Flying and swimming is a key movement feature in Perfect World, and controlling your flying or swimming character is as easy as running on solid ground. You can change your direction using the keyboard (Z and Space for diving and rising) or by holding right-click of the mouse. For eye candy, there are individual swimming motions for each race (like frog strokes for the humans). Somehow, the developers forgot to add in the penalty of dying when falling from a high altitude or from drowning, but that’s a good thing. Also, even if you aren’t buying flights from the item mall, you’ll eventually encounter a quest that will give you your free flight item. On the other hand, elves are gifted with wings from the very beginning; though flying is at the cost of MP (other flight items won’t cost you MP anymore).

Shortcuts are available from F1 to F8 and numbers 1 to 6. You can store up to three preset shortcuts and are easily interchangeable. Alternatively, you can expand the shortcuts bar to view all the presets for an easy combination of mouse-clicks and keyboard-presses during combat. You can queue up to three skills / items from the shortcut bar. Sometimes, there’s a lack of response from the game when you start skill spamming. Thankfully, you can macro a group of skills and even set it to loop infinitely until your target dies, you lose MP or your skill’s cooldown is still ticking away.

Learning skills entails money and soul points. You approach a job master and select the skills available for you, paying some money and an extravagant amount of soul points. It doesn’t come cheap, and seems like a discouragement for players who don’t have the time to farm money and soul, or just don’t have enough capabilities to earn enough. Often, you might misinterpret the game as requiring you to become wealthy at an early level just to gain access to the better skills (applies to items and equipments as well). To unlock skills, you need to achieve higher cultivation levels, given as a quest every ten levels or so. Once unlocked, the skills will be ready for purchase at your nearest job master. Other skills might require a certain level or a certain prerequisite skill learned.

To earn your gold, you can turn to the auction house and sell your wares there. You can also bid or buyout items up for sale. The auction house has a search function, by filtering according to a specific type or by the ID number of an item. An option of typing the item name isn’t present, thus forcing you to rely on the filter function, which gets tedious. Alternatively, you can sell your items by setting up your own player shop. A nice touch to the shop is the “buying” section, where you post items you’re willing to buy from other players. This eliminates the tedious process of searching and manually trading others when an offer comes up.