Does anyone else feel that as this game is doomed to a short and mediocre life? I’ve played a good number of MMOs over the last two decades and I just don’t think this game has it is now has what it takes to be a long-lived MMO. I’m currently a level 100 Swordsman>Highlander3 and the game still hasn’t opened up into anything more than endless grinding to gain levels.
Before I go further i’ll say what I do like about this game. I adore the visual style and the soundtrack is 10/10, though one could argue that it is more dramatic and over the top than it really needs to be for many areas. Combat mechanics are solid though I feel not enough is being done with boss design as they’ve all been exactly the same fight. The way classes are set up has been interesting so far.
Everything else though is the same poop we’ve seen since WoW destroyed this genre. Every zone and quest exists to level the player and it does so in an extremely linear fashion. The level requirement to pick up a quest is absurd. If the player can complete higher level quests why not let him?
Each quest is one of the following:
-Collect X bear asses
-Interact with X bear asses
-Use the above bear asses to lure and fight the Giant Raving Bear Ass
All of this with map indicators showing you exactly where to go or where to find the bear asses. The one time I found a wild quest hiding in a well which required me to look in a general area for something was an immense relief and for a period of ten minutes I was actually engaged with and applying my brain to a quest rather than mindlessly running to grey circles on the map and holocausting everything with a golden checkmark above its head.
Another problem this arrangement highlights is that every zone only contains monsters of the map’s recommended level. Higher level players have no reason to return to these areas to hunt these monsters.
This approach to things is going to leave the beginner zones progressively emptier as the game matures. New players will not interact with older players, and vice versa.
On the subject of idiot-proof quest handholding, the minimap is an absolute blight on video games. It needs to go away and be replaced by a static map that works off of landmarks. A minimap with real-time GPS accuracy just prevent the player from ever actually looking at your beautiful scenery and actually orienting himself in the world. It’s also a missed opportunity for something like a Cartographer class, which could’ve been a class that makes maps of any area. The better the Cartographer has explored the area the more complete the map he will produce. But there is another thing preventing such a possibility addressed in the next paragraph.
The quest warp mechanic seems benign at first but it’s really, really bad. It makes a group of strangers impossible to keep together and more importantly it allowed the map designers to be extremely lazy, to the point where every single zone and dungeon is a chain of islands connected by paths, tunnels, and bridges, often in a trunk-and-branch arrangement. Often they have plopped down completely unneeded walls, visible or otherwise, to adhere to this theme.
This setup of having the quest vendors extremely close to the quest targets highlights another type of problem. At the moment mobs spawn in very predictable locations (Sometimes exact, unchanging locations) and have a short leash, to prevent them from wandering away from the quest they’re relevant to. This makes them very farmable and easily targeted by bots. it also makes the experience of killing them all the more predictable and boring. There is no longer any hunting. We just go to the grocer’s now.
This approach to things has ramifications applicable to things I mentioned earlier. You used to see not only high leveled monsters in beginner zones, but also low leveled monsters in high leveled zones. The monster were a part of the world and made it feel alive to find them wherever it would make sense to find them. They didn’t magically become stronger, pallette-swapped variants either. The presence of low leveled monsters in high leveled zones made those zones viable play areas for new players just as high leveled monsters brought older players back to the beginner zones. All this only served to increase player interactions while immediately making the world space feel much larger and more open, as no one was caged into the few zones relevant or useful to their level.
I’ve played some grindy game before and even without the tripled XP rates of this CBT this game is far from the grindiest when analyzed critically, but it FEELS grindy. I think one reason for this is that every enemy is very easy to defeat, even when you are 10 level beneath. This reduces each encounter to a brainless series of button presses that you know will yield .1% XP. The lack of danger also means you never have to form groups or work with other players. MMOs are at their core games of social interaction and the absence of danger is a serious problem. There’s also very little to do so far aside from grind. So far there are card battles, but if you’re never interacting with other players what are the chances you’re going to get into a card battle without intentionally seeking one out?
Currently there is a limit on how often you can trade items. On gear it reduces potential, and materials can only seem to be traded once. This ‘feature’ is absolute poison. Some say it prevents auction house manipulation, and it might, but what it really does is encourage every player to bot or die. There also shouldn’t be a need to prevent auction house manipulation because of the next paragraph.
At the moment the auction house is busted, which has been a wonderful thing. In its place a flea market has populated the town squares, something I haven’t seen in an MMO in a very long time. With time these informal marketplaces will appear in areas outside of towns, like major dungeon entrances for instances. the player-operated flea market is a much more engaging experience than a global marketplace accessed through a single NPC. With this game’s approach to support and utility classes I feel they missed a great opportunity for a very unique class: Auctioneer/Broker. A class that could run a personal auction house wherever it wanted or had built-in mechanics to take items from players, sell it, and skim a portion of the profit.
Currently every class can craft anything so long as they have the recipe and materials. I don’t think this is an ideal setup. There could’ve been dedicated crafting classes which would again, promote player interaction. It could work in the old fashioned way of player’s putting trust in the crafter not to run off with the materials or you could make them operate like Squires do now. Materials in. Fee. Item out.
I went into this game really wanting to love it, and I do think i’ll still play it but as it is I don’t think it’s going to become a legend of MMOs like Ragnorak, Everquest, Mabinogi, Dark Age of Camelot, or Lineage were. It really needs to fill out all those dead-ends in the maps with interesting zones to explore and a lot less hand holding in the quests. It would be better to have no quests at all than what they have in this game.