ability Points and levelling-up gradually becomes more difficult as the character's level becomes higher. Since all skills require a great amount of Ability Points at a higher rank, there's a limit to character development if players don't take advantage of rebirthing. |
· Status |
The player must keep an eye on the three major status bars: health, mana and stamina. When health reaches zero the player dies (if fatally wounded, the player may still recover health or get healed), while mana is used for magic skills. Stamina is important because without it skills cannot be performed. The player may use the rest skill, use stamina potions or eat food to recover stamina.
The player's eating habits will affect the character's build, that is, eating certain foods in large quantities will increase their weight (it may also raise/lower some of their stats). Eating berries has a slimming effect, gradually reducing the character's weight. These transformations happen over time, so the player may also watch how the character's body starts to change.
Each (real world) day of the week grants players specific bonuses, such as getting a higher experience rate for certain skills, higher item creation success, aging, gaining AP, etc. Players can take advantage of these bonuses to quickly advance their character builds. |
· Combat System |
 The combat system has a tactical side to it. Predicting the enemy's next move and making use of different offensive and defensive skills is crucial. However, the game features an automatic combat mode if the player wishes to choose this option. Enemies have different ranks and come in all sorts of species, some of them being very large in size. The player can see the strength of the enemy before attacking it by pressing the Alt key. Some monsters are aggressive and will attack and pursuit on sight. This also sharply reduces the number of bots because of the high artificial intelligence (AI) of monsters.
Dying implies a loss of experience points (depending on whether the player respawns in a town or on the same spot the death occurred) and sometimes the loss of equipment (these lost items can be retrieved at a lost and found NPC, but at a cost, usually, half of the item's actual price). Fallen players can be revived if another player uses a Phoenix Feather on them. If the player has purchased the Nao Support package, then Nao can be summoned to revive the player. If the player has zero experience points and suffers a death penalty, negative experience points will accumulate and the experience bar will turn red on the Character panel. |
· Fantasy Life |
 There is a wide range of Life skills which give the player the chance to experience a different side of the 'fantasy life'. Players can perform tasks such as tending to the wheat and potato fields, making flour, gathering wool from sheep and eggs from hens, weaving and making garments, mining for minerals and crafting weapons, playing and composing music, cooking dishes, etc.
Using a system called Music Markup Language (actually a variation of Music Macro Language, players may compose their own arrangements or use music scrolls created by other players. Different musical instruments, such as lutes and flutes, can be used to play these compositions in-game. Naturally, there are legal implications of playing copyrighted music, and while Nexon officially discourages such actions, there are many players who choose to do so.
NPC interaction is very important in the game. As the player talks to different non-player characters, keywords will become available to use in dialog with other NPC's. These conversations will reveal plot points and NPC backgrounds, unlock quests or skills, etc. NPC's also offer a variety of services such as shops, item repair and upgrade, skill apprenticeships and more. Players can also request arbeits from some of the NPC's, which can be useful to get items or quickly earn some gold (the in-game currency). By interacting frequently with the NPC's, they will be able to remember the player's character.
Players can set up stores to sell their items. Incidentally, items cannot be looted, as it frequently happens in other games, since any item dropped from a monster cannot, as a rule, be picked up by another player for a short time. Items can be safely traded through the trading panels.
Generation 3, in later updates, added housing areas between Tir Chonaill and Dunbarton and also between Bangor and Emain Macha. Through this housing system, players can bid for a house and pay rent for it afterwards, in order to keep it. Houses may be used as stores and players can purchase items to decorate their homes. |
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As in many other MMORPG's, player characters can get married in-game, by requesting this to a marriage NPC. A pet system is also available. Players may purchase Pet Cards from the game store and summon them in-game. Pets can help in combat or, in some cases, even be used as transportation, allowing the player to travel at a greater speed than on foot.
Other features worth mentioning are the friend, party and guild systems. Guild creation requires the purchase of an extended play package from the game store. Guilds can expand/level up by meeting an increasing quota of points (called Guild Points, or GP), which are earned by the guild's members by staying in-game. PvP combat is also possible in special arenas.
(Source from Mabinogi Wikipedia) |
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