We find ourselves in a crowded San Francisco convention hall at the Game Developers Conference. What do we do? Rather than rolling the dice to see if we're getting drunk, we try out the free-to-play hack-and-slash online role-playing game Dragon Nest from Nexon. This is a hybrid game Dragon Nest Gold that takes the brawling mechanics of a third-person action game and adds persistent RPG advancement and a colorful, cartoon-like decor, and it seems like something that could be fun for the whole family, assuming all your family members have their own computers.
Dragon Nest works like a lot of free-to-play hack-and-slash games. It lets you create a character from a specific class (such as warrior, wizard, archer, or priest) and then sally forth into instanced combat areas to beat the living heck out of various cutesy monsters by repeatedly clicking your mouse button to swing your weapon or occasionally using various Dragonnest Gold hotkeyed abilities. Instanced areas are divided into short, combat-heavy segments bounded by doors that unlock only when all monsters are destroyed, but these shorter segments make it easier for impromptu parties to stick together until they can take on the boss and eventually complete the instance and either move on to the next instance or return to a shared-space town to socialize with other players or purchase items from the in-game cash-op (which lets you spend real money Dragon Nest Gold in microtransactions in exchange for in-game items).