Last night Games Campus, the publisher of the German version of the game, managed to provide their players with level 100 template characters. I have to wonder how they did that. Games Campus has only been online with this game for a couple of weeks. Ok, everybody got pretty much the same characters. The last character that everyone created was turned into an EC4 Heavenly Demon nuker (for black clans), or a Wu Tang warrior (for white clans). We all got +12 weapons and some of the skills were set to C12 as well.

They messed up a few things of course. Nobody had any sort of epithet so you had to go out and do a couple of quests for a good one. The Lightning Fist epithet is easy to get at EC4, and so is the Punisher of Demons epithet. The HD nukers didn't have much for shields either. The low level Chi shield was C12 but the more useful VE shield wasn't trained at all.

The nuker I got was wearing beggar clan boots, and the rest of the clothes weren't all that good either, but at EC4 you can make level 5, or 300 defense clothes and that was one of the first things most people did. I also went and bought some poor mans slotted clothes from the seamstress, and made a quick trip to the Black Market in CC3. It cost me 10 million gold to get a bunch of extra dodge ornaments.

The build on the nukers wasn't all that good either. It certainly wasn't set up for last nights PvP event against the GMs. The Hefei quest to change your build was still available and a lot of people went and did that too. The template characters didn't have any karma either, but the Bloody Plains Flowers quest was available, so you had your choice of good karma or bad. I have some of the old FD and RC level bad karma relics so that's what I used.

Even with all the good and bad that went into these template characters I can see why Games Campus did things this way. I'm a reasonably good cook and a couple of times I've had to cook for some large numbers of people. I don't have any problem to do that, but everybody is going to be eating the same thing!

In other words, this situation isn't quite the same as what GamersFirst is facing when trying to get our Acclaim characters back, or give us a template character that resembles what we used to have. In the end it was a good test of the template characters idea, but obviously Indy21 and the publishers are going to have to put more thought into the idea.

I don't know when Games Campus is going to go live with an open beta version of the game, but I sure hope they have the bugs fixed, particularly the bugged quests, before they think they're going to make any money on the game.

So, how did you do in the GM PvP event? Does anyone have any screen shots for us?

- AxtTreiber