Alodd'a Fun

Vind has now taken Allods Online for a spin.
I was speaking to him in the game last night, and he suggested that we try switching to playing as Empire (Horde), if we're going to give it a serious try.

I'd been toying with the idea myself.
In WoW, Horde have always been viewed as being the more serious of the 2 factions. The kiddies almost always choose Alliance, and the population on the Horde side is almost always lower than the Alliance.

The downside to this is that Allods has a faction restriction. You can only have toons on one side or the other, not both.
The word is that everything is going to get wiped soon, so I haven't really been getting attached to the characters, and have been spending most of my time trying out new classes, and professions.
So with that in mind, I deleted all of my League characters, and re-rolled Empire ones.

gPotato have done something sensible here:
In WoW, they found that one of the main reasons people didn't play as Horde, was that they didn't have 'handsome' character choices. When they introduced BloodElves as a playable race, the Horde gained a lot of popularity.
In Allods, there are humans on both sides of things. We're humans, we can be good or evil, without explanations. And it means that you can choose to play as a 'normalish' character but still mix with Orcs, and the cyber-punk-undead Arisen.
No extra character models, very little extra effort, and problem solved.

In little things like this, gPotato remind me of the Chinese cloning phenomenon.

For those who have no idea what I'm talking about: The Chinese are currently going through a phase of copying everythign in the world, and making it quicker, faster and cheaper.
e.g. The IPhone - Apple is charging £500+ for their 3GS beauty, within a couple of weeks of it's release the Chinese had come up with the IClone, selling it for around £70, with almost all the same features (minus the AppStore) dual sim card slots, memory card expansion slot, and it's sold unlocked, for you to place any sim card you like in to it.
Also e.g. They also did this to an American car, and the copies were so close, but also so cheap, that you could take the door of your Chrysler in the US, buy a chinese door for a few quid, and it would simply slot in to place, with the seals lined up and everything. The American company went ballistic, launched lawsuits, and basically spat their dummy out.
But after a fortune in legal costs, and no sight of a victory, they realised there was nothing they could do to stop this and simply started buying the parts from China themselves to reduce their costs.

Sometimes, the simplest solutions are the best. And that seems to be the case with some of the Allods features.

I found the the Empire starting area to be a much better taster of things to come later in the game, than the typical paradise-island setting of the League starting zone.
You start in a ship under attack from the League... and other things. You get to shoot cannons at another ship, and see one of the collosal Astral-Monsters that you'll be up against later in the game.

Unusually for me I actually read the text of a few of the quests. And was initially suprised about some of the things I was being asked to do.
One of the first quests you get is to beat up rats and slugs, but also Prisoners of War, to see if your brainwaves change while carrying out your orders.
It's just a game, and they're just pixels, and you don't actually kill any PoW's, but I was a little suprised at the order. That's the only example of things like that I've found though.

Once you're past the starting zone, the city feel of the Empire is actually slightly better than the League side.
I got the impression that the league takes itself very seriously, whereas the Empire is much more laid-back and slightly funnier.
For example, in the League City of Novograd it's all guards and swords, and ancient elven mysteries.

In the Empire city it's Orc Policemen (think PIGs from DukeNukem, if you've played it), and the quests are generally more along the lines of "Do me a favour" rather than "Your Empire Commands".
It was quite refreshing actually.

At the end of the day though, Quests are quests, and it's all just XP. And by level 21 Empire and League will be questing in the same zone anyway (Much like in TBC / WotlK). But at that point the open-ish PvP will come in to play.

You wont have to take part in it, you'll never have to PvP if you don't want to. But the flagging system will work differently to WoW's.
If you flag yourself for PvP, you actually recieve a buff that increases your XP gain, if you don't you get a buff that reduces it. You don't have to attack anyone, and you might not get attacked yourself, but it's the chance you'll take for the buff.

Again, a simple solution to something that WoW never really mastered. It's not forcing you to join in, but it's a good encouragement.

The only down-side from Empire so far is that I quite enjoyed the Mage I had on the League side. Unfortunately only the Arisen can be mages on the Empire side, and I'm not keen on their look.
But I'm sure some will much prefer them to playing as a boring Human or a standard Orc.