This is the feedback of someone who never played RO and didn’t watch any of the Korean beta test footage or participate in it, so my opinion remains untainted by nostalgia or “BUT THEY HAD _____!”
Lets start out with the big one everyone talks about - The exp rate. At the current rate, leveling up is very grindy even at low levels. I can’t imagine how long it would take to level at these rates once you got into the level 400+ range. I feel that the monsters don’t have enough of an exp difference, if I can 1-shot a monster for 90 exp or spend 10 minutes in combat for 100 exp, its pretty obvious which one I’m going to pick. However, I know that rates were lowered for this test, so rather than being mad I’m just going to wait and see what happens with them in future versions.
As another part of the monsters not having enough exp difference debate, this causes some problems. Because everyone chooses to 1-shot the 90 exp monsters that means huge numbers of players all leveling in the same area because there’s nowhere else to go. This makes leveling up even harder, because you have to constantly fight other players for even a single kill.
I feel like character customization needs to be a thing. Nowadays with all the MMOs out there you just can’t have one without character customization. At the very least we need to have skin tones, more hair options, and the option to change hair color(to at least the basic colors black, brown, blonde, etc.) instead of it being a reward for achievements that take weeks to accomplish. On the more advanced side, being able to customize our outfits in some way would be great to give a little more of a feeling of not being a clone, but this isn’t really a NECESSARY thing, just a nice added bonus if you do it.
I love the combat system, I like being able to run around and maneuver over the battlefield using strategic tactics to fight rather than just standing in one spot and smashing a button(we do that enough while grinding) however it does still need some fine tuning as far as cooldowns/sp cost/damage/etc. goes. The bosses may be a little on the easy side, but given the fact that we were generally 10+ levels lower than the bosses, if they weren’t kind of easy we wouldn’t be able to kill them at all. Its also good that solo players can kill them because not everyone likes forming huge parties. Solo leveling on the other hand, is very annoying. Especially for a wizard. Because of the wizard’s terrible attack damage if they want to play solo they must either fight monsters far weaker than them to level up at a snail’s pace, or if they want to level at the same speed as everyone else they must constantly use their spells which drains SP in minutes, leaving the wizard helpless and forced to go rest for 10 minutes while their SP regens or spend tens of thousands of silver on SP potions. Also I think it would be nice if there was a way to re-fight bosses you have already killed without needing to party with someone who hasn’t fought it yet. Maybe some sort of colliseum or something?
I wish the classes were a little more balanced. So much of the conversation I’ve heard this week has been about how “X is the only good wizard/Swordsman/Cleric/Ranger build and if you don’t do this you’re going to suck and be worthless.” I know that some of it is opinion, but other parts were fact - there are classes that just ridiculously outclass any of the other options to the point that there is no reason to ever choose the other options.
I love the music and the art style and look of the game, some of these songs I could listen to all day (But I am being driven insane by THAT FUCKING CHEEPING SOUND IN THE BACKGROUND IN CERTAIN AREAS).
Quests - I’ll be honest, quests are a huge part of why I play MMOs. I like the story and all the different characters and the lore and all that. Of course, the rewards for doing them are also nice. This is an area I feel the game is lacking in. At the moment I have seen very few quests, and most of them were just generic fetch quests repeated over and over with different items. At several points in the game so far it has felt like there was a severe lack of quests, like there could have been far more but instead there were none. As far as I noticed there were only 3 repeatable quests in the entire game until you’re at least level 40+ and those 3 can only be repeated a couple times (I think one could be repeated 10 times the other two only 5 times). The actual story quests were interesting(despite some mistranslations) but it seemed like they went up in difficulty faster than I could go up in level. Each new quest I would have to spend hours grinding before I could continue. This is good in a way because it stops people from blowing through the quests too quickly, but when the exp rates are this low it can be detrimental as well because some people want to continue the quest without needing to take a 4 hour grind session for every 5 minutes of questing. Also, it would be nice if there was an option to turn quest markers/areas off on the map for people that like to explore rather than being told exactly where to go.
I do like the idea of having multiple beginner towns/areas for the different classes, but I realize that at this point in development doing something like that would be time consuming. If they were to be made they would probably have to be separate zones that don’t appear on the map because otherwise much of the basic game would need to be re-done to make room for them. As far as the map layouts go I don’t really have a huge problem with them, though if you did want to make some of the maps more open and roomy rather than a series of pathways I certainly wouldn’t complain. I do like the hidden areas however, they add to the fun of exploration and I would like to see more of them.
The way the server is set up annoys me, I would prefer if there were just separate channels for the entire world rather than every individual zone having its own separate channels, but this is a minor complaint and not a big deal. The option to change the hotkeys around to suit your style is a request I have heard a lot from people. I haven’t experimented with that any, but if that isn’t an option it definitely should be.
That’s everything I can think of off the top of my head, but if I think of anything else I’ll just edit this later.