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.
Published: Oct 10, 2008 01:02 pm