Sheytan
Posts: 863
Joined: 11/28/2006 Status: offline
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Dosnt sound like fun based on the negative player feedback... This game is the perfect example of tons of potential with a horribly flawed execution. What you expect Incredible mix & match combat system involving combining various kinds of spellsets to create your own dynamic playstyle A wonderous epic adventure, accomplishing quests, traversing the world by land, sea and even air Carve out your own little piece of the world and place your house in public for all to see Crafting/Harvesting system that also takes place in the open world Wow! What a great list of features! I was sold on this game right away, even made the decision to go in on Archeum. Let's see how that turned out: What you get You know what I was hyped about? Making a guy who absolutely destroyed everything while nicely playing a banjo/flute to aid in my path of destruction. What ArcheAge delivered was one or two good combinations that could basically one-shot any other player. I desperately held on to the thought that this wasn't the case for the longest time out of everyone in my group and simply found myself worthless because I didn't spec into a specific set of spells. Yep, you can go from point A to point B pretty plainly. Walking is well implemented. Oh, sorry, you were interested in flying and boating? So flying is alright. Unless you get a top-tier glider, you are stuck with basically just a glider, meaning you need to be generally above where you want to end up and do typical glider controls to get where you want to go. Now sea travel. Sea travel involves getting utterly destroyed by pirates and hilariously powerful sea creatures and not much else unless you voyage out at max level. HAH. So you want a house? Tough. This game is plagued by bots and hackers. As soon as any plot of land becomes available for a house/farming plot to be placed on it, a bot or hacker owns it. Literally instantly. One of my friends bought an auto-clicker mouse to try to get our group a house after a week of playing and not even that stopped the nearby hackers who had already claimed 8 houses that day. Now you're thinking "Oh, that's a cosmetic thing though. A shame, but purely cosmetic." Keep reading. Crafting/Harvesting is an absolutely core part of this game. The entire economy is based on it, the way you can get any of the gear or things you want require intense amounts of harvesting, crafting and bartering. Harvesting works by planting a crop/placing an animal, letting it grow for a few hours, then returning to collect it. If you plant/place in land you own, it is protected. If it's out in the open world however, your crops and animals are available for harvest to any player who happens upon them and returns when they're ready to harvest. Oh, did I mention you can't place houses/farming plots without being a Founder (which comes with a recurring fee)? Well you do. On top of all of this, your crafting/building/harvesting/getting money from monsters you kill are all locked by two wonderful mechanics: Labor Points and Gilda Stars Labor Points are generated automatically during play time at an unbearably slow rate. They are then consumed by planting, harvesting, building, opening coin pouches dropped by monsters and other various things. This mechanic is a leftover of the game originally being from Korea, where there are laws limiting the amount of time people can play MMOs. Gilda Stars are the true bane of this game. You use stars to purchase things like blueprints for boats, gliders, houses, vehicles and other various interesting items. These items range from costing around 30 Gilda Stars to several hundred if not thousands of Gilda Stars. So you're thinking, "What's wrong with this? It's a currency system." Well, naive reader, the problem is in how you gain them. Gilda Stars are gained by completing story quests. At a rate of 1-5 per quest (I'm being generous since I didn't complete the story and I assume they go to higher than the 2 I was getting per mission at level 20) and another even more ridiculous method. The only reason your number of Gilda Stars aren't capped based on how many missions there are in the game is because you can get them also by doing trade runs. Trade runs are an incredibly interesting concept. The idea is you gather a bunch of resources and transport them from point A to point B and get a reward for it. Here's what it involves: Step 1: Gather or purchase (from the auction house) a few hundred wood, fish or some other material. Step 2: Locate a special kind of crafting station and assemble your trade pack. Step 3: Trek across the world (by land, sea or a combination of both) to one of the npcs who will trade you Gilda Stars for your trade pack. Please note: You travel at an IMMENSELY reduced speed, making a decent mount required. Oh, and if you log out with the pack on, it will nicely wait a short period of time before dropping off of your character and onto the ground for anyone to steal, meaning you must spend at least a half hour (depending on how far/profitable you want your voyage to be) just sitting at your computer to steer your character onto the path. tl;dr Promised combat variations are basically worthless and unbalanced, anything interesting about the travel is worthless until you're max level, resource gathering is a joke for many reasons, housing is a joke for the same reasons and more. Pass on this and save yourself the time and money. quote:
ORIGINAL: Feurer Krieg Sorry for the delay in updates. We haven't run many turns as both John and I have been playing ArcheAge, a pretty fun MMO. If anyone is interested in it, or is already playing on the Naima server let me know - we can always use more folks in our guild. Especially those as strategy minded as people who frequent this forum. Now that the initial rush is winding down I should have a bit more time to get back to the updates.
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