This week I’d like to share a recent discovery I made while searching for new forms of entertainment during quarantine. It’s called Orna. Orna is a mobile-based GPS MMORPG à la Pokémon Go, Wizards Unite, and Ingress, available now for Android and iPhone. However, instead of catching Pokémon, exploring magical phenomena, or hacking portals, this time you’re fighting monsters in classic RPG style!
You can start out as a warrior, mage, or thief. You have the ability to gain access to all of them eventually, but you’ll need to do some leveling first. As you continue to level, you’ll have the option of branching out into more advanced classes and class specializations such as Spellsword, Centurion, or Hunter. Each class provides its own special abilities, attacks, and – in the cases of magic classes – spells that you can use. Each class also has its own unique stat bonuses and/or penalties. After having played for a few days now, I can confirm that each class really does feel unique and seems to fill a particular niche that other classes of the same tier can’t.
Orna differentiates itself from other GPS games by actually allowing you to engage in classic, turn-based combat that many players are familiar with after decades of gaming. Monsters have different strengths and weaknesses, and may drop gold, weapons, and items after being defeated. If a monster knocks you out of combat, you’ll have to drink some potions to recover HP and then wait a while before you can challenge it again. The monsters scale to your level for a while before being replaced by new, more powerful monsters. Eventually you’ll be able to gain access to a Bestiary that lets you recruit monster companions to help you in combat. Orna also manages to keep things fresh by providing multiple daily quests to kill monsters and help NPCs in exchange for gold and XP rewards.
One of my favorite things about Orna is that monsters tend to stick around until they’re defeated, and their HP doesn’t recover between combats. This means you can gradually wear down even the toughest opponents over time in order to reap a decent XP reward. Not only that, but if another player fights a monster, it will remain weakened when a different player fights it. You can even team up in parties to share XP and gold as you fight monsters together.
Orna also distinguishes itself by providing so many different types of weapons, armor, and other gear that can improve your stats and give you special abilities. The sorts of gear you can find from monster drops changes and improves as you level. This gear can be upgraded if you gather the right materials and pay a fee at a Blacksmith. Improving your gear over time is one of the most fun and satisfying parts of the game.
As I hinted earlier, you can play Orna either by yourself or with friends/party members. Playing as a member of the party will allow you both to level up and get rich more quickly. The game also has an Arena mode that allows you to fight your friends or random opponents in order to win very large XP, gold, and item rewards. When you reach level 25, you can join a “Kingdom” (basically a guild in other MMOs), and at level 100 you can found your own Kingdom. Members generate gold for their Kingdom as they win combats, and that money can be used to buy special benefits for the Kingdom as well as to prepare for special quests that Kingdom members can do together.
If you can’t already tell, Orna has a ton of features and complexity that really makes it stand out among the other members of the GPS game genre. If I tried to list every single detail of the game, this article would be many times longer; I tried to give you the best overview I could by touching on the most salient features. If you want to learn more, I suggest you go ahead and give it a play!
For more screenshots of Orna, click here.
Do you have thoughts or questions about the article or suggestions for future content? Leave a comment below or drop me a line at jtdimino@d20radio.com.
J.T. Dimino
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