Rakion: Chaos Force/Gameplay

Rakion is a free, three-dimensional, fantasy action online game developed by the South Korean company Softnyx. It was in a free "closed" beta testing from August 11 - 25 2005, in a limited group of countries (which included the United States, the UAE and at a later date, Europe).

It switched from development to open beta testing on October 13, 2005, which ended on December 1, 2005. At this point, the game began to follow a similar model to Softnyx's other MMOG, GunBound. Users may purchase "Softnyx Cash" with real-world currency and spend it on "Power User" status (which offers various benefits and unlocks further ingame purchases) or items that are often very powerful and not available to the non-paying public.

Story
Not much has been revealed in terms of storyline for Rakion, however what has been released indicates that the battles in the game are part of a wider series of conflicts over "cell" - a substance that can be used to summon ancient creatures from a war ages ago. Rakion takes place after this war - many of the ingame texts reference how things used to be in that war, or that an item is a remnant from that war. There is also Alcon a person or substance), which is believed to be a great evil which is mentioned as poisoning one map and distorting the properties of many creatures.

Gameplay
The gameplay of Rakion is similar to a lot of third or first-person shooter games. One uses the WASD keys to move the character around, and the default camera is FPS style, though the player's character can be seen. A secondary console control camera is also available. Characters have a variety of combos and attacks, and all characters have both a ranged weapon and a melee weapon that can be switched between by pressing "Q". The camera is rotated by the mouse, and the attack buttons are the left mouse button and the right mouse button. There are six different game modes in Rakion (Stage, Team Deathmatch, Solo Deathmatch, Boss mode, and Golem). A level limit may be selected when making a game. Players also have a "basic mode" option that does not take into account statistics and creatures, making all players in the match equal.

Classes
In Rakion, a player is a member of any of the five classes. These classes are Swordsman (sometimes called Warrior), Archer, Blacksmith, Ninja, and Mage. Each class has a long-range and a short-range attack, and, under certain conditions, normally achieving a specified number of kills, can transform into "Chaos Mode". Players who have the ability to transform into chaos mode have a blue glow surrounding their body as a warning to others. While in chaos mode, players have more vitality, cannot be knocked down, and do a lot more damage.

Creatures
There are several different creatures in Rakion. All of them appear in Stage Mode, and they can all be bought in the shop. Like other items, creatures have level requirements. Creatures gain experience and level too; a higher level creature costs more cell points to summon, but it has higher stats, and should one wish to re-sell it, it will fetch a higher price.

Game modes
Excluding Stage mode, which puts players on the same team, all of the game modes are PvP-based. A game can consist of anywhere from 1 to 21 rounds, and a round can last between five and twenty minutes. There are four types of PvP games in Rakion. The game will automatically balance the teams after a round by swapping the players with most experience points acquired so far in that game to the other team. This switch will only occur if one team has less players than the other. In most types of deathmatch dead players respawn after a 7-second period and have four seconds of invincibilty when they respawn. The Deathmatch modes have healing capsules and books that provide cell points; the other modes do not.

Profanity filter
The in-game chat system automatically replaces most profanity with the word "LOVE", as in "You mother LOVEing LOVEer!" The filter isn't limited to whole words, so typing the word "class" will appear as "clLOVE". In the past, the filter could be bypassed by typing a ' in the middle of the word as an escape sequence. However, this bypass was patched.

Criticism
Rakion uses a similar online structure to another Korean based game, GunZ. Both games are not run on dedicated servers and instead make the client act as his own server, a peer to peer network. Some critics have critcized Softnyx for this design decision since in places other than South Korea, the distance latency often creates unfair advantages over other players. Other concerns have been noted that it gives hackers more "tools" to cheat with. Softnyx only response to this is that Rakion is meant to be run as a LAN set up and not against far away players.