You're not likely to have heard of Pristontale before, as the MMORPG originated in Korea seven years ago, before being translated into English in 2004. The game won accolades in its native language, and prompted a green light for developer Yedang Online to work on a big-budget sequel, which was released in April this year across Korea and found 40,000 players. Pristontale gold 2 heads West in November, but not without a little help: behind the wheel is Key To Play, a newly-formed online portal that hand-picked the MMO as its launch title in Europe.

Key To Play has gone to a lot of effort: both on an elaborate launch event in Barcelona featuring a live introduction to the story of God demon Midranda and his desire to destroy the world, and the content of the MMO itself. Key To Play understands that Korean design doesn't necessarily translate here, and holds "cultural localisation" at the heart of its operation. The online portal has worked with Yedang Online to bring more story elements and Western character design into Priston tale gold 2.

But the biggest selling point of the game will be that there's no cost involved in downloading or playing it; the only charge in Priston tale gold 2 is for microtransactions later on. Which, incidentally, we weren't shown.

What we did see were the main attractions: a combo battle system where skills can be chained together; exotic mounts, such as trolls whose shoulders you can ride; open player-versus-player combat; and all the fun - or misery - that comes from grouping with other human beings. That's what we were shown. Our experience was rather different.

It began choosing a race, which was between the warrior Tempskron or the magical Morion. We picked Priston tale gold Tempskron and decided on the male Fighter over the female Huntress, mostly because he grunted when we moused over him. Fighters can branch out and become Warriors or Combatants at level 10, before picking Violent, Warlord or Destroyer paths later on. After choosing our class we changed our look in a fairly limited, but nicely varied, character creator.
The first problem we faced upon entering the world was knowing what to do. Clearly there was no new-age 'lead you by the hand' design here. Eventually we stumbled into a quest-giver, got our first task, and felt at home enough with the familiar user interface to set about chopping up some mushroom men. Mission accomplished, we jogged back into the city, got our reward, bagged more quests and headed out again. And again. And so began our arduous night of slaughtering giant bunnies, wolves, armadillos, pixies and hunchbacks, then running back into to town to pick up more quests and do the same thing all over again.