SNW: A stylish MMO? Isn’t that an oxymoron?

Forget about the cutesy sprites and backgrounds in Ragnarok Online. Sword of the New World’s art is more comparable to NCsoft’s Lineage II but with a distinct Baroque twist. The buildings are all colonnades, domes, and elaborate staircases – even the background music is influenced by the period.

But art direction aside, one of the unique features of Sword of the New World is the Multi-Character Control system. Players will be able to create an entire family of characters to play with. Each family can have up to four members, and the members will carry the family surname. Best of all, you can take up to three family members out in a party at the same time. For people who can’t decide on any one class to focus on, now you can level up three at once.

We’re not sure how many classes will be available, but at a recent demo event we saw a Musketeer, an Elementalist, a Scout, and a Fighter. And each class will have their own costumes, stances, and skills with which to work with. Each level, up to the maximum of 100, will give you points which you spend on skills. The stances, however, are leveled up through usage. So, the more often you use your healing stance, the stronger your healing will become.

While the ability to level up more than one character at a time (and always having a party available to you) may sound promising, in practice, things can get really hectic, and fast. If you don’t carefully manage your party, you’ll quickly find yourself overwhelmed and then dead. All movement is mouse-controlled, and you’ll have three sets of hotkeys available (one for each character). To facilitate party control, there are several different modes you can click on that help dictate character automated action. You can choose to move all three characters as a group, or individually assign movement orders. You can set your party to automatically attack any monsters within range, or set them to only retaliate when hit. And, the stance your characters are in will determine what other automated actions are executed (like auto-healing).

It wouldn’t be much of an MMO, though, if you didn’t have anything to do with your friends. You can take your family and group with other family parties for some extra help taking down harder bosses or dungeons. According to publisher K2 representatives, there will be family duels, PVP, and faction wars, so there should be a lot to do with your friends, though we will need more details to discuss those aspects any further. Don’t worry if your computer is a bit old – supposedly, the client has a surprisingly few amount of polygons despite the nice graphics and runs well on moderate machines. And for those with even older PCs, there will be a low-spec client available. There is no word yet on what the price plan will be, but keep your eye out for the upcoming beta if you aren’t too busy with World of Warcraft.