White Knight Chronicles: The MMORPG

By Spencer . October 10, 2008 . 1:02pm

Leonard who can transform into the White Knight is the main character of the story, but you get to be in the adventure too as an avatar. Your custom avatar joins Leonard’s group in the Level 5’s create-your-own-combo PlayStation 3 RPG and has his/her own adventure online. White Knight Chronicles online mode consists of cooperative quests where up to four players try to take down a giant monster without the power to transform.

A demonstration battle showed a group fighting a humongous troll. Warriors could only reach the troll’s knees while a ranged attacker (mage?) was able to hit his head. The troll had multiple weak spots and it looks like finding those will be critical in the online monster hunting quests.

You can recruit allies by finding players in lobbies which hold up to sixteen people or by inviting respected warriors into your group by mail. The demo movie only had text communication and emotes similar to other MMORPGs. While text could work since the PlayStation 3 controller keyboard comes out this year voice chat would be better. Implementing voice chat has not been decided by the design team. It’s also unclear if White Knight Chronicles will have cross region play and if there will be canned universal phrases like in Final Fantasy XI.

One neat feature is all the hard work spent building your avatar in the offline single player mode automatically translates online. Avatars retain levels and items in the MMORPG portion and any items/levels gained from online battles are kept when your avatar returns to help Leonard. The avatar creation system appeared to be flexible with multiple heads, haircuts, and outfits to choose from. Here’s a look at some of the choices with the same outfit.

Sony will publish White Knight Chronicles on December 25 in Japan. The game is confirmed to hit Europe and North America, but a release date has not been announced.

Images courtesy of Sony. Photos Spencer/Siliconera.

TAGS: Level 5, MMO, Playstation 3, Sony, TGS 2008, White Knight Chronicles

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ikiryou

I'd love to have a Monster Hunter for the PS3, but this would definitely fill that role and then some, very nicely.

Thanks for presenting this info ^_^

Symphony

I hope that they include voice chat. That's sort of... well, I'd hope that we're at the point where something like that is a required feature already.

ikiryou

For some reason, there doesn't seem to be many PSN players who actually *want* to use voice chat :/ I've seen this with Unreal Tournament 3, Warhawk and recently with Armored Core4A. A friend at work interested in getting Warhawk stated outright that he wasn't even interested in communicating with other players [there is team play in Warhawk, hello??].

I would think that a co-op mode would almost require something like communication to be effective [in other words, "voice chat please?"]. I might need to look for a Level5 official fan board and nag them a little *whistles*.

Nika

@ikiryou: I know many female gamers often refuse to use voice chat because it often results in harrassing (sexually or not). I myself don't play online much so I've never encountered the problem.

as much as I understand their point, I still think voice chat would be very usefull, trying to play a game and type simulantiously just doesn't work to well.

Pesmerga00

I'm a little worried about online and offline character/items, being transferable and stored on the player's machine. Phantasy Star Online comes to mind. The cheating in that game was almost unbearable. I hope I'm wrong, because this sounds interesting.

Blasphemy

I doubt there will be any cheating on this game because it's not made by Sega and PS3 is not easily hacked. Also there is no PC version of this game so hopefully we don't have to deal with cheaters.

Raoh

cant wait for this game..

i dont mind either way regarding chat. voice chat should be available.

but i've played EQOA and FFXI on the ps2 with keyboard chat only. old ps2 socom games were in game voice chat but lobby was text chat. matter of fact the socom fans over at the playstation forums want text chat in the lobby back.

i dont mind either way but i get turned off by online games if the person on the other end is just yelling, humming singing or just wants to show how grown up they are by cursing..