Hi. I so I came to this game to give it a fair shot. I’m a bit of an MMO junkie having played through generations of MMOs from the days of Ragnarok Online up to the present day. To give you something of an idea of my MMO gaming experience I’ve played to end-game and beyond everything from Ragnarok Online, Tantra, RF Online, Lineage 2, World of Warcraft, Cabal Online, SWTOR, Aura Kingdom, Archeage, TERA, Guild Wars 2, and now lastly, Tree of Savior.
Based upon that, I feel I’ve built up enough experience to make an objective and fair assessment of my experience playing Tree Of Savior. I initially came upon this game looking for something to fill the time between earlier this month and the release of Bless Online and seeing as it was something I hadn’t tried and marking the many similarities between this game and Ragnarok Online I decided to give it a try.
Firstly, questing and the leveling process.
This game does nothing innovative with its questing system nor with its leveling. The quests are mostly just generic fetch or kill quests. Even the main story quests are simply variations upon these basic quest types making leveling to 360 a needlessly tedious process. Forgive me for drawing a comparison here as I feel like I may trigger some fanboys but Guild Wars 2 does an excellent job addressing this issue in terms of quest design. Guild Wars 2 has things called heroic heart quests which are essentially optional quests you can do alongside the main quests for additional exp and some karma (in-game currency for various goods). The great thing about these heart quests is most if not all of them can be done in various ways. Say you’re tasked with collecting apples. You can either a) kill monsters who may have the apples, b) shake trees to get the apples out, c) buy the apples from somewhere to give to the quest npc. You have options and that kind of diversity makes questing feel like less of a chore and more of an active experience. You feel in charge of how you’re tasked with progressing. Even the main story quest gives you options and branching paths depending upon the choices you make. This isn’t a concept isolated to Guild Wars 2 either. SWTOR puts this idea into play very well evolving the story into something personal and relatable, giving you a sense of connection to your character since his story has evolved according to the choices you’ve made. Tree of Savior already suffers from a lack of voice acting, at many times I found the story-line to be nonsensical or at the very least badly translated, and 100% of the time I found myself referring to my avatar as the “Revelator, Performer of Menial Tasks” as every goddamn NPC in the world seems to believe you to be personally responsible for gathering their dinner or chopping down goddamn trees less than 5 meters away from where they’re standing. It’s hogwash and absolute rubbish. Even the “hidden” class quests are artificially difficult. What I mean by this is many times you find yourself in a game where progression is locked behind difficult content. This is fine. Having to do a difficult quest or hunt for rare materials for a job progression quest or to progress the story is totally understandable in my opinion. But when you lock progression behind “artificial” difficulty by simply making the quest in question tedious beyond belief it’s simply bad quest design. The appraiser quest has you sitting for hours in the same spot waiting for a flower to spawn which you spend another hour watering if you’re solo. This isn’t rewarding gameplay at all. Where are the actual quest mechanics? It simply looks like an obnoxious nudge from the developer to resort to buying gacha boxes to not have to deal with the tedium of performing the quest itself. Don’t even get me started on the Bulletmarker quest. Other games have acknowledged this sort of tedium when they realize they haven’t made engaging quests and at least put in auto-pathing to save your sanity from how mindless their questing is. I don’t condone this idea at all since it makes MMOs look like mobile games but at least the feature is there when they know they’ve made terrible quests.
Exploration and immersion.
You outlevel zones much too quickly in some cases for you to truly immerse yourself in exploration, though I appreciate the creativity in some areas (elevators and that amusing mine cart sequence where you get thrown across the map). Apart from that however there aren’t very many ways for you to interact with your environment apart from a few “gimmicks”. There are no platforming segments, no secret areas and while I must concur that this might not have been a goal in the minds of the level design team, it would have been a nice touch nonetheless. The fact that the adventure journal rewards you for exploration is a point in the game’s favor.
As mentioned earlier though, the badly translated lines and the lackluster story-line ruined any sort of immersion for me. The amount of busywork also destroyed any sense of connection I had with my character as I felt like my revelator was simply a glorified yes-man.
Bosses, Dungeons, and Raids
Dungeons in this game are simply exercises in tedium yet again. Admittedly, they get far easier thanks to power-creep from gear (which I have strong words about later) but once again they’re basic and sub-par. They’re also largely wasted opportunities for community building. Many games implement level-scaling into their dungeons and dynamic rewards which are adjusted to compensate for higher-level characters wishing to participate in lower-level dungeons with their friends. People do not run the lower-level dungeons simply because it’s unrewarding for them to do so. This leaves the community with characters in the lower levels not having anybody to run dungeons with and creates scenarios where people with higher level alts cannot participate in content with their friends who may have only just started the game. This game’s dungeon system would feel so much more alive with dynamic level adjustment and scaling rewards. Just saying.
Now as for the bosses and the dungeons themselves… Oh my god where to begin. There are no real mechanics. And any that DO exist are simply hammered into irrelevancy due to the power-creep from gear. Where are the puzzles? Where are the intricate mechanics you find so prevalent in so many of today’s MMOs boss encounters? You could argue that things like “kill that mob to damage the egg” count as mechanics but that’s barely different from the atypical questing you already did during the leveling process to begin with… I don’t know if it was simply impossible to implement these things based upon the design of the game itself but the developers could honestly have tried harder in my opinion. I haven’t encountered anything in this game that couldn’t be killed with enough of a dose of “hit it in the face til it dies”. The raid in this game (Earth Tower) has no business calling itself a real raid. It’s simply more artificial difficulty locked behind even more gear power-creep. To illustrate my point let’s draw another parallel. Now mind you this is a boss with one of the “simpler” mechanics in Guild Wars 2. There’s a raid boss in Guild Wars 2 called the Vale Guardian. In his normal state the entire party can damage and hit him. Every 33% percent health he loses he “phases” and splits into three separate forms. At this point the party separates into two or three teams depending on how you deal with the split. His blue form can only be damaged when a buff that makes it immune to damage is stripped. His green form can only be damaged by physical attacks. His red form only takes condition or “dot” damage. You split the party up depending on who can do what. When all three splits die he reforms back into his original form. You have a set amount of time to damage him in his original form and to do the split phases until the enrages and will typically wipe the raid. REAL mechanics. Where are they in ToS???
Gear Progression and Enchancement
First of all, the gear power creep in this game is too much. Many games have adopted the idea of horizontal progression in their games to combat this issue. Expansions simply add more stuff for your character to do and possibly a few new skills but not another gear treadmill. They instead decide to focus on replayability and rewarding content for you to engage in instead of having to resort to having you spend the majority of your time grinding for better gear. This game is relying on making you grind for fluff and filler content instead of creating actual content! And don’t even get me started on the arbitrary nature of the anvil. This is one of the most horrible enchancement systems I’ve seen in a modern MMO in a very long time. I thought the enchancement system in TERA was bad giving you a 0.8% chance to +15 an item but at least there it doesn’t break. You have infinite chances to finally get your gear to it’s maximum enchancement level regardless of how long it takes to get there. It’s possibly even more grindy sure, but at least at the end of the day you sit with the knowledge that you will eventually succeed at your goal and that your effort for creating, upgrading, and farming materials for said piece of gear ultimately gets rewarded after enough time and effort. I’ve had pieces in this game that stubbornly refuse to even get to +11, weapons that refuse to get to +16 after hitting +15 multiple times, and pieces that I don’t really have a use for getting to +18 with normal anvils. It’s far too much RNG with no proper failsafes barring the P2W diamond anvil. It’s soooooo bad. And the fact that diamond anvils even exist leading to a pay to win mechanic has no business being in a modern day mmo. BDO had a mass population exodus after releasing P2W components in the form of “convenience” items. Archeage fared much the same for the same reasons. Revelation Online died because of their P2W cash shop. These games bear evidence to the idea that this concept simply isn’t ok anymore in this era of gaming. Just stop.
Replayability and class diversity
Ok, so the build diversity in this game is something I can appreciate. But I do have to point out when something does it better because that’s the point of this post isn’t it? Instead of having to bog down people’s lodges with multiple alts just for the same profession why not allow them the freedom of swapping builds at their leisure? Why does it need to be an event-locked or cash shop feature to experiment with builds? The leveling process is already terrible, why subject people to it again? Is it to sell more character slots or reset scrolls? We’re going to draw another parallel here because objective comparison creates a healthy viewpoint to address this issue. Final Fantasy IV requires no alts. You can be every profession on the same character. You can swap builds and professions on the fly leading to dynamic gameplay and opening up multiple party roles for every character. And it ADDS to the experience. It does not DETRACT from it. It keeps the game fresh and alive. Many other games have similar features though not as intensive. Guild Wars 2 allows you to swap builds on the fly within your own profession to better suit a given role. You can even swap stats on gear. SWTOR lets you swap builds in every major hub letting you multi-role within your class. Why on earth can’t we swap builds here without having to pay or wait for an event?
The Social Element
Ok, I forgot to add this in but this is actually quite important. (this is an edit) WHY IS GLOBAL CHAT HIDDEN BEHIND A CASH SHOP ITEM? This kills player interaction! There isn’t even map chat. I read somewhere that it was possibly to stop gold sellers from spamming chat or yada yada yada but…they do anyway. They buy megaphones with free TP. You could have solved this dilemma in so many other ways that would have not hampered player interaction. a) ban the bots (what you actually should be doing to begin with) b) ban the chat spammers c) give people expanded block-lists so they can block gold sellers themselves (laziest solution but hey it’s there) So why this one? Restricting chat to a premium service does nothing good for the community.
Server State, Optimization, and Connectivity
Klaipeda Channel crashes more often than what should be considered tolerable. You get unexplainable disconnection issues and lag in barely populated maps. And oh my god frame-rate during world bosses is horrid. Is this game rendered in Unreal Engine 4 with high-res textures and detailed character models? Oh wait no that’s TERA. Then why does it run so badly?
Conclusion
If you’re just starting this game or haven’t been sucked into it’s mindless grind and P2W system, I implore you, save yourself. This game adds nothing to the modern day mmo market worthy of recognition and you do yourself a disservice playing it when you could find a far more satisfying experience in so many other games on the market. Its systems are antiquated and while I initially imagined that was part of its charm, when the nostalgia goggles wear off you simply find yourself with an inferior product which constantly nudges you towards its cash shop to deliver not even half the experience you’d have playing a proper premium game. Games should not feel like an unrewarding grindy chore nor should they ever be this devoid of enjoyable content. Turn away and don’t look back, if you’re looking for a great new MMO this isn’t it.
