Review: Secrets of the Solstice

Naturally, I've fallen back into the habit of MMORPG's, and my current fix is a game by Outspark, who also have other MMO's such as Project Snow, Fists of Fu and Fiesta. Secrets of the Solstice is a 3D Fantasy MMO that reminds me a lot of Ragnarok Online. There are four basic classes, with two of them branching off into another Class (Neophytes may become Rogues or Scouts, Acolytes may become Priests or Disciples), along with several dungeons and party experiences, most of which I've never seen in an MMO before.

What does it bring to the ever expanding MMO world?
Well, the most important thing that I've noticed is the community. Far too often, MMO's have "invisible GM's", who never show up in game, or hold events maybe once a month. With Secrets of the Solstice's two GM's, Phibes and RoboPanda, they hold events daily, ranging from odd quizzes to rare monster spawns, or just plain hide and seek. With the events, brings in permanent Cash Shop items for the winners of said events, something rarely done in other MMO's. They also treat dungeons differently, in a more competitive fashion. Each dungeon has level brackets, in which teams may compete to get the high score for the dungeon and recieve rare prizes, along with collecting materials to craft items from the dungeons themselves. To make sure that the system isn't abused, there is a time limit between two runs of the same dungeon, which keeps it balanced and still fun.

Along with all of the regular grinding goodness, Secrets of the Solstice has hundreds of quests, with each NPC in the world giving at least one quest, with many of them repeatable. Quests range from the beginner "Hunt X monsters" to the extremely long Pet Quest, which can take months of effort because of materials required and cooldowns.


So what sucks about it?
Naturally, all games have problems. While Secrets of the Solstice has it's active community, the economy has been shifted because of an exploit in the past and is often difficult to make a lot of money. With that, there is also the Cash Shop users vs. the free players. naturally, to have a free game you must collect revenue somehow, and so the Cash shop is there for that, but the strength of the CS items vs. the regular in game items is very large, and not all players can afford to spend real money on the game, while some spend plenty of cash in the shop, to power level or get extremely good gear.


Secrets of the Solstice is a Free to play MMO created by Outspark, and is quickly growing. Outspark will launch SoS: Reborn soon, which I will review as soon as possible.

No reviews for a bit..

..Unless you want to hear about Lego: Batman and Pure, which have killed some time for me in between Monday Night Combat. Aside from that, I'm looking into acquiring a Pandora computer, whether by my eventual employment and paycheck, or Christmas. The Pandora is a handheld computer, roughly the size of the first generation "fat" Nintendo DS, but it has a 43 QWERTY Keyboard, a sizeable screen and graphics card, and runs on a Linux shell, and it also has a D-Pad, buttons, and analog nubs.