AdventureQuest
AdventureQuest is a free online single player
RPG developed by
Artix Entertainment in
2002. The system requirements for the game are a current
web browser and version 7.0 or later of
Macromedia Flash Player.
The game is free of cost, but a one time upgrade grants players the Guardian or X-Guardian status, allowing them to experience certain in-game benefits and features not available to other players.
The game itself tends to have
anime-style graphics.
Guardians are allowed to play ArchKnight and DragonFable, two other RPG's based loosely off AdventureQuest, as well as Zardwars, which is a test game created to test multiple databases. Guardians also have a separate server which is used for testing possible changes to the game and participating in special game events open only to Guardians. Guardians have the advantage of being able to play whenever they want on AdventureQuest servers, while there are a certain, variable, amount of slots for non-paying adventurers.
As well as random encounters and quest battling, there are also events called wars. These are server-wide events that call for a certain amount of monsters to be defeated before moving on to a boss battle. If a player defeats the boss he/she may be able to claim a rare war prize. In the past players did not actually have to slay the boss to get the rare prize. The matter was resolved by implementing a system where items are now purchased in a war chest, which can be accessed only after defeating the boss monster. Weapons are the most common war rewards. They often do more damage than weapons available normally or have other advantages, such as powerful specials.
Several new war methods are being held currently, including a manually updated percentage bar, and a quest-style war where there is no waiting bar for the boss. Both of these sell the rewards in a war chest, which can be accessed after defeating the final enemy. Some wars have had a limited time to be completed for the rewards to be made available. Now, the servers can handle 2 different wars at the same time. The amount of slots can peak at around 22000 users, and can have a low of 6,000 users. Currently, it seems that the manually updated percentage bar is preferred by the staff. There is also a type of war where players can fight for one side or another and whichever side fills their quota for enemies defeated fights a boss and collects the rewards from the chest, although all players can fight the boss.
In May 2006, two wars that are two-sided like the style mentioned above have taken place. They were the Necromancer vs. Paladin war and the Werewolf vs. Vampire war. The Necromancers won the Necromancer vs. Paladin war and the Werewolves won the Werewolf vs. Vampire war.
Events are a system in Adventure Quest used to keep the content fresh and new. These have ranged from Wars, Such as the Carnax Saga, to Holiday celebrations, such as Mogloween (Halloween).
The current event (as of August 2006) involved the NPCs Cyrus, Galanoth, and Vampire Slayer E meeting in Battleon. Then a massive bunch of Dragons attacked town. Initiallly, players were set to fight two battles against dragons, however, the boss has been released and now the players fight a Were-Dragon and it's
entourage. Quest rewards include the DracBow and the DracShield, which, ironically, have nothing to do with dragons, and the Golden Dragonslayer Armor.
This is the newest game by Artix Entertainment, entitled
DragonFable. DragonFable is something of an interactive serial web comic, the storyline of which will consistently evolve over time. It has been stated that
DragonFable will interact with
AdventureQuest. In fact, Guardians may already access DragonFable. However, it recently came out of Beta on June 9th, 2006, and the DragonAmulet was made available for purchase. The Dragon Amulets unlock special areas, quests, powerful items and allow access to an expanding number of exclusive areas in the game. These areas contain incredibly rare and powerful weapons. As the game progresses, the amulet will unveil more secret benefits including special story side quests, the ability to speak in the language of Dragons, and your ultimate destiny of becoming a Dragon Lord. The full game is due to open to free players by October 2006.
Recent updates on the game's progress are available on the Design Notes page. It will be intertwined with the AdventureQuest storyline so that players will be able to play both games to get rewards. Even though the focus will be on DragonFable, AdventureQuest will still be updated. Unlike AdventureQuest, though, DragonFable will be a 'walk around' game, where players can walk their characters through towns and quests. However, the game has no character interaction besides
NPCs. Guardians and X-Guardian have a special "Guardian" armor at their disposal for paying for AQ. New, free players from "AdventureQuest" who want to become Guardians on "DragonFable" have the option (along with Guardians) to buy the special "DragonAmulet," allowing players to go to special places and get rare and powerful equipment.
DragonFable will take place two to three years before AdventureQuest. All characters from AdventureQuest will appear in DragonFable as well, with characters such as "Galanoth" and "Artix." The game will tell the origins of things such as the missing "Guardian Towers," how "Battleon" was founded, and how the "Dragonslayers" came to be. New characters will also be added, and the "Doom Weapons" and "DragonLord's" weapons will make their mark as some of the most powerful weapons in the game. However, the DragonLord's weapons will need the DragonAmulet to activate them.
Currently, characters may be created in only three classes: Warriors, Mages and Rogues. Characters may also switch to an incomplete version of the Guardian class, and stay that way until they log out or change characters. Additional classes, including the Dragon Lord Class, are due to be released in the future. Minor additions such as weapons and enemies are constantly being introduced, as well as new locations.
Z-Tokens are a kind of rare currency in AdventureQuest that enables players to buy various powerful weapons, armors, shields, pets and items in the Z-Token shop, which is located in front of the Inn. Z-Tokens randomly appear, and can be gained by fighting monsters, or can be bought. The cost of the Z-tokens are $9.95 for 2000 and $19.95 for 5000. It has been said by one of the staff that the amount of Z-Tokens you get depends on the level but the amount that is gained has no known formula known to the public as of 15 July 2006. These strange coins appear like any other coin, but have a "z" shaped in the center. All types of weaponry are available in the shop. The stronger items, such as Summon Energy Dragon, Little Death, or Grim Vestige have higher price tags than normal. The prices range from 100 to 6000 Z-Tokens. Also Z-Tokens can be used as a payment for entry to a trophy hunt and attempt to find and kill a rare and powerful creature, at 60 tokens for 5 turns.For the clans at Paxia, tokens can be donated to your corresponding clan at Paxia and help the clan turn stronger.
Guardian Only Login
There is a limit on the number of free players which can play simultaneously. In the early days of AdventureQuest, the limit was fixed at 4,000, but now the limit is at least 10,000 , and the number of extra slots fluctuates according to
time of day and
server load.
Once the limit is reached, only Guardians may log in, until sufficient
players log out to free up slots or the server limit increases. This can be sometimes difficult, as the limit will occasionally decrease by nearly half, and moments after the server limit is increased, all available slots are taken. Some Adventurer players use the server stats on
AQstats.com to help get a good idea of when to log in. A web browser script was once available that would log the player in the instant it detected a spot on the free server, while others are forced to keep pressing refresh on the login page until login is possible to duplicate the same result. Some players have been known to log in with a free account and leave their
computer on continuously to stay logged in, or even put the computer on
standby to stay logged in upon
restart.
New accounts get fifteen free logins to help them login and get a feel for the game. Each of those allow the player to bypass the limit once, while Guardian
accounts can bypass it anytime. It is a common occurrence that free accounts are abandoned after those fifteen free logins are used up.
AdventureQuest may eventually have
advertising added to its game site to allow more server load to be purchased, allowing more players to play the game simultaneously, which in turn, would allow for more free slots on the server.
Lack of in-game interaction
AdventureQuest is essentially a
single-player game, and provides no means of in-game interaction between players. This is perhaps one reason to its small share of the Web RPG genre, behind games like
RuneScape,
MapleStory, and
World of Warcraft. Some commonly requested in-game interaction features include: - *
Battles between players. High level players may find the monsters too easy and wish to challenge other players. The AQ staff has said several times that this will not be implemented into Adventure Quest, although an AI-based player versus player system might be added to DragonFable after its full release. - *
Item trading. Item trading between players was once offered, but was taken away because the staff could only do it manually, and there were too many requests for them to handle by themselves.
Stale Monotony
AdventureQuest is sometimes accused of being
repetitive and
boring. Almost all of the
gameplay activities involve defeating enemies to gain
experience and currency, while there is little else to do. The majority of the gameplay involves: hitting an attack button; choosing from a limited amount of armor, weapons, spells, and pets; buying and selling those items; clicking
dialogue boxes; and clicking on
directions to move to a different area. Training up and leveling takes a long time, and often requires
repeating tedious tasks. Many of which involve waiting through short
animation sequences to end before continuing on playing. However, many people enjoy it because they can
multitask while playing and find an addiction to its simple gameplay, which is not hard to find in a
variety of
online games.
Lack of Features
AdventureQuest is often accused of lacking
basic features present in other
RPG's. Artix Entertainment rebuts by reminding users that AdventureQuest has weekly
updates and is
ever-changing, although several other online RPG's possess those qualities as well. Most of AdventureQuest's updates consist of only new, medium level weapons being added to the game, and rare occurrences of semi-extensive, and sometimes uncompleted, quests. AdventureQuest was originally made to be solely a simple, single-player RPG and has progressed too far to consider rewriting to whole game to add the benefits of extra battle features, better side events, or multiplayer actions.
X-Guardian Boost
In the Guardian information page, it says that buying the Guardian status lets one's character receive all
future Guardian updates and features. However, Guardians still have to pay for the feature of X-Guardian boost. Within X-Guardianship, there are only 5 things received that are different from a normal Guardianship:
*A separate Hall of Fame list, showing only the highest level X-Guardian characters.
*10% extra experience from every battle, whereas normal Guardians get the same amount of experience that free players get.
*A minimum of 3 health and mana potions at login, instead of 1 for Adventurers or 2 for Guardians. Any potions in a character's possession over the account's corrisponding minimum level will carry over logins.
*A potion limit of 35, instead of 25 for Adventurers or 30 for Guardians.
*A one-time addition of 10,000 gold.
Free Play
There is an evident lack of
free-to-play content being added. Many updates are Guardian only or are showcased only on the Guardian only server. In some cases, an entire update is devoted solely to advanced ways to
pay for in-game content, such as X-Guardianship and Z-Tokens. With the AdventureQuest staff proclaiming on the
home page that half the game is available only through Guardianship, this leads people to think of the free play more of a
free demo, rather than a free web RPG. Combined with the extremely limited free player access and the many links throughout the game asking one to become a Guardian and pay money, this is often taken as an elaborate way to convince players to pay, instead of allowing people to enjoy the game as a free web RPG.
There are a constantly growing amount of classes in AdventureQuest. Classes were first introduced after the Dragon War Saga, when the player slayed the legendary Fire Dragon Akriloth and was awarded with the Dragonslayer class, however this was in name only as it had no effect until the real class came out. Currently, Adventurers can only go up to Level 5 in class abilities, while Guardians and X-Guardians can go to the full 10.
FighterA basic warrior. Their class abilities focus on pure melee attacks. When you become a level 5 fighter you unlock the Knight class.
RogueA person that uses a mix of both dexterity and strength to quickly assail an opponent. Their class abilities commonly used ranged attacks.
* This class has an "elite" armor type, the Blarney Rogue Outfit.
MageA "rookie" magician that is good with spells and staves. Their abilities lets them cast spells based on any element.
KnightA strong fighter who fights to defend the king (though no one knows who the king is). To become a Knight, one must be at least a level 5 Fighter. Their abilities focus on both ranged and melee attacks, making them much more useful than Fighters.
NecromancerA magician specializing in re-animating corpses and becoming an
undead themselves (a
lich). To become a Necromancer, one must be at least a level 5 Wizard. Their spells focus on summoning powerful undead creatures to attack.
* This class has an "elite" armor type, the Obsidian Cloak.
NinjaA class that, like the "rogue" class, depends on speed, dexterity & multiple attacks to defeat an enemy. Surprisingly there are no class relations with other class levels. Their is no actual abilities that Ninjas focus on, as they have at least 1 melee, ranged, and magic attack available. They do, however, focus on Darkness powered Razor Fan weapons.
PaladinA blessed knight on a journey to slay undead. To become a Paladin, one must be at least a level 5 Knight and a level 5 Mage. Their abilities focus on Melee, Magic, and Light. Their abilities gain immense power when facing Undead foes such as Zombies.
* This class has an "elite" armor type, the Golden Holy Armor.
Dragon SlayerA person who devotes their life to dragon-slaying. Their abilities are are weak on their own, as is their Armor, but they become truly deadly when facing any monster with "Dragon" in their name. Their true power is unleashed when wielding the Guardian Only weapon "Dragon Blade".
* This class has two "elite" armor types, the Elite Dragon Slayer, and Golden Dragon Slayer, which is available in the Nightbane Chronicles.
*There is a glitch with this class, characters that defeated Akriloth during the dragon war were awarded with the class of Dragon Slayer. 2 years later, when the true class was released, characters that took the class could skip the first quest (which was different from the rest) and take the normal kind to earn the first class level. This was caused by the characters having the class but no level. This was shown by the mission screen stating the player was a level 999 dragonslayer. This glitch ended when the character gained a level in ANY class. This glitch has likely been resolved as there are likely no character's that still have the Dragon Slayer class from the war that are in use and have trained in a class.
DracomancerA person who studies under High Khan Cyrus to learn and protect the ancient knowledge of dragons. They can transform into a dragon themselves. Their abilities focus on the power of dragons, such as turning their own hand into a fiery dragon talon.
Vampire SlayerA person who slays vampires and werewolves. Their abilities are only useful when fight Vampires, the Undead, or Werewolves. Their weapons gain power when wielded against a certain foe.
* This class has an "elite" armor type, the NightHunter Vampire Slayer.
WizardAn advanced mage, who is extremely good with spells and magic. To become a Wizard, one must be at least a level 5 mage. Their abilities are completely magical, and are far more deadly with high Intellect.
* This class has many different types/colors of armor but they all are the same statwise.
Sub-RaceWhile not a true class, it is counted as one for compilation purposes. One can choose to become either a
Werewolf or a
Vampire. They both have separate weapons to use, and their armors have special powers. Guardians can also become a
Werepyre, a combination of the two, which harnesses the power of both Werewolves and Vampires, but at the cost of not having weapons, and being a reject from werewolves, vampires, and humans. However, though werepyres are "rejects," nothing changes, except they can enter neither the Werewolf Lair nor the Vampire Castle. They are also given a stronger armor than Werewolves or Vampires.
Misc.* All the classes that are listed having "elite" armors simply have two different types: a cheaper, lower level one and a more expensive, sometimes better, high level armor.
* Some "elite" armors such as Obsidian Cloak hit twice on a normal attack.
Along with the various assortment of equipment in the AQ database, some of the higher level and wealthier players get the chance to buy "uber" sets, with elite attack power and defenses. Traditionally, the armors cost 1,000K gold, the weapons cost 700K gold, and the shields cost 300K gold, totalling at 2,000K gold per set. The sets usually cycle out each summer. So far, the players of AQ have seen two uber sets, the Golden Set, which is light based, and the Nightmare set, which is Ice based.
To fill the gap between mid-leveled armors and high leveled armors, the staff put in "Lesser" Uber plates. The have slightly weaker defenses and are half cost, and with 80% sellback price, but they are lower leveled, making them stepping stones for the uber sets or, if a player was not around to get a specific uber set.
Over the history of Adventure Quest, some myths have appeared that have spawned dozens of rumors. These are all, however, just rumors and untrue.
*During the Great Fire War, there were rumors that the Ice Katana would cost over 1 million gold and many players became extremely rich trying to save up for it.
* In the final parts of the Great Fire War, a myth circulated that if one saved the Fire Orb, instead of using it to fight the final boss, the player would be able to keep it for use as a shield.
* After Demento's death, rumors abounded to the extent that attending his funeral would let the player keep his armor.
*It is rumored the staff-only shop is located in plain view behind the door with the number
42, though staff and the more intelligent players know that the door is just a reference to the book
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It is not surprising, seeing as the staff are big fans of the book. (Note: Certain tales of this myth involve the 42 door being opened at exactly 3:00 and 10 seconds every day, and the weapons and equipment from the Golden set.)
*A small rumor began when the Carnax wars were re-released, that beating the fully powered Carnax would allow them to buy the Carnax Fighter and the Eye of Carnax. This rumor ended when the fully powered Carnax was defeated by a small group of people, and the rewards were still the same.
*There is a rumor when you get 120 or 125 hourglasses for Death, you may buy any Rare that has been in the game from Reapers Hideout.
AdventureQuest players can now join three different clans, Aerodu (wind), Nautica (water), and Geoto (earth). Once you have joined one, you cannot leave and join another clan until the event is over.
There are goods and bads in all clans:
*Aerodu: High Attack, but low defence
*Nautica: High Defence, but low attack
*Geoto: Moderate Defence and Attack
There is now a war between the Aerodu and the Geoto. Nautica voted not to fight in the war. Wars involve players either:
*Fighting computer controlled monsters made to look like members of the opposing clan (due to lack of Player vs. Player content). this subtracts one point from the opposing clan's life total.
*Firing weapons (Such as catapults and missiles) at the opposite teams base in a mini-game, which subtracts 3 points from your enemy's life total, or
* Playing a typing game to build defenses for your teams base, which adds one point to your health total.
Aerodu and Geoto, the two waring clans, have slight advantages and disadvantages. Aerodu, however, seems to be winning the fight (It is leading Geoto in Health Points), even though Geoto has stronger numbers than Aerodu.
It is confirmed that Nautica has gained an ally, and that character is currently named Jacques Triton. You can visit the library in Isle d'Oriens and browse the books and you might find a tale called the Fisherman, which tells some (possibly all) players in AQ that Jacques Triton is the main character in the story. Nautica, Geoto and Aerodu are included in the book as well. At the end, the Fisherman transforms into a monstrous beast mutated from the powers of the three clans. Many players now recommend you to vote NO when a voting period to let Jacques in your clan begins, as he could possibly attack the clans himself.
According to the Nautica clan, they will break their promise to stay out of the war and attack with the fisherman.
The game features character customization. To edit your character's face, you must visit Warlic's Magic Shop and use the mirror. You can customize hair styles, hair color, skin color, and eye color. As a guardian you are also allowed to customize the color of your armor, and choose if you want a cape. However, this must be done with Valencia, the rare item collector. You can also change your character's name in the Hourglass Quest.
*
AdventureQuest - Main site for AdventureQuest.
*
AdventureQuest Forums - Main forums for AdventureQuest.
*
ZardWars - A similar game to AdventureQuest.
*
DragonFable - Flash game by Artix Entertainment that preceeds Adveture Quest's plot.
*
Minigames - Minigames branched from Adventure Quest themes.
*
UltimateAQ - A nonaffilated, but helpful, site all about AdventureQuest, but not updated frequently.
*
AQstats - A nonaffilated site for information about characters in Adventure Quest.
*[
1] - the AdventureQuest wiki
