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Anime Archeage beta impressions

Night Goat

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For years now, I've seen eager fans gushing over the upcoming Korean MMORPG, Archeage. They say it's really a living world, instead of the static theme parks we're used to. So when DashiDMV alerted me to a beta key givaway, I thought I'd give it a try.

The first thing you do is choose a race. Archeage only as four: humans and elves form one faction, while furries and Asians form the other. We all hate elves and rightfully so, but against furries they're the lesser evil, so I went with a human in hopes that I might purge the unclean.

Gyl8SqI.jpg

Oh god no.

Character creation is disappointing. There are few good options for creating your waifu, and far too many ugly ones that no one will ever choose. So, there's little variety possible if you don't want to look like an Oblivion character.

The first thing you'll notice is the intrusive interface. The mini-map covers almost have of your field of vision, and there doesn't seem to be a way to resize it. Immershun status: ruined.

mSKnSee.jpg

On the left of the screen, you'll notice that there's a trial in progress. Apparently players who commit crimes can be judged by a jury of their peers, and if found guilty can be sentenced to a few minutes in jail. No one seems to take these too seriously, and watching the proceedings can be occasionally amusing.

Anyway, the gameplay is...not good. If you've played an MMO in the last decade, it will be painfully familiar. Get a quest from an NPC with an arrow over his or her head - it will probably involve killing x of a specific type of creature. Go up to it, tab to target, go through your rotation until it dies, rinse, repeat. This is where my expectations for the game really sunk. You get a horse very early, which is nice. You also get this:

i6iwTVG.jpg

Intense rowing action! Can you do this in WoW?

I rapidly lost interest in the game, with the same banalshitboring combat and quests that I've done a million times in other games. Maybe the game gets more interesting later, but fuck if I'm going to put up with so much boredom before I get there.

Verdict: it's shit. :negative:

smMSBKV.jpg

So long, waifu.
 

Baron

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Night Goat said:
The mini-map covers almost have of your field of vision
It's not a mini map. It's just a map. Feature, not flaw.

It's an ugly UI, but then... it's not an attractive game. Keep it covered up.

Weird the Koreans can excel at cinema and then fingerprint when it comes to MMORPGs. Unless it's a NWN2 mod, is it a NWN2 mod? If so, thumbs up good work.
 

markec

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I played the beta and need to set few things straight.

1. The face options are premades but you have shit load of sliders to modify any part of the face.

2. Map can be minimized by dragging the corners, for some this seems as difficult as nuclear physics. Also you can modify any part of UI.

3. Questing is simple, any while they consist of mostly kill x of enemy or gather x items the numbers are low so you end quest quickly and there is a twist, if you for example kill few extra enemies you can overachieve and get bonus reward. Since numbers are low at start like kill 10 mobs you need to kill 5 more to get bonus so its not time consuming and feel rewarding. Also maps are filled with secret quests, some you find exploring the map, others by killing certain monster. One good example is questing at ruins filled with undead, you kill few minor bosses and get several key fragments from them, you can then forge them into a key and open a secret area, none of this is in your quest log but you need to actually pay attention to world around you.

4. Combat is decent, not as nearly as good like GW or Terra but atleat there is some movement involved or you die really quicly (i assume op played only tutorial area) and not just stand there and wait for cooldowns.

5. Game is a grind, not of xp but materials for crafting and crafting is great. I can go in this more if you want.

This game if multiplayer oriented, which sounds funny coming from mmo, but for a long time there is very few mmos out there which forces you to be part of a guild in order to make any progress in this game. While this game allows solo gameplay you will be in a world of pain soon enough for crafting purposes and miss out lots of features.

My overall experience is a game with potential to be great.
 

Castanova

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No one talking about the character system? How is it? Seems pretty important.

Are we talking FFXIV-style of ultra-simplicity? Or are we talking vanilla-WoW/Wildstar level of customization? Or something else?
 

markec

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No one talking about the character system? How is it? Seems pretty important.

Are we talking FFXIV-style of ultra-simplicity? Or are we talking vanilla-WoW/Wildstar level of customization? Or something else?

You choose from several classes at start of the game, which sound like your usual mmo picking between fighter, mage, ranger, cleric and few others. When leveling you get skill points which you use to unlock available skills, there is no trainers and no money cost for this. After several levels you get to choose your specialization, you get a large list of skill sets you can unlock. I played as a cleric and got skill sets that focus on damage, curse, buff or healing spells, there was rather big selection and didnt really go trough it, also some skills combinations can produce combos. Its nothing special but its decent enough and large amount of skills make you think what build you will make.
 

Terpsichore

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It's just yet another MMO that had a solid base and looked promising but was turned into shit because publisher wanted to make quick buck. Made F2P (shit by default), engine downgraded and more retardation to come in the future.

Good thing I gave up on MMOs many years ago so I'm not really upset, just disgusted.
 

Castanova

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I see. So you can spec your character in terms of skill choices but there's nothing like the WoW talent tree where your choices affect how good you are at various skills/other things.
 

markec

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crafting is great. I can go in this more if you want.
do tell.

Crafting itself is nothing original, but it sheer scope of it is what makes it great. There is huge amount of stuff you can craft, plants to gather and grow, animals to raise. You can spend entire game just focusing on crafting and still reach max level since both gathering and crafting yield large amounts of xp. What also makes it great is grind, for example to build smallest house in game you need for start with 100 planks, which you make from 300 logs, average tree gives you around 5 logs. Problem is that not all trees can be cut down, and those that can will be target of other players. You can plant your own trees but average grow time is 1-2 days or real time before you can cut it down and you need a large scarecrow to protect your field from other players but protected area is rather small and you can grow only a small amount of plants. Everything you do crafting/gathering related spends labor points which generate over time, lots when you play and few when you are offline, players that buy monthly subscription get large bonus for generating those points. This looks painfull to do crafting if you are solo f2p player and it is so much its not really worth playing at all, since best things about this game is made to play in group. This grind actually forces players that want to do meaningful crafting to join guilds, so I think "grind" in this game is well founded since it both makes crafting feel rewarding and makes players seek out playing with other players instead of playing solo, since building such buildings like castles is something that only a large group of players can accomplish.
 

sbb

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that scarecrow shit you described is super cool. crafting systems always seem so weird to me but this one sounds really nice
 

Machine

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The F2P option is glorified trial but game isnt that great to justify "subbing" to it tbh. I played the rusrus version before and have friend who played korean version and pretty much everybody said game is only getting worse with each subsequent patch. Game has some interesting mechanics and is probably closest to EvE a 3rd person animefag mmo will ever get to but game has some major faults. In the end not even crafting and grinding matters, only how much people you can muster to zerg pvp against your enemies. This is basically only important thing and you can expect massive tears from dumbasses that paid 150$ for this only to discover that theres literally 0 solo content in this game and that hordes of f2p pubbies will shit on everybody esle if they band together.
 

RK47

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Dead State Divinity: Original Sin
So many glowing reviews.

A teleporting botter I found in hellswamp. I would report these bots, but it would cost me several days of labor to get them all.
I just started testing this one and I've been in it for less than 10 minutes. First two mobs drop one of these coin purses you need labor points to open. Regardless of how many labor points we'll eventually end up having at release, I find the absence of normal, usual loot system in favour of this locked coin purses absolutely dealbreaking. It is just not familiar, not fun, and smelling of cashgrab.
Worked myself up to level 7. Stayed logged in overnight to accumulate labor points. I can guarantee that when they put the 45 minute idle kick in there will be a huge number of free accounts with random movement scripts showing up. Hell, I don't know shit about scripting and I could write one in less than an hour.
I like this game and yet I am so baffled by the labor system and the completely unnecessary shackles it puts on your character. Even worse is the die hard Aage fans spouting out how its so important to the economy. Fucking clueless sheep. Why are they ruining a good game with this? Still, the graphics are amazing and it makes me laugh how smooth it is compared to the cartoony neon green Wildstar graphics that stutter and put.
They even make you spend labor points to report bots and hackers. The real money cost is about $0.20 per report.
1laVtI3.png

With a subscription you can run out of labor in 20 minutes if you spend that time crafting. After which you cannot even go PvE, or not if you want to open the loot at least.

I have no desire to buy potions too (did I mention how easy it is to run out of labor even if you are paying the monthly sub?)

For anyone not familiar with how alpha works, Alpha players don't actually pay subs because people paid a $150 flat fee to get into alpha instead. But alpha accounts all have "patron" status, which is what you pay a monthly sub for when the game goes live.
 

SuicideBunny

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heh, sounds like translated standard f2p browser time units bullshit into mmo form.
 

markec

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Well those comments are full of shit so I assume Night Goat made them all.

A teleporting botter I found in hellswamp. I would report these bots, but it would cost me several days of labor to get them all.

Since you get around 2000 lp at day and it was 25 lp for report this would look as the game was swimming in bots that noone here noticed. Or is he talking about russian version version of the game that was infamous for poor management that allowed game to be overrun and die.


I just started testing this one and I've been in it for less than 10 minutes. First two mobs drop one of these coin purses you need labor points to open. Regardless of how many labor points we'll eventually end up having at release, I find the absence of normal, usual loot system in favour of this locked coin purses absolutely dealbreaking. It is just not familiar, not fun, and smelling of cashgrab.

There is normal loot and anyone who played more then 5 minutes would realize that. The coin purses cost 2 lp to open and give nice amount of easy money, so if you want nice amount of easy money you need to spend lp for it.

Also just to mention, you can actually steal stuff from npc houses and sell but you can be seen and reported by players.


Worked myself up to level 7. Stayed logged in overnight to accumulate labor points. I can guarantee that when they put the 45 minute idle kick in there will be a huge number of free accounts with random movement scripts showing up. Hell, I don't know shit about scripting and I could write one in less than an hour.

You get lp when offline too and there is also a max cap of lp you can accumulate.


I like this game and yet I am so baffled by the labor system and the completely unnecessary shackles it puts on your character. Even worse is the die hard Aage fans spouting out how its so important to the economy. Fucking clueless sheep. Why are they ruining a good game with this? Still, the graphics are amazing and it makes me laugh how smooth it is compared to the cartoony neon green Wildstar graphics that stutter and put.

I agree that lp can be annoying but I also see advantages of this system. It forces you to actually think what you will do in terms of crafting and harvesting, and not just spend all day gathering and crafting huge amount of stuff.



They even make you spend labor points to report bots and hackers. The real money cost is about $0.20 per report.

This was done in alpha since some people were abusing the report skill. It is general idea to report bots via support ticket which is free.




With a subsription you can run out of labor in 20 minutes if you spend that time crafting. After which you cannot even go PvE, or not if you want to open the loot at least.


You can run out of lp in 20 minutes only if you craft shit load of stuff (meaning you have huge amount of resources) at random. And as I said before you have 0 problems going into PvE since you get normal loot.

Honestly this comments looks like it was made by people who havent even played the game more then a hour.
 

Zewp

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I played the Russian version for a while and it didn't seem too bad. The intrusive UI also bothered me greatly, but otherwise it seemed alright. The combat is standard MMO fare, but it seemed like the metagame was where it was at.
 

Blaine

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Grab the Codex by the pussy
A finite and capped "action points" allotment expended when you open loot bags or craft, subscribing merely increases allotment/accumulation of points, and no doubt the cash shop will be there at release with -20% LP expenditure scrolls for $2.99, +50% LP accumulation potions for $4.99, magic treasure chests for $9.99 granting an instant +1,000 LP....

Toppest of keks. Well, that saves me the trouble of trying out the CBE and wasting 30 GB of space on my storage drive. If there's one thing I absolutely won't abide, it's daily "action point"-type limitations, or anything that limits how long I can play (or hamstrings accomplishing useful tasks during play). It's bad enough this is a Korean F2P game, and the sandbox moniker is the only reason I ever even remotely considered checking it out, but this sounds like your standard financially-manipulative shitfest.
 

SuicideBunny

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trion just now fucked up defiance by making lockbox keys cost 10 times what they used to before without changing their rewards from stuff to make people buy more of the rl money currency. wouldn't be surprised if they fuck this up in a similar way soonish.
 

Suicidal

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Played in the Russian beta. It's pretty good but only if your end goal is "murder other players", because otherwise there is nothing to do. Unless you like Farmville, in which case there is a lot to do.

Killing people and provoking butthurt was fun until you kill too many and your jail times start racking up.
 

Terpsichore

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It isn't really sandbox if you take farmville out of the equation. The world is fairly large but you can teleport to every minor hub once you've visited it. You can activate all the hubs in the northern "neutral continent" for levels 50+ on your freshly made character since monster aggro radius is ridiculously low. That leaves the water but there really isn't much to do other than stealing some autist's potatoes planted on a god forsaken island.
 
Self-Ejected

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trion just now fucked up defiance by making lockbox keys cost 10 times what they used to before without changing their rewards from stuff to make people buy more of the rl money currency. wouldn't be surprised if they fuck this up in a similar way soonish.

The Archeum Founders Pack is currently in 6th place on Steam at a $135 price point. I'm sure they won't feel too bad about "fucking up" a game that's already made a profit from pre-orders alone.
 

Dr Tomo

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trion just now fucked up defiance by making lockbox keys cost 10 times what they used to before without changing their rewards from stuff to make people buy more of the rl money currency. wouldn't be surprised if they fuck this up in a similar way soonish.

Well it shouldn't be a surprise when Trion put a gate on Rift where you had to purchase plex to access the market. I love the excuse which many players actually drink the kool aid when they say it is "to deter farmers and gold sellers". This might be different as I would assume that they have to get S. Korean studios permission to Jewify the game.

It isn't really sandbox if you take farmville out of the equation. The world is fairly large but you can teleport to every minor hub once you've visited it. You can activate all the hubs in the northern "neutral continent" for levels 50+ on your freshly made character since monster aggro radius is ridiculously low. That leaves the water but there really isn't much to do other than stealing some autist's potatoes planted on a god forsaken island.

I heard that farming and doing any type of building requires a subscription and so I would assume that makes the game even more boring. Well I guess that leaves Black Desert if they decide to port it to the west.
 

Hobo Elf

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I heard that the game bombed hard in Korea and Russia. Those guys will play any shit MMO, but even this game is too much for their standards.
 

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