Overview:
DISCLAIMER: It will be very obvious if you have not read the article. What is written here is not that of an "Insert Game name here" Fanboi, these are the thoughts of someone who has played ArcheAge and disliked the experience. And maybe with an honest review, someone will do something about it or it will allow for others to not be blinded by the hype.
I, as many others around the internet, have become very fixated on a Korean MMO title called ArcheAge. It really is quite impressive on paper, using Cry Engine 3 for beautifully rendered graphics, sandbox features mixed with instanced dungeons, grand siege battles, open world PvP, open sea combat and exploration, an in-depth crafting system, open ended character development allowing for over 120 different specs, housing, and customization.
I immediately started to reminisce of my Ultima Online days, back when I had a fleet of ships and could go hunting for treasure, then bring my bounty to my home and either hoard it in chests or use the heads of those I’d killed along the way to decorate my dirty stone keep walls. Then if after that adventure archery no longer seemed like an efficient method of killing, I could drop it for magic. It was simple, straight forward, but held a sense of complexity that was a theorycrafter’s wet dream. (I cannot stress how important it is for a game these days to have tangible ways to assess if your spec is doing well for your needs. The need for feedback on your choices and why one thing is better or worse than your previous choice is important. This is one thing that GW2 still needs to work on in order to give more purpose to combat. It's also necessary if you want your players to feel like their spec choices have meaning. You never really achieve a sense of having mastered combat in GW2. I think anyone in gaming (or psychology) will attest to how motivating the opportunity for mastery or expertise can be. It may not be tangible, but it's one of the undeniable things players achieve from the hours and hours they pour into these games. Gaming, in essence, provides a sandbox for progress and achievement. But before we get too far off topic if you want to read some thoughts on that you can go here: http://alttabme.com/forum/index.php?threads/gw2-i-feel-alone.2662/#post-27273)
Although I will reference games like GW2 and WoW throughout this piece, I need people to know though that these games are not perfect either and I don’t expect them to be the same at all, nor should we want them to be. I think that is my main issue with ArcheAge. I do not expect it to be any of the games I have played in the Western MMO sphere lately but I do expect them to have some of the aspects that have improved the gameplay experience for the genre as a whole.
Well, I got my hands on the Korean retail and was able to jump into it myself. I only believe videos and reviews about 50% of the time because a game is not only about a feature list but about look and feel.
This is where my bubbling, over-the-top enthusiasm began to drain.
Combat Look and Feel:
With all that in mind, let’s talk about combat. I will open with reference to a very large thread over at mmorpg.com where people are talking about the combat feeling lackluster. This is mixed with people who have played the game and those who have just seen videos.
http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/572/view/forums/thread/373376/page/1 (3)
The strangest part of this however is the extreme reaction this usually causes from the community. People in favor or against the combat all have one thing in common, they cannot get past it. It becomes a hot button topic making all other features, such as those I will explain in this article, a hindsight. I thought it was interesting, but once again I needed to form my own opinions from actually playing it!
I do not claim to know Korean in the slightest, so to some extent my experience has been hindered in not being able to read tooltips and quest text, but I do know and can speak to how something “feels” when I play it. However, the existence of the thread above is proof there may be something that is just off. I held off my own opinions until trying it myself.
When I first logged in, I selected casting as my first discipline.
Combat and movement are big for me, and the movement in this game is pretty choppy and sluggish. It feels like Age of Conan meets a laggy version of Tera. The movement animations alone feel like they belong in a pre-WoW MMO; it feels like they could have been taken out of the 1990’s version of EQ. Regardless, I decided to continue through in hopes that it was just the newbie skills that felt so off. Well, it didn’t get much better.
(Skip to 3:00 minutes in to get a feel for combat)
At one point I got a chance to talk with an English speaking player in general chat, and I asked if combat got any better as you leveled.
(Reminded me of UO in terms of dragging skills all over the black space of the screen back in the day when there was no skill bar:
)
The CC in this game has been quoted many times for being of the “whoever attacks first wins” style. CC is great--when in moderation. However, I’ve watched people be put in a single CC lock for over 30 seconds. That is 30 seconds where you can do absolutely nothing. During combat, that’s HUGE. In this genre of games, anything above 7 seconds of combat time easily qualifies as an eternity. Oh, and there are no counters for the aforementioned CC. Once you’re locked, you’re locked.
So after having had a very mediocre experience with ranged combat and a set of spells that felt like a toned-down version of the “magic” we have all come to enjoy from movies, pop culture references, and other games, I decided it was time to get right up in the face of the enemy and rolled a warrior-type (remember there are no actual classes).
This is where I really started to get upset about the feel of the game. For the sake of ranting, I will list a few of the reasons why:
“Combat— “A Sense of Hitting”
Right now ArcheAge is lacking any sense of hitting. With the examples listed above of how its lacking in other areas of combat, it is hard to see how you can improve without a remake of the system to include any true “sense of hitting”.
This was disappointing, especially when chaining cool abilities together, which leads to more CC. You often ended up attacking through the mob in front of you or turned around where you shouldn’t actually be hitting anything at all. The clipping was absurd.
Combat Conclusion:
With the headway Western MMOs have made in combat in the recent years and even other Korean MMO’s I can’t help but feel they missed the mark on something very important here. Combat is over 50% of what you do in any MMO. Killing monsters for resources to your home, PvP, PvE, etc you just are always attacking something. I understand combat is a very personal thing, be it tab targetting, free form, or a hybrid of both need to feel right no matter which it is. Unless I want to play a glorified version of Farmville with a combat system attached to it, I don’t see how this is worth the time investment as an MMO with housing and an end-game revolving around hours and hours of time spent in-game.
Okay, but how about the world, the environment, the sandbox features!?
Realism vs Stylised:
There are two types of games. Stylised games push the color pallette past reality, allowing the user to get immersed in a vibrant world, not only as a new and exciting place to explore, but as a game. It puts the user in a state of suspended disbelief, which allows for much more abstract and fantastical ideas.
Then there are realistic games, which try to look as much like a real world as possible while pushing your systems graphics and processing power to the max. These games have a very big hurdle to overcome, as the minute you introduce realistic graphics you are subject to the human mind’s knee jerk reaction to the smallest thing triggering that “something is not right here” feeling.
ArcheAge has gone the route of realism. I am all for it, and having a super computer I was excited to push everything to max and just go “wow this is beautiful”. What I was greeted with though was a very dull palette of colors mixed with randomly placed “objects” to portray foliage and terrain. The DoF (depth of field) only took away from the immersion, as it muddied the background even more. As a photographer, I love DoF, but I also know it does not exist in the extremes it is often presented with in games. It adds a certain flavor to a game that I am sure is enjoyed by some, but for me it just makes it harder to see the world around you. This was the first feature I turned off, which did help make the game feel more open, but I was not impressed with the world as a whole enough to care either way. I almost felt like by turning it off, I was then seeing things that should have remained hidden.
Geforce showed off ArcheAge as an example of TXAA being used to the max, but what you end up getting is a game trying to emulate reality, but failing.
A wall may look like it has rocks sticking out of it, but you still clip against it the same as someone with the graphics turned down. You cannot scale the rocks that are sticking out, so it just makes it look pretty, but it is not functionally pretty. Also the demo seen above is not achievable in the game yet for normal players oddly.
The other problem is that sometimes the environment in that video, like my experience with the DoF, looks better with it turned off. There is not a sense of coherence between the environmental improvements. So you get a few bits and pieces that look better but the world around it is not changing in uniformly.
The water is debatable. It has a great motion for up and down waves, where you bob in the water. But the water itself looks like saran wrap. This may sound nit-picky but it has to do with the whole realism vs stylized mindset. Your brain triggers the "Hey something isn't right here" with it.
Cinematics/Cut Scenes:
This was one of the strangest things to me. As you progress cutscenes play out. Think of the “2.5D” Guild Wars 2 style cut scenes you have seen. But then reduce the speed of them by say 4000%. So you are looking at a very slow pan up from the feet of a character to his neck, then slowly fading to another slow pan. It is almost painful to watch these cut scenes. Mind you I don’t speak Korean so the story might be there, but the visuals to go with it are not.
So looks aside, how does the realism effect gameplay?
Then there are the "interactions with NPCS" that zoom in on the characters. Let's just say someone messed up here... the DoF causes all hair to turn into a muddy mess and characters are often looking at you with a lazy eye.
Mounts:
We already talked about combat which missed the mark here, but let’s talk about the non combat related “realism”. Mounts are a big part of this game. Instead of going with a keyboard based turning system like WoW for mounts where you can turn on a dime, turning is like a real horse where you have to drag your mouse in an arch and not strafe. While I love the idea of it, the execution feels like your mount is stuck in molasses. Almost to the point of Age of Conan’s “You might fall off a cliff if you don’t turn early enough before the edge of a cliff”.
There is one saving grace to mounts: you have the ability to put armor on them. This is a really cool customization feature for your mounts that makes them unique to you. However, mounts have no use in combat as of now, so it is lost as just an aesthetic bonus.
Then you get the ability to pilot ships, siege tanks, and even farming machinery. Each has a different feel added to it. It is actually easier to navigate a giant warship than it is your mount.
Once again there is that lack of consistency between different aspects of the game.
Character Creation:
This one was the most disappointing to me personally. I love to really feel like my avatar is unique. You have a game here which has so many different sliders and cool bits and pieces to customize your look you would think it would be a wet dream for those who like to spend lots of time creating their avatar to really be unique. Well what you see is NOT what you get. There are about 8 presets per race. Each of these looks great(let me make it very clear here you will not be able to achieve a Western look for your character if you use these presets as they are very much Korean in style), problem is if you deviate the character customization screen where it shows your character close up is using a different rendering engine than the in game version. So you might raise your eyes 2 mm and your mouth down 10mm, but when you hit “create” what you end up getting more often than not is something out of a horror film. Ok that might be a bit of an overstatement, but what you see is NOT what you get.
This was extremely upsetting.
I have seen this in Western MMOs, too (e.g., Age of Conan). The character creator is so high res that when it downscales in game you have a 99% chance of your character looking 50+ years older than intended with some aspects not even making anatomical sense. It really is a crap shoot whether or not your character will translate into what you want in game no matter how much time you spend tweaking the many many sliders.
I will give them some credit here, as we have seen in many Korean MMOs, where the “Jiggle Physics” go above and beyond.
Well this game toned it down a lot. They made the armor a little more than panties. They gave breasts some jiggle but no where near what we have seen in the past. But here’s where it gets weird again; there is once again a “child-like” race. Then you have the elves, humans, and cat people. I would say in terms of “relating” to your character this game is not really giving us anything new to grab onto. The cat people are literally human models with spots, a tail, ears, and sideburns (that get messed up by the DoF in quest cut scenes as mentioned above and also look exactly like wolverine from X-men on every character).
So in terms of originality we are really dry here. Even having cat people seems weird in a world that is pushing so hard to be realistic. It would have made more sense to ONLY have fantasy-genre characters to choose from.
Conclusion on the execution of Realism in this game:
I would have to say the lack of consistency between gameplay, aesthetics, and overall graphics being a muddy “barren” make the feel at any given point a disappointment. There were certain “oooOoO” moments when a flock of birds would fly by or herd of zebras would run across the barrens, but these small moments of “life” in this wide open flat world felt few and far between. Then you add in these characters that look very much all the same or decrepit and it sums up to a very strange wasteland.
Who cares, it’s a SANDBOX GAME! I can do anything I want which is WAY more important than anything else:
The first point I want to bring up is that this is more like Lineage “Sandbox” than Ultima Online. By that I mean:
The press has pushed this game as a “Sandbox” MMORPG more than I think it deserves. That was the first time I saw an accurate representation.
You cannot go to any tree and start chopping for resources, you have designated resources for building and expanding. There is no dropped loot other than on specific missions, as are present in cargo ship trade route runs. The biggest problem here are the rewards for being a Pirate to intercept these types of missions to gain reward are outweighed by the exile you will get to a “pirate island” that is just for your kind. You’re cut off from the rest of the game and towns. Sure there should be consequences but it shouldn’t be so much that you don’t have a reason to give the opposing team opposition without feeling you are limiting yourself in the rest of the game.
However if grinding and collection quests is your thing this game doesn’t spare any expense on this type of gameplay. They have not attempted to break the mold that even WoW broke a few expansions ago when it comes to the tediousness of quests. It is the true definition of a grind.
Crafting and player based economy:
Like any game with resources and crafting, without demand or the chance of loss there is a plateau that will be hit eventually without things to strive for. Everyone will have enough to make the economy non existent. And in a Sandbox MMO, player driven economy is important. Once you have gotten your home there is no system to expand out, gathering resources and then placing a new house to expand into a new zone as you have everyone in the same boat of oversaturated resources. Land then becomes hard to come by and unless its in the PvP zone its protected from being destroyed. And like the Pirate system that has no reward for serious consequences, the economy has the opposite, high reward with no consequences, except to those who also play the game. Without money sinks and a way to balance out the economy ArcheAge is heading toward a flatline when it comes to worth.
So what about Housing?
You can go to one of the main towns to look at all the different types of houses you can purchase. In each show home there are things you can purchase to put in your home to decorate. They are actually really beautiful. But when you apply these to the real world/game practice you see player-run towns that don’t look like towns, but rather more like FarmVille: a homestead of the same resources in bulk, such as goats (which are the most profitable resource) filling every single bit of available space. So you go from being aesthetically pleasing to a resource farm.
The magic of a home and town is lost to min-maxing personal gain. ArcheAge turns into Men who stare at goats.
This is a real shame because the designs for the different houses are truly beautiful. They even allow for you to interact with the chairs, beds, tables, etc. This seems to be a feature found in most Korean MMO’s as they are very much social gamers. Sitting and chatting with your buddies in your virtual house is fun.
Conclusion about the Sandbox feel of ArcheAge:
I would have to say this game feels less like a sandbox game as you are extremely limited to where you play, place homes, and there is no system to set up your own vendor towns. Houses are there to benefit you and that is all. It is a feature put on top of a game that doesn’t have enough meat to make it worth the time investment. They are beautiful though so at least they got that right. Just don’t expect to make a lumberjack or mining character and going to a cave or forest like in Ultima Online and gathering resources for a few hours, then heading back to your home in order to upgrade or decorate. And that grind... my god, does the end justify the means?
Factions:
Ok well, “screw it I hate housing anyway, I am all about the PvPs!”
Well you are in luck! There is PvP in this game. However, with the extreme amounts of CC, lack of visceral combat, as can be seen here:
As well you can attack members in your own faction. This leads to A: Bots running rampant with no way to deal with them. http://ArcheAgesource.com/topic/1301-inpact-of-botters/
And B: The ability to grief your own faction by baiting them into attacking you.
I feel like if you want factions to really want to feel like they are fighting for a common goal, the implementation of same-faction attacking is strange unless done through a “war”-style system through guild affiliations. A similar feature was available in UO. But as it is, it is just a push on the realism feature again, but doesn’t help to immerse you.
If you are excited about sieges you might want to hold off reservations until it is actually implemented. There is no implementation of siege battles yet (always a sign of a feature added a little too late to make it balanced into the game properly, one example being Age of Conan) leave much to be desired. Plus if you are looking to get rewards for your kills you might be let down. There is no real reward for killing another player, although there are a TON of punishments.
Jail/Criminal System
For this one I am just going to link you to that system: http://ArcheAgesource.com/topic/1123-ArcheAge-the-criminal-system-crime-court-prison-pirate-cbt5/
It’s too much to include in a review like this, but it has more complexity than the PvP system itself and sadly is more interesting... The one thing I will say, however, is this system actually can work against those who try to stop botting, as I mentioned above. Most importantly though the idea of player killing has these very strong punishments that outweigh the risk and rewards (zilch).
And finally and I think most importantly, SOUND:
I left this till the end so the article would flow from feature to feature, but in terms of importance I would rank this one as #1 before anything else said in this review. The sound effects for attacks are overused and old. Weapons sound different depending on the material but every weapon is tinny and hollow. There is no weight to the noises and if there is it is often misrepresented. Even smaller attacks are often too heavy. Creatures have very over the top or unrealistic sounds. There are even some old sounds from EQ (e.g., the bear rawr) that are so burned in your brain from playing that is isn’t even a modified version of it. That is not a good thing.
The most obvious of the sounds that will drill a hole in your brain is your own character’s emotes during combat. The female “moans” when attacking aren't just distracting, they’re invasive.
The mobs also make a sound of sort when hit. So combine a noise every attack, multiplied by two depending on what you are attacking and your soundscape is muddied with recycled foley from the 90’s and Korean voice actors constantly grunting. It is like a badly dubbed Jet Li film. Sound has to be subtle but distinct enough where you don’t even know it is happening, because like a realistic approach to a game, your brain immediately knows when something is “off”. The timing on the sounds is also all over the place. You can hit and hear the sound ending much after the impact. This seems to be an issue with a lot of these Korean MMO’s. They use very “realistic” sounds, but you can only go so far when you are picking “Metal Hitting Metal 1” or “Metal hitting Metal 40” for a weapon attack. When you are hitting a bear and hearing steel on steel, it throws you out of the world you are trying to immerse yourself into.
This is a prime example of ArcheAge using music from a generic sound byte library:
Add into that the hint of Korean flare and you have a lot of sparkling noises when doing mundane tasks like watering a plant or digging dirt.
So what is left?
You have one thing left that is enjoyable, gliders. The gliders are a great way of traveling and enjoying the world around you. They are also very unique in terms of “flying mounts”. Their models are gorgeous.
But is that grounds for an MMO being a must have?
Trion Publishing ArcheAge for NA doesn’t mean big changes:
Before I get a flux of people saying “Well Trion picked it up and will have time to fix all of this before the North American release”, let’s quickly look at the facts of past NA ports of Korean games. I will use the major example of Tera. Tera was originally a Korean MMO picked up by NA publisher En Masse Entertainment:
The history here is that publishers pick up “finished games” and the parent company that created it retains their creative input and the publisher is just that, a publisher, works on localizing the game and then the game is released to North America. I too was enamoured by the idea that Trion, the creators of RIFT, picked up the game. They have one of the most robust housing systems seen in an MMO since the days of EQ and UO. I instantly thought to myself, “OMG THEY ARE GONNA PUT THAT IN ArcheAge...” but the chances that this comes to life are maybe 2%. And those who aren’t dissuaded by the above facts about ports, will most likely end up playing the “patch game” with these (i.e., waiting for the next patch to make the game they want to play better and suck them in, but actually just enjoying the content of the patch for a few days before burning out again). The only update the NA release of Tera saw was the childlike characters now had boyshorts on instead of thongs, as our rating system wouldn’t allow it.
Conclusion:
So as much as I would like to promote this game as a truly groundbreaking, must-play title when it hits North America, I simply cannot with the information I have gathered so far and personal experiences I’ve had playing it. Games in NA such as GW2 and WoW have really set the standards HIGH for user experience, and while the sandbox is something I yearn for (as do a lot of people from the UO EQ generation), we have evolved; gaming has evolved. With games like GW2 and WoW setting the bar high for how this genre of game should "look and feel" it would be doing a disservice to myself and others to not compare them. When the bar gets raised other companies in every other expertise need to get their shit together and match it or better. The same in my mind goes for games.
To say we can take a few steps back to enjoy the feature set (such as housing and end game exploration) would be lying to ourselves. We are spoiled by the fluidity of combat in games like GW2 and we are spoiled by excellent content releases in games such as WoW. To ignore that we have been given these amazing things that in turn coined phrases such as “WoW killer” should make it clear to us that we cannot take steps backward to get features that push us forward. It is all or nothing, and to sell ourselves short is to spit in the face of those companies that have been helping push this industry forward for so many years. I am not saying the games I mentioned are perfect, but they did make the gaming “experience” better in one or more major ways, enough to make a step backwards feel off. So my conclusion: ArcheAge has a promising feature set, but is based in “archeagic” gameplay.
You must also keep in mind this game is a Korean port and the look and feel of this game really is Korean (which has its appeal from the normal Western “style”), from character models to strange creatures in the world and hard-to-explain quests. And as much as we would like to say those aspects will be revised for the Western release, the feel of the game will remain, although the quests where you slaughter a kitten may not.
Yes, content could be a driving force and there are currently no games that pull off the sandbox themepark MMO like ArcheAge, but does that mean it is playable? As first impressions go, no. If I want my old UO housing feel I would rather play UO than a “newer” game that is built on old mechanics and chugs the system specs of my friends.
So consider this article less of an “ArcheAge is gonna fail” and more of a “Hey, there are other games from Korean developers coming out with the same feature list that may have more potential!” (e.g., Bless, Black Desert, and Blade & Soul). Personally it is hard for me to give my mindspace to more than one MMO at a time. Make sure you give yourself the opportunity to take in the potential of these other games as well, so as to not put all your eggs in one potentially disappointing basket.
Sources:
1: http://www.gamesradar.com/25-new-mmorpgs-horizon-2013-and-beyond/
2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exiled_Realm_of_Arborea
3: http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/572/view/forums/thread/373376/page/1
4: http://www.arena.net/blog/the-big-beta-weekend-preview
5: http://archeagesource.com/
I, as many others around the internet, have become very fixated on a Korean MMO title called ArcheAge. It really is quite impressive on paper, using Cry Engine 3 for beautifully rendered graphics, sandbox features mixed with instanced dungeons, grand siege battles, open world PvP, open sea combat and exploration, an in-depth crafting system, open ended character development allowing for over 120 different specs, housing, and customization.
I immediately started to reminisce of my Ultima Online days, back when I had a fleet of ships and could go hunting for treasure, then bring my bounty to my home and either hoard it in chests or use the heads of those I’d killed along the way to decorate my dirty stone keep walls. Then if after that adventure archery no longer seemed like an efficient method of killing, I could drop it for magic. It was simple, straight forward, but held a sense of complexity that was a theorycrafter’s wet dream. (I cannot stress how important it is for a game these days to have tangible ways to assess if your spec is doing well for your needs. The need for feedback on your choices and why one thing is better or worse than your previous choice is important. This is one thing that GW2 still needs to work on in order to give more purpose to combat. It's also necessary if you want your players to feel like their spec choices have meaning. You never really achieve a sense of having mastered combat in GW2. I think anyone in gaming (or psychology) will attest to how motivating the opportunity for mastery or expertise can be. It may not be tangible, but it's one of the undeniable things players achieve from the hours and hours they pour into these games. Gaming, in essence, provides a sandbox for progress and achievement. But before we get too far off topic if you want to read some thoughts on that you can go here: http://alttabme.com/forum/index.php?threads/gw2-i-feel-alone.2662/#post-27273)
Although I will reference games like GW2 and WoW throughout this piece, I need people to know though that these games are not perfect either and I don’t expect them to be the same at all, nor should we want them to be. I think that is my main issue with ArcheAge. I do not expect it to be any of the games I have played in the Western MMO sphere lately but I do expect them to have some of the aspects that have improved the gameplay experience for the genre as a whole.
Well, I got my hands on the Korean retail and was able to jump into it myself. I only believe videos and reviews about 50% of the time because a game is not only about a feature list but about look and feel.
This is where my bubbling, over-the-top enthusiasm began to drain.
Combat Look and Feel:
With all that in mind, let’s talk about combat. I will open with reference to a very large thread over at mmorpg.com where people are talking about the combat feeling lackluster. This is mixed with people who have played the game and those who have just seen videos.
http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/572/view/forums/thread/373376/page/1 (3)
The strangest part of this however is the extreme reaction this usually causes from the community. People in favor or against the combat all have one thing in common, they cannot get past it. It becomes a hot button topic making all other features, such as those I will explain in this article, a hindsight. I thought it was interesting, but once again I needed to form my own opinions from actually playing it!
I do not claim to know Korean in the slightest, so to some extent my experience has been hindered in not being able to read tooltips and quest text, but I do know and can speak to how something “feels” when I play it. However, the existence of the thread above is proof there may be something that is just off. I held off my own opinions until trying it myself.
When I first logged in, I selected casting as my first discipline.
Combat and movement are big for me, and the movement in this game is pretty choppy and sluggish. It feels like Age of Conan meets a laggy version of Tera. The movement animations alone feel like they belong in a pre-WoW MMO; it feels like they could have been taken out of the 1990’s version of EQ. Regardless, I decided to continue through in hopes that it was just the newbie skills that felt so off. Well, it didn’t get much better.
(Skip to 3:00 minutes in to get a feel for combat)
At one point I got a chance to talk with an English speaking player in general chat, and I asked if combat got any better as you leveled.
“Combat gets better at higher levels around 25.”
I asked him how.
“Well it doesn't really change, you just have more buttons to press.”
This was a huge upset for me. Sure I like having lots of combos and skills to pick from, but if they are just there for the reason of having tons of skills with no strategic foundation, what’s the point? It just clutters the screen. And as with most games with an inordinate amount of skills to chose from, only a few will ultimately be used with any frequency.(Reminded me of UO in terms of dragging skills all over the black space of the screen back in the day when there was no skill bar:
The CC in this game has been quoted many times for being of the “whoever attacks first wins” style. CC is great--when in moderation. However, I’ve watched people be put in a single CC lock for over 30 seconds. That is 30 seconds where you can do absolutely nothing. During combat, that’s HUGE. In this genre of games, anything above 7 seconds of combat time easily qualifies as an eternity. Oh, and there are no counters for the aforementioned CC. Once you’re locked, you’re locked.
So after having had a very mediocre experience with ranged combat and a set of spells that felt like a toned-down version of the “magic” we have all come to enjoy from movies, pop culture references, and other games, I decided it was time to get right up in the face of the enemy and rolled a warrior-type (remember there are no actual classes).
This is where I really started to get upset about the feel of the game. For the sake of ranting, I will list a few of the reasons why:
- Weapon distance for attacks is hard to gauge. There is about a three-person gap between hit block and weapon swing, so you can be unrealistically far to hit someone.
- Melee feels weird compared to ranged. Ranged is not as dynamic as in GW2, and more static. Once melee combat begins, you are stuck in place for each action’s animation.
- Limited amount of melee animations which repeat over and over.
- The tweening between animations is dirty, giving the attacks a “loss of frames” feel or twitchy motion.
- Single target combat is EXTREME in this game. When you are swinging a giant axe at six bunnies attacking you (true story), you expect to be able to take them all out in one foul swoop. No such luck. Single target is locked hard in this game. I suppose games like GW2 and Age of Conan, which gave us tab-targetting with splash damage, changed our idea of how combat should feel. It gave the feeling of actually being in a battle, rather than just in a race to drain one mob’s health bar before yours drains too much to take on the next guy (or bunny).
“Combat— “A Sense of Hitting”
Right now ArcheAge is lacking any sense of hitting. With the examples listed above of how its lacking in other areas of combat, it is hard to see how you can improve without a remake of the system to include any true “sense of hitting”.
This was disappointing, especially when chaining cool abilities together, which leads to more CC. You often ended up attacking through the mob in front of you or turned around where you shouldn’t actually be hitting anything at all. The clipping was absurd.
Combat Conclusion:
With the headway Western MMOs have made in combat in the recent years and even other Korean MMO’s I can’t help but feel they missed the mark on something very important here. Combat is over 50% of what you do in any MMO. Killing monsters for resources to your home, PvP, PvE, etc you just are always attacking something. I understand combat is a very personal thing, be it tab targetting, free form, or a hybrid of both need to feel right no matter which it is. Unless I want to play a glorified version of Farmville with a combat system attached to it, I don’t see how this is worth the time investment as an MMO with housing and an end-game revolving around hours and hours of time spent in-game.
Okay, but how about the world, the environment, the sandbox features!?
Realism vs Stylised:
Then there are realistic games, which try to look as much like a real world as possible while pushing your systems graphics and processing power to the max. These games have a very big hurdle to overcome, as the minute you introduce realistic graphics you are subject to the human mind’s knee jerk reaction to the smallest thing triggering that “something is not right here” feeling.
ArcheAge has gone the route of realism. I am all for it, and having a super computer I was excited to push everything to max and just go “wow this is beautiful”. What I was greeted with though was a very dull palette of colors mixed with randomly placed “objects” to portray foliage and terrain. The DoF (depth of field) only took away from the immersion, as it muddied the background even more. As a photographer, I love DoF, but I also know it does not exist in the extremes it is often presented with in games. It adds a certain flavor to a game that I am sure is enjoyed by some, but for me it just makes it harder to see the world around you. This was the first feature I turned off, which did help make the game feel more open, but I was not impressed with the world as a whole enough to care either way. I almost felt like by turning it off, I was then seeing things that should have remained hidden.
Geforce showed off ArcheAge as an example of TXAA being used to the max, but what you end up getting is a game trying to emulate reality, but failing.
A wall may look like it has rocks sticking out of it, but you still clip against it the same as someone with the graphics turned down. You cannot scale the rocks that are sticking out, so it just makes it look pretty, but it is not functionally pretty. Also the demo seen above is not achievable in the game yet for normal players oddly.
The other problem is that sometimes the environment in that video, like my experience with the DoF, looks better with it turned off. There is not a sense of coherence between the environmental improvements. So you get a few bits and pieces that look better but the world around it is not changing in uniformly.
The water is debatable. It has a great motion for up and down waves, where you bob in the water. But the water itself looks like saran wrap. This may sound nit-picky but it has to do with the whole realism vs stylized mindset. Your brain triggers the "Hey something isn't right here" with it.
Cinematics/Cut Scenes:
This was one of the strangest things to me. As you progress cutscenes play out. Think of the “2.5D” Guild Wars 2 style cut scenes you have seen. But then reduce the speed of them by say 4000%. So you are looking at a very slow pan up from the feet of a character to his neck, then slowly fading to another slow pan. It is almost painful to watch these cut scenes. Mind you I don’t speak Korean so the story might be there, but the visuals to go with it are not.
So looks aside, how does the realism effect gameplay?
Then there are the "interactions with NPCS" that zoom in on the characters. Let's just say someone messed up here... the DoF causes all hair to turn into a muddy mess and characters are often looking at you with a lazy eye.
Mounts:
We already talked about combat which missed the mark here, but let’s talk about the non combat related “realism”. Mounts are a big part of this game. Instead of going with a keyboard based turning system like WoW for mounts where you can turn on a dime, turning is like a real horse where you have to drag your mouse in an arch and not strafe. While I love the idea of it, the execution feels like your mount is stuck in molasses. Almost to the point of Age of Conan’s “You might fall off a cliff if you don’t turn early enough before the edge of a cliff”.
There is one saving grace to mounts: you have the ability to put armor on them. This is a really cool customization feature for your mounts that makes them unique to you. However, mounts have no use in combat as of now, so it is lost as just an aesthetic bonus.
Then you get the ability to pilot ships, siege tanks, and even farming machinery. Each has a different feel added to it. It is actually easier to navigate a giant warship than it is your mount.
Once again there is that lack of consistency between different aspects of the game.
Character Creation:
This one was the most disappointing to me personally. I love to really feel like my avatar is unique. You have a game here which has so many different sliders and cool bits and pieces to customize your look you would think it would be a wet dream for those who like to spend lots of time creating their avatar to really be unique. Well what you see is NOT what you get. There are about 8 presets per race. Each of these looks great(let me make it very clear here you will not be able to achieve a Western look for your character if you use these presets as they are very much Korean in style), problem is if you deviate the character customization screen where it shows your character close up is using a different rendering engine than the in game version. So you might raise your eyes 2 mm and your mouth down 10mm, but when you hit “create” what you end up getting more often than not is something out of a horror film. Ok that might be a bit of an overstatement, but what you see is NOT what you get.
This was extremely upsetting.
I have seen this in Western MMOs, too (e.g., Age of Conan). The character creator is so high res that when it downscales in game you have a 99% chance of your character looking 50+ years older than intended with some aspects not even making anatomical sense. It really is a crap shoot whether or not your character will translate into what you want in game no matter how much time you spend tweaking the many many sliders.
I will give them some credit here, as we have seen in many Korean MMOs, where the “Jiggle Physics” go above and beyond.
Well this game toned it down a lot. They made the armor a little more than panties. They gave breasts some jiggle but no where near what we have seen in the past. But here’s where it gets weird again; there is once again a “child-like” race. Then you have the elves, humans, and cat people. I would say in terms of “relating” to your character this game is not really giving us anything new to grab onto. The cat people are literally human models with spots, a tail, ears, and sideburns (that get messed up by the DoF in quest cut scenes as mentioned above and also look exactly like wolverine from X-men on every character).
So in terms of originality we are really dry here. Even having cat people seems weird in a world that is pushing so hard to be realistic. It would have made more sense to ONLY have fantasy-genre characters to choose from.
Conclusion on the execution of Realism in this game:
I would have to say the lack of consistency between gameplay, aesthetics, and overall graphics being a muddy “barren” make the feel at any given point a disappointment. There were certain “oooOoO” moments when a flock of birds would fly by or herd of zebras would run across the barrens, but these small moments of “life” in this wide open flat world felt few and far between. Then you add in these characters that look very much all the same or decrepit and it sums up to a very strange wasteland.
Who cares, it’s a SANDBOX GAME! I can do anything I want which is WAY more important than anything else:
The first point I want to bring up is that this is more like Lineage “Sandbox” than Ultima Online. By that I mean:
The press has pushed this game as a “Sandbox” MMORPG more than I think it deserves. That was the first time I saw an accurate representation.
You cannot go to any tree and start chopping for resources, you have designated resources for building and expanding. There is no dropped loot other than on specific missions, as are present in cargo ship trade route runs. The biggest problem here are the rewards for being a Pirate to intercept these types of missions to gain reward are outweighed by the exile you will get to a “pirate island” that is just for your kind. You’re cut off from the rest of the game and towns. Sure there should be consequences but it shouldn’t be so much that you don’t have a reason to give the opposing team opposition without feeling you are limiting yourself in the rest of the game.
However if grinding and collection quests is your thing this game doesn’t spare any expense on this type of gameplay. They have not attempted to break the mold that even WoW broke a few expansions ago when it comes to the tediousness of quests. It is the true definition of a grind.
Crafting and player based economy:
Like any game with resources and crafting, without demand or the chance of loss there is a plateau that will be hit eventually without things to strive for. Everyone will have enough to make the economy non existent. And in a Sandbox MMO, player driven economy is important. Once you have gotten your home there is no system to expand out, gathering resources and then placing a new house to expand into a new zone as you have everyone in the same boat of oversaturated resources. Land then becomes hard to come by and unless its in the PvP zone its protected from being destroyed. And like the Pirate system that has no reward for serious consequences, the economy has the opposite, high reward with no consequences, except to those who also play the game. Without money sinks and a way to balance out the economy ArcheAge is heading toward a flatline when it comes to worth.
So what about Housing?
You can go to one of the main towns to look at all the different types of houses you can purchase. In each show home there are things you can purchase to put in your home to decorate. They are actually really beautiful. But when you apply these to the real world/game practice you see player-run towns that don’t look like towns, but rather more like FarmVille: a homestead of the same resources in bulk, such as goats (which are the most profitable resource) filling every single bit of available space. So you go from being aesthetically pleasing to a resource farm.
The magic of a home and town is lost to min-maxing personal gain. ArcheAge turns into Men who stare at goats.
Conclusion about the Sandbox feel of ArcheAge:
I would have to say this game feels less like a sandbox game as you are extremely limited to where you play, place homes, and there is no system to set up your own vendor towns. Houses are there to benefit you and that is all. It is a feature put on top of a game that doesn’t have enough meat to make it worth the time investment. They are beautiful though so at least they got that right. Just don’t expect to make a lumberjack or mining character and going to a cave or forest like in Ultima Online and gathering resources for a few hours, then heading back to your home in order to upgrade or decorate. And that grind... my god, does the end justify the means?
Factions:
Ok well, “screw it I hate housing anyway, I am all about the PvPs!”
Well you are in luck! There is PvP in this game. However, with the extreme amounts of CC, lack of visceral combat, as can be seen here:
As well you can attack members in your own faction. This leads to A: Bots running rampant with no way to deal with them. http://ArcheAgesource.com/topic/1301-inpact-of-botters/
And B: The ability to grief your own faction by baiting them into attacking you.
I feel like if you want factions to really want to feel like they are fighting for a common goal, the implementation of same-faction attacking is strange unless done through a “war”-style system through guild affiliations. A similar feature was available in UO. But as it is, it is just a push on the realism feature again, but doesn’t help to immerse you.
If you are excited about sieges you might want to hold off reservations until it is actually implemented. There is no implementation of siege battles yet (always a sign of a feature added a little too late to make it balanced into the game properly, one example being Age of Conan) leave much to be desired. Plus if you are looking to get rewards for your kills you might be let down. There is no real reward for killing another player, although there are a TON of punishments.
Jail/Criminal System
For this one I am just going to link you to that system: http://ArcheAgesource.com/topic/1123-ArcheAge-the-criminal-system-crime-court-prison-pirate-cbt5/
It’s too much to include in a review like this, but it has more complexity than the PvP system itself and sadly is more interesting... The one thing I will say, however, is this system actually can work against those who try to stop botting, as I mentioned above. Most importantly though the idea of player killing has these very strong punishments that outweigh the risk and rewards (zilch).
And finally and I think most importantly, SOUND:
I left this till the end so the article would flow from feature to feature, but in terms of importance I would rank this one as #1 before anything else said in this review. The sound effects for attacks are overused and old. Weapons sound different depending on the material but every weapon is tinny and hollow. There is no weight to the noises and if there is it is often misrepresented. Even smaller attacks are often too heavy. Creatures have very over the top or unrealistic sounds. There are even some old sounds from EQ (e.g., the bear rawr) that are so burned in your brain from playing that is isn’t even a modified version of it. That is not a good thing.
The most obvious of the sounds that will drill a hole in your brain is your own character’s emotes during combat. The female “moans” when attacking aren't just distracting, they’re invasive.
(Same Video as in the Combat section of this review. Skip to 3 minutes in to get the idea
This is a prime example of ArcheAge using music from a generic sound byte library:
Add into that the hint of Korean flare and you have a lot of sparkling noises when doing mundane tasks like watering a plant or digging dirt.
So what is left?
You have one thing left that is enjoyable, gliders. The gliders are a great way of traveling and enjoying the world around you. They are also very unique in terms of “flying mounts”. Their models are gorgeous.
But is that grounds for an MMO being a must have?
Trion Publishing ArcheAge for NA doesn’t mean big changes:
Before I get a flux of people saying “Well Trion picked it up and will have time to fix all of this before the North American release”, let’s quickly look at the facts of past NA ports of Korean games. I will use the major example of Tera. Tera was originally a Korean MMO picked up by NA publisher En Masse Entertainment:
The history here is that publishers pick up “finished games” and the parent company that created it retains their creative input and the publisher is just that, a publisher, works on localizing the game and then the game is released to North America. I too was enamoured by the idea that Trion, the creators of RIFT, picked up the game. They have one of the most robust housing systems seen in an MMO since the days of EQ and UO. I instantly thought to myself, “OMG THEY ARE GONNA PUT THAT IN ArcheAge...” but the chances that this comes to life are maybe 2%. And those who aren’t dissuaded by the above facts about ports, will most likely end up playing the “patch game” with these (i.e., waiting for the next patch to make the game they want to play better and suck them in, but actually just enjoying the content of the patch for a few days before burning out again). The only update the NA release of Tera saw was the childlike characters now had boyshorts on instead of thongs, as our rating system wouldn’t allow it.
Conclusion:
So as much as I would like to promote this game as a truly groundbreaking, must-play title when it hits North America, I simply cannot with the information I have gathered so far and personal experiences I’ve had playing it. Games in NA such as GW2 and WoW have really set the standards HIGH for user experience, and while the sandbox is something I yearn for (as do a lot of people from the UO EQ generation), we have evolved; gaming has evolved. With games like GW2 and WoW setting the bar high for how this genre of game should "look and feel" it would be doing a disservice to myself and others to not compare them. When the bar gets raised other companies in every other expertise need to get their shit together and match it or better. The same in my mind goes for games.
To say we can take a few steps back to enjoy the feature set (such as housing and end game exploration) would be lying to ourselves. We are spoiled by the fluidity of combat in games like GW2 and we are spoiled by excellent content releases in games such as WoW. To ignore that we have been given these amazing things that in turn coined phrases such as “WoW killer” should make it clear to us that we cannot take steps backward to get features that push us forward. It is all or nothing, and to sell ourselves short is to spit in the face of those companies that have been helping push this industry forward for so many years. I am not saying the games I mentioned are perfect, but they did make the gaming “experience” better in one or more major ways, enough to make a step backwards feel off. So my conclusion: ArcheAge has a promising feature set, but is based in “archeagic” gameplay.
You must also keep in mind this game is a Korean port and the look and feel of this game really is Korean (which has its appeal from the normal Western “style”), from character models to strange creatures in the world and hard-to-explain quests. And as much as we would like to say those aspects will be revised for the Western release, the feel of the game will remain, although the quests where you slaughter a kitten may not.
Yes, content could be a driving force and there are currently no games that pull off the sandbox themepark MMO like ArcheAge, but does that mean it is playable? As first impressions go, no. If I want my old UO housing feel I would rather play UO than a “newer” game that is built on old mechanics and chugs the system specs of my friends.
So consider this article less of an “ArcheAge is gonna fail” and more of a “Hey, there are other games from Korean developers coming out with the same feature list that may have more potential!” (e.g., Bless, Black Desert, and Blade & Soul). Personally it is hard for me to give my mindspace to more than one MMO at a time. Make sure you give yourself the opportunity to take in the potential of these other games as well, so as to not put all your eggs in one potentially disappointing basket.
Sources:
1: http://www.gamesradar.com/25-new-mmorpgs-horizon-2013-and-beyond/
2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exiled_Realm_of_Arborea
3: http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/572/view/forums/thread/373376/page/1
4: http://www.arena.net/blog/the-big-beta-weekend-preview
5: http://archeagesource.com/
