Mir 2: The Legend continues is a re-release of the popular ‘The Legends of Mir 2′ MMORPG that was first released way back in 2001. The Legends of Mir 2 was developed by a Korean company, but was most successful in China. Even after the release of a sequel, The Legends of Mir 3, Mir 2 remains a popular game in East Asia. The series was never as popular here in the West, and on March 31, 2009 both Mir 2 and Mir 3 English servers were shut down. A Japanese publisher, Gamepot, moved in to fill the void by releasing “Mir 2: The Legend Continues” as a free-to-play game supported through micro transactions. How well has this classic stood the test of time? Read on to find out.
End of an Era
The graphical and general gameplay style found in Mir 2 is very similar to that of classic action RPG titles released during the 1990s for the PC. Games like Diablo and Nox defined the genre, but many other games used the classic 2D, fantasy, isometric camera angle features. Most MMORPGs during that time were also designed in this model, including Ultima Online and the original Lineage. All of these games had purely mouse-controlled movement, though Mir 2 does allow auto-running to be activating by hitting the ‘d’ key. Even when it was first released, Mir 2 was not a cutting edge game technologically, but it did have several factors that lead to its success. The most important of these being that it was the first major MMORPG on the scene in China, where Mir 2 recorded up to 250,000 concurrent Mir2 Online Gold users at peak hours. The second factor is the level of freedom players enjoyed in Mir 2. The entire game world had open PvP with towns guarded by powerful NPCs to keep out murderers. Racking up too many kills led to a player being labeled as a murderer, which left him or her open to attack from other players and NPC guards alike. Unfortunately, the MMORPG genre has evolved since the golden years of Mir 2, and new games are now available that offer everything Mir 2.
