Knight Online

There's a sense of nostalgia that always manages to bring us back to the first games we played, even if by today's standards their graphics and mechanics are pretty lackluster. Knight Online is one such game, as it manages to still serve the player base even after so many years since its original launch date.

While today's gamers may think that Knight Online is your typical sword and sorcery MMO, few know that it is among the first to promote the genre. The setting is pretty common: a magical war-ravaged world where two factions, the El Morad (humans) and the Karus (orcish humanoids) fight each other for land and honor. Choosing the faction will make the difference between starting experiences, as well as the obvious character appearance and arsenal of spells at your disposal.

The game has clunky controls that may confuse players used to how other MMOs allow you to control your characters. For example, movement by keyboard feels delayed, while movement by mouse looks weird because characters have no turning animation when changing direction. The UI is also pretty cluttered, with borders looking pretty old, and the icons and buttons being rather small. Those interested in seeing how well the game looks with all settings set to "Ultra" might be disappointed since the list of actual customizable video settings is pretty limited. More so, the game is a bit resource inefficient and not optimized for the latest hardware, as it doesn't seem to yield 60 FPS even on powerful PCs.

Like all games that are well past their primes, the population in knight Online seems to be divided into two categories: high-level players that have been playing since the dawn of time, and newbies that won't even bother leveling more than two hours. More so, you might not like that fact that most of the population is usually located in the cities where they all talk or vendor their items, thus creating lag whenever entering a city. Combat is also generic and unappealing, with animations being far too robotic.

​​​​​​​Knight Online doesn't bring anything new to the table as far as fantasy MMOs go, but for those of you that may have had it as their first MMO ever, you'll be glad to know it is still running strong.