So, just spent the last couple days taking part in the Archeage closed beta, and if anyones interested here are some of my initial thoughts and impressions of the 20 odd levels Ive had a chance to experience. For simplicity sakes Im going to split it into pros and cons. Any questions feel free to ask. Pros: Graphics are amazing, truly enjoyable even at medium to mostly high settings. The worlds fantastically imagined, everythings detailed nicely, and there is plenty of eye candy, even down to a nice night sky, that had me stop and look at it for a few seconds. Music is tight, ive caught myself humming a few of the tunes you hear in game as i do my housework or other such things,which is always a sign to me that the soundtrack is working its way inside your subconcious. Its an orchestral mix, with a lot of hyms. Perfectly suits the world and the story. The story is one of its strongest points IMO. In most mmos i play i quickly skip the text and run off to do whatever the quest has asked of me, but with this i find myself reading over the text in the mini cutscenes and taking my time. I played a Firran, and found the race story to be well fleshed out, with a carefully though out theme, that carried across the quests i participated in. If you like your mmos to have something of a story, AA has you covered. Combat feels tight, the animations are nice and the sound effects are fantastic. Theres a combo system, that takes the stock standard rotation that most players work out on their own, and makes them rethink it, as using certain abilities after others will result in a combo effect, which could be more damage, a small stun, or a knockdown. So far ive found that for my particular class and skill choices (more on that in a minute) that i could combo up to 3 abilities in a row, which makes the game feel more than just a button smasher/cooldown watcher that the combat system is based on. I enjoyed it, others may not, but definately something a little different for a tab targetter. The class system is a very interesting system, in that you have the choice of all classes for all races, and mix 3 of those classes into a playstyle that you want, picking mixing and matching abilities based on what you want, how you want to play etc etc. Im fairly sure that spending some of the in game currency will enable you to drop a class (or 2, or even 3) and select another, but the catch is all classes level independantly. So you might have maxed the three classes you chose to level with, but then switching the defense class for archery, find that its only level 10, and you only have access to the first skill in that class, until you use it in combat or farming etc etc. The open world is fantastic! Its one huge seamless world, no zone loading, no loading as you leave a town, nothing. Its one huge seamless world, with a loading screen free ocean for you to explore on your very own ship (I didnt get that far in haha). Its actually a really nice thing. They give you a mount at level 10, and boy you need it, as even from one town to the next takes a couple minutes of running. Thankfully the worlds rather pretty, and they do have the odd sidequest thrown in along the way to break up the monotony. Questing is a little bit of a mixed bag. Its about 99.999999% your usual MMO affair. You know Kill 10 spiders, report back or Collect 5 honey comb etc etc. As boring as the sidequests are, i do find them relatively quick, in that even at level 20, ive only ever been asked to kill 10 things or retrieve 10 items. Also, if you feel that you dont want to finish all 10, you can under and over achieve the quest by handing in early, say at 8/10 kills. You will gain less XP from the quest, but at the same time its an interesting idea. Same with over achieving, you know in mmos when you have to kill 15 hyena or something, and then as youre leaving the area 3 more get in your way and you aggro them and have to kill them? Well with AA you gain a bonus amount of xp for those 3 extra kills, so you never really feel like youve been wasting your time with a particular mob. Sometimes id kill an extra beastie on the way past just to get that little top up of xp, even though strictly speaking i didnt have to. Ive found the levelling to be rather quick, as in 2 not even full days ive managed to get to level 20 fairly easily just doing the quests in each area, and like i said the occassional top up to get that tiny bonus. Although ive found it quick, i hear that after level 20 things do slow down a fair bit, unsure of how that happens as im only at the point most people report that it starts to slow down, but again to me, 2 days of playing roughly 4 hours a day to get to 20 is great! And every mmo has to have a slow down point somewhere. One last thing i will add as a somewhat interesting perhaps positive perhaps negative feature is the fact that AA features full collision models for players, players pets and npcs. Since AA is a PvP focused game im interested to see how this ability to phsycially block someone, or push someone will work at those later levels when fighting during your trade runs or defending your guilds castle. It was enjoyable while levelling sometimes, but also a little frustrating as a player running up to talk to a quest giver you were already talking to, could ocassionally bump you far enough away to drag you from the mini cutscene. Wont be a problem after the initial week or sos mad rush. Now, onto what i would consider the major draw backs. Translation issues are still throughout the game, even down the some (a few really) quests are still in Korean, and several of the npc chatter type voice clips are still in Korean. Normally i wouldnt mind this so much, but Trion games (the western publishers for the game) have had the game in localisation for at least 8 months, although im fairly certain theyve had it being translated and such for nearly 12 months. Trion is a fairly huge game developer and i honestly feel that this simply isnt good enough. Its not like they have a single translator working on it in his free time from work in a basement somewhere, they have an entire team working towards traslating it, and the fact that after several months they still havent finished it actually annoys me. I understand that Korean to English isnt the easiest of conversions (Completely different sentence structures etc etc) but still i feel that this should already be done and dusted. Technical issues are still there too, despite the game having been out for more than a year in Korea. This sits squarely on XL Games shoulders, and has nothing to do with Trion (hopefully they can fix what XL seems unable to). There seems to be many many reports of problems, from textures failing to load at all, to weird artifacting, purely black terrain, framerate stutters in certain areas for no reason, crashes, screen tearing, etc etc. I had a few problems myself if im honest. I run at between 55 and 60 (Note, v sync) fps pretty much the entire time im playing, apart from one small area where there was a cloud effect which ate my fps and dropped me down to 20. Ive also had blurry textures on the edges of roads or patches of dirt, and had to clear my shader cache to fix these. I also found that running in dx9 with multi threading enabled gave me the greatest performance, even though my card is capable of running DX11 games, (I have a gtx 650 ti 2gb, some people on INTEL inbuilt graphics cards were running at max settings, where i couldnt with my dedicated gfx card) The part that gets me with these issues is that it doesnt appear to follow any rhyme nor reason, 2 nearly identical system will handle the game completely differently, resulting in one poor guy spending a few hours troubleshooting problems, logging into and out of the game (some settings changes require a client restart, ie quitting the game completely and loading it back up to take effect) where as the other guy cranks the settings to max and happily plays without so much as a hiccup. Powerful parts dont seem to be a solution either, as some people with far more impressive rigs than my own have had texture blacking issues, where as i only experienced them for around a minute upon first logging into the game. Now, lets talk about labor points and this particular system. Its an interesting concept, that players will earn Labor points while online that they will then spend to farm/gather/craft items and trade packs to hand in to earn a secondary in game currency to spend on ships, land, housing, etc etc. Now, the system isnt terrible in and of itself, but being a free to play player is going to be seriously limiting. You gain 5 points per 5 minutes online. I had planned to save mine up, to spend on farming and trade runs when i reach end level (not that i will on this character as there will be a character wipe before open beta) and all was okay, until i started to get quest rewards that required you to spend 5 labor points to Identify them, which enables you to wear the item. Still not a huge deal, until they start giving you quests to teach you the crafting system, which you then have to spend your labor points on to create items (for the xp) which arent even as good as the quest rewards you just recieved! And then, to top it all off, mobs will drop these coinpurses, which contain a little of the in game currency, and guess what, it requires labor points to open them too. Not so bad at 1 labor pt per, but at level 20, i have 100 to open, and i only have 150 labor points left. So, at end level i can see a fair amount of just finding things to do while staying online to enable your LP to accumulate to the point where you can get that final trade pack together to go and finish your house, or whatever. IMO Patron status is a must! For a certain amount of real world money (I believe they have set it at $15 US a month, but betas, changes yada yada) you will get 15 LP for every 5 minutes youre online, and the best part ofcourse is the 5 LP you get per 5 minutes while logged off. So if you really want to play this game, and not have those Oh come on, only 10 more minutes until i can finish my crafting for the day youre going to require patron status. The next issue i have is one that i think may solve itself, but still, its worth mentioning. The community. It was such a mixed bag i dont know where to start. On one hand i found some extremely friendly and helpful people in town, from answering my sill newb questions in chat, to a random who just happened to be levelling roughly the same time as myself in the same area, and although they didnt say a single word to me, we formed a little group and just... levelled together for a few hours, sometimes entertaining each other with strange dances, (You have to see the dance mechanic to understand it). Also on the nice side of things i was waiting for a particular group of mobs to spawn, (its a strange little quest mechanic i have only run into once in game so far, but particular monsters will only spawn at particular in game times) and while we were waiting we ended up forming a huge 50 man raid to kill, thats right 20 normal every day mobs. Then there are the Trolls, trolls in chat about WoW, about chuck norris, about how GW2 is better, and although i was fairly easily able to ignore them, people took the bait, and arguments went and went and went. Someone would say How come my textures are black? and the trolls would start Your PC is shit or ALT+f4 fixes that or Delete sys32... The usual slime of the internet, and no one falls for that crap anymore, but the trolls were that thick and fast that it was hard for anyone to get a word in sideways, resulting in the truly helpful and friendly members of the community to resort to whispers just to help someone out. Also, why would you take a BETA key off people who are truly up for helping improve the game, give it a try, etc etc, if all you wanna do is sit in the starting area, capslock on, spouting lies is beyond me. So, hopefully as the game develops and the initial rush of HUR HUR new game! LETS PLAYYYYYYY wears off, the generally decent community underneath will be given a chance to shine. Until then, just ignore the larger chat channels until you actually need them. Now it comes down to my final complaint and that would be some of the cash shop items. Im not one of those its pay 2 win crowds, as i do understand that it takes money to keep a game going, to create and maintain it, butttt that being said there a few items in the cash shop that sorta... made me wince. Faster mounts and Gliders are available to purchase, and at first this seems like a clear upgrade, but the thing is, all of them are also available for the in game currency, or can be crafted/raised etc by someone in game willing to put the time IE LPS into them. It feels a little unfair to see a level 10 running around with the best mount and glider available in game, but at the same time, looking at Trions other free to play games, i dont see AA going down the Heres a better sword that you can only buy. But the number of LPS that could be required to completely craft that same sword, or the trade packs to sell for the delphic star (secondary in game currency, beyond the normal gold silver bronze) may mean that that particular item would be a full weeks worth of work, and that would be for a patron. Trion will just have to walk the fine fine blade of the cash shop, and hopefully will come out okay. So, for my final verdict, i would give Archeage a 9/10, with its two major downfalls being the technical issues you have, and the LP system, that although isnt terrible, it does have me seeing many hours dancing in orgrimarr type moments as you wait out the remaining lps to finish whatever it is youre planing to work on. This would be when a guild would be beneficial, above any other time, as youd be able to help them with their trade runs, all the while earning the LPS to create your own trade packs to take and trade in for cash. Hopefully the rest of the closed beta weekends, and then finally the open beta will fix the technical issues so many are having, but only time will tell. Andy Pittman Zack Purnell
Posted on: Sun, 20 Jul 2014 08:09:34 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015