Your inventory shows a simple interface. The upper half shows a window of your equipped armors and weapon, plus a tab of the fashion items you’re currently wearing. The lower half shows two tabs, one for the general loot, and one dedicated purely for quest items. Your bank also shows a simple inventory interface and can store money as well. The inventory and bank slots are expandable by purchasing an expansion slot in the item mall or undertaking a repeatable quest from the nearby banker, a welcome sight for non-paying players.
Trade skills are an important feature in Perfect World Gold. The game offers you blacksmithing, tailoring, pharmacy and ornament-crafting. You can freely learn all these, and are available quests during your early levels. You attain higher levels by crafting a certain number of items per level. Some time later, a quest will appear to further advance your tradeskills. Eventually, you will have the ability to craft holy, dusk or frost palace items. However, harvesting the necessary materials is a tough task. Materials are scattered sparsely throughout the land, and searching for them is a real chore. Others may opt to buy from other players or from the item mall. Other materials or the molds for rare items are dropped at a very low rate from elite mobs and bosses inside dungeons. Along with crafting, you can also upgrade or refine your equipment to attain bonus stats, and also socket them with soul stones, depending on the number of slots available. Just be sure you’re inserting the right stone, because removal entails the loss of the all the stones socketed in the weapon.
Attaining Perfection
Your character build is dependent on the stats you distribute. You are given 5 status points per level to distribute among 4 different stats. All of the equips have a required level and certain points spent on a stat. Some stats are underrated or overestimated. The probabilities and increase bonuses can sometimes be too low or too high and thus your character must rely on stat bonuses provided by the gear you’re wearing.
On the lighter side, interaction with other players is a breeze. You have your own messenger to privately chat with friends, know their current location and level, and even leave offline messages for them. Chat emoticons are aplenty, and there are a set of character actions to perform as well, keeping you entertained. Your friends will also be visible as separately-colored dots on the minimap, to keep track of their whereabouts. Makes you wonder why that tracking function isn’t available for guildmates too?