ArcheAge, Don’t believe the hype...

[StaticSky]

Yes it does, and sorry if I misinterpreted. I agree that the combat is lacking and I wish they would have put more effort into it as it is something of a base to build future features on in the case of MMORPGs (in general).

 

[Passage]

As a casual, the Pay-to-Win aspect and no level cap are the largest offsets for me, especially in a PvP environment (a PvE sandbox is like peanut butter with no jelly). Being perpetually at the bottom of the totem pole is wholly unattractive. Add that to the deflation I feel when comparing footage to gameplay, and I don't see it replacing the current titles I play.

 

[shava23]

I'd just like to say, coming from a heritage that include Asians, that the "childlike" race in the game are the ones who are like Koreans -- the ones you identify as "humans" are supposed to be like Europeans. You can draw out the social commentary for the most part from there, but let me say, it was no end of fun being a young female software engineer in the 1980s in Boston. I was in my early 20s -- and all the guys around me (and almost everyone other than the support staff were guys) thought I was a teenager at most. With tits. Assumption A: I couldn't possibly know enough to write code. Assumption B: lolita doll.

Yay? Objectified as non-human. Yup.

Fail.

Try to think out of the haole box just a bit. You can be fully human too!

I was in the alpha, am in the open beta now, and will be in the head start next week. Some things you complain about have been fixed, some I disagree with your aesthetics, and some, I think your judgements are (as above) really off base in ways that have more to do with the reviewer than with the game. Obviously, I like it. I'm sorry you missed a lot of the community aspects because of the language barrier. You could have those now.

I missed out on UO, but I did get to play SWG early on, and this is the first game that has filled a lot of those holes for me. Eve came close, but it was a little too dry, impersonal, and spreadsheet-y. This, to me, is immersive (I totally disagree about the art and scenery -- Villanelle, for example, is probably the most gorgeous setting in an MMO I've ever seen -- Lutesong Harbor? omg...).

I do agree (with bells on) about the foley. And the campy Korean women's "armor" -- running through the jungle with my trickster main (archery/rogue/witchcraft), in stiletto heel high lace boots and school uniform (leather) culottes and a sports bra. hoo-boy... TERA was the same deal only worse -- this lacks the over-the-top ornate fetish that TERA and various Korean games put into the armor in general.

Level cap in the TRION version is 50, soon to go to 55.

 

[Avereon]

Where did you get no level camp from? And P2W? Where does that come from? Every single thing in the cash shop can be bought with in game gold.. In 3 or 4 hours of play it isn't hard to make enough gold to buy 10+ dollars worth of cash shop credits, at least on my server, these items tend to very depending on your server.

Hmm, I am sure by now some of the people who read this article actually played the game? A few things I noticed in this article were wrong.. perhaps it is because he couldn't read the language? Or maybe some of those things have been changed? Either way, CC isn't so much a problem, there are several skills that end and make you immune to forms of CC for a short time. Also that first video he shows of combat.. It's a tank fighting a boss that glitches out.. Did he really pick the worse case scenario and post it as an example of combat? Not to mention the tank was bad... Use your skills please.. I've never seen an MMO where I thought tanks looked like a lot of fun to play, perhaps that's why DPS is the most over played role in MMOs.. Ever tried finding a healer or tank for queue? It's not easy is it? That would be because their combat is slow and boring. Any game that requires even a little grinding to level is just that much more for those roles.

That being said, I play a tank in AA, actually the same class choices as the other video he showed. I have started focusing on playing tanks and healers in MMOs because I do it well and because I don't want to wait in queue forever or wait for tanks and healers...

In some ways this reminds me on Neverwinter Nights, just in one way actually and it's very funny. In NWN, you were given so much freedom on how to build a character that a lot of people completely missed out on the game because they wouldn't take the time to study the classes, feats and skills, and instead would make some very silly builds that would fall apart. Just because you like the idea of a fighter/mage doesn't mean you can just choose the fighter class and mage class and now you have a good tanky spell slinger.. I see people doing the same thing here. Hell, I did it with my first character. It's not that my first character was a bad idea, any more than a tanky spell slinger is a bad idea, but that it wasn't executed properly, and that's exactly the problem I see people make here.

It seems to me like people don't realize that not everyone liked WoW. I played, had a bother who played and a cousin. They wanted me to play with them so I gave it a shot. I was bored to tears from the start. The only thing I liked about the game was the arena PvP and open world PvP the few times I found it. Every thing else was just mindless grinding.. They kept telling me, just hang in there, once you get to 60 (current max level) that's why the big raids start and things pick up! Well, great.. So level 60.. was grinding with a bunch of people.. Yay. So WoW not my cup of tea. This I enjoy far more than WoW.

That said, there are plenty of things I don't like about the game. The player driven economy seems off on some servers, others it works fine. The labor system is.. Just bad currently. Everything cost too much labor, and labor translates into either in game gold or rl money, depending on how you acquire it. On one server I calculated that forging a level 30 sword cost 31 gold in raw materials and 700 labor. At the value of labor that's 42 gold on that server, the sword only sells on AH for 18 gold.. FAIL. You'd make more gold selling the materials and only spending about 100 labor mining iron. To me, the water looks great, what's lackluster is the sky.. It's bad. It's the worse sky I've seen in an MMO in a good 10 years.. but that's not a big deal. I guess some of the sounds are a little off? IDK I always play music when I play so I don't listen to it anymore.

As for PvP, what does it offer? IDK, I guess if trecking around in enemy territory with a big target on your back saying kill me isn't exciting to you then it's not your thing? Or even in your own territory where enemy factions can usually be found roaming around and other players on your faction might decide they want what you have and try to kill you for it. The article makes it seem like there is no reason not to PvP and no reason to PvP.. Well, there's honor you trade for better gear, trade packs you will need to walk through hostile territory to turn in for gold/items/gulda stars, castles you can build to rule over lands and be besieged or besiege other castles to take over their land. That's what is available in early release.. you want more? Well, I am sure more is coming.. Maybe you should try some of this first though before you ask for more? Baskin Robins has 31 flavors, all you've try is vanilla and you are demanding they make more flavors.. GG.

You make it sound like the combat is just point, click, button mash.. If that's what you are doing, you are doing it wrong...

This is a list of some of skills and where they chain with other skills to produce added effects such as extra damage, stun, taunt, fear and so on. Picking what you want your class to do requires navigating the complex skill trees and combining effects for maximum impact. These aren't even all the skill currently in the game. It also helps to make sure you have some type of CC, CC breaker, and physical and magical defense so you don't get hard countered.

Anyway, I'll leave it by just saying, if this isn't your game it isn't, but that doesn't make it a bad game. It has issues to work through, yes, but what game doesn't? That doesn't mean you can just judge it by your initial response to a game you can't even read. I heard someone say something about it having a bad story line, but they couldn't even read the story because it was still in Korean? lol

 

[Passage]

Where did you get no level camp from?

http://forums.archeagegame.com/showthread.php?71030-Power-Leveling-other-skill-sets-at-50

I meant the extra skills, and it looks like the cap is skill cap is around 55 now.

And P2W? Where does that come from?

There's a big red link in my post on where that came from.

Also, don't forget the article was originally written in Feb 28, 2013. As of right now (October 2014), that's a version from more than
18 months ago.

 

[ToxicAsF]

The original post was also made a year and a half ago.

 

[tr1age]

Follow up:

ArcheAge: a Blueprint For Greed


Tuesday, October 7, 2014 | 0
I guess it's fair to say I was wrong about being wrong. XLGAMES and Trion aren't spearheading the MMO Renaissance. In fact, they're further contributing to the aggressive tumor of Pay to Win gaming. In summation:

ArcheAge is deeply flawed.


Calling ArcheAge feature-rich is certainly an understatement, but to the new player experience gives the appearance that the game is generic F2P business-as-usual dumpster fire. The truth, however, is far more dubious.

Getting Started


Character creation in ArcheAge is fantastic. You can make a white guy, an Asian guy, a fruity elf, or a REALLY FUCKING STRANGE CAT LADY.

A pretty lady.Source: Geekinsider
Classes are determined by the selection of three skill trees. Some trees synergize better than others, and if you try and get too creative you'll be gimpy. There is just enough leeway to let you feel creative without actually allowing you to think very hard about any skill decisions.

Armor is split up into light, medium, and heavy categories and while anyone can wear any armor type, it's obvious that natural favoritism occurs. This is another of those, "get creative and you'll be easy to kill" situations that they seemed to favor the design of.

Once you're done making your handsome lad, you're off to begin one of the most generic quest-hub grinds in the history of MMORPG's. Discovering that the PvE was so shallow in a game with such a massive feature list was fucking painful. Combat fully embracing the classic (boring) tab-target 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-= method certainly doesn't project greatness.

Gliders were a sunny spot in the (sort of) early game. They only allow you to stay above ground for a finite amount of time, so they don't make the world feel really small like a flying mount tends to. The later models also come equipped with weapons, so you can shoot your enemies out of the sky, but you rarely see many epic glider battles... which is a shame.

I could go further into detail on the new-player experience, but it really is one of those, "played one played them all" scenarios with the exception of one early quest. The first sign things were looking up was when I picked up a quest that resulted in a tiny horse in a backpack glued to my back. Intrigued, I followed the quest line which had me feed, dance with, and wash a baby horse until it burst forth into adulthood and became my slave. This took about 2 minutes, and I assumed that raising non-tutorial mounts would be a more complex process. It isn't.

Establishing a Settlement


The strongest and most terrible feature of ArcheAge is the needlessly complex crafting and construction system. If you didn't quit the game after a couple hours of soul crushing boredom you'll discover a line of quests that earn you some farms and a donkey. That's really when the game starts to open up. Depending on your goals, you can use your farms to grow trees for lumber, or crops for various other purposes. My long-time guild, Korben Dallas Multipass, pooled resources to first construct a house to be used as a base of operations, then a small harpoon boat to carry out our evil desires on merchants and fishermen. The harpoon boat was a great investment, but I'll come back to that.

Our ghetto shanty...
This middle phase of the game was alarmingly satisfactory until it became obvious that the entire mid-to-high crafting system is centered around forcing players to either spend money in the cash shop or progress at a snail's pace. This applies across the board to every tradeskill, but it seems like the barrier to entry of Fishing was the worst. You know the saying, "Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, start him down a road to demoralizing credit card debt from which he will never recover and ruin his life"? Is that right?

My favorite tradeskill, artistry, allowed you to use Music Markup Language to write songs that you could perform in the game, however I found out that it's a direct ripoff of the same feature in Mabinogi... Still, there is something special about playing The Final Countdown over the lifeless corpse of your enemy.

F2P Strikes Again


As all F2P games, all systems in ArcheAge are constructed in such a way as to screw you for not shelling out money to accomplish menial tasks. To explain this, I'll need to define a few systems:

Labor Points

Labor Points are used to limit the number of crafting actions you can execute per day. This keeps down item supply, which would be good for the economy if you couldn't pay money to get labor point potions. Subscribers earn labor points while offline, but earn double for being logged in. This is why power-gamers just afk bot their characters inside their houses. Apparently nobody anticipated this causing queue issues... Or being stupid bullshit.

Gilda Stars

Gilda Stars are tokens you earn slowly by turning in daily quests, running trade routes, and various other boring shit. They allow you to purchase plans for large structures and boats, however these things are tradeable so you can purchase all of these items on the auction house for gold which completely negates the purpose of Gilda Stars. Another fucking great idea.

Trade Packs

Trade packs are craftable goods that you can transport from one tradepost to another for gold, stars, or other trade goods. You can only carry one at a time, and the items slow you down. They also can be looted on your death, which opens up interesting avenues for piracy and privateering. Trade Packs are a great way to make money if you're a terribly boring person.

APEX

See: PLEX. APEX is a cash shop item that can be sold to other players who can turn it into cash shop currency. Ultimately APEX is identical to buying gold. Being that cash shop items are tremendously beneficial, it's extremely easy for a person who enjoys throwing their money down a well to gain a significant advantage over normal subscribers whose wives would murder them for spending money so frivolously.

Now, because gaining crafting in middle to late stages of the game is so massively expensive, you're pretty well fucked unless you want to spend money on top of your subscription on digital items to sell on the Auction House. Being able to buy massive quantities of gold at level 1 in a game where the economy is so complex and important definitely places this game into the Pay to Win category, yet I still find myself wanting to tinker around in the game for one big reason...

The Sandbox


Once we had our boat out at sea where the action is, the game opened up a lot, but when you have a harpoon boat it's far more tempting to drag it up on land.

We harpooned the airship, but got stuck in a tree...
The potential for dicking around and trolling in ArcheAge is its best feature by a wide margin. Sailing is solid and sea battles can get pretty intense, but they're completely pointless unless your enemy has trade packs on board. The biggest failure of ArcheAge for me is likely the reason it's doing so well. The game would have been much more fun to play if the stakes were higher, but carebears pay the bills.

One of my favorite experiences in ArcheAge was loading up my boat with newbies and raiding the enemy continent. Due to sheer numbers, we took down some max level players, and really had a great time. The only problem with this was how pointless it all felt after a while. What's the point of wanton slaughter if you have nothing to show for it? Sure, there is an honor point system, but that type of thing leaves a really WoW taste in my mouth.

Factions pit whites against Asians in an amusingly transparent way. What is Korean developer XLGAMES trying to instigate exactly? PvP is heavily weighted on who strikes first, so stealth is extremely nice, but you'll find that you want different skills for sea combat than you do for land.

TL;DR


The whole game plays like a deformed monster wearing the skin of a hot chick. From a distance you see the skin, and you're like, "Oh, maybe I'll investigate", but as you get closer and the horizon is no longer obscuring the hulking mud creature it's much harder to stay focused on the potential. Like all F2P games, ArcheAge tries to get you to spend money quickly, and then quit before you become too self-sufficient. It's worth a try if you can stomach the early game and ignore the extremely shady business model, but I wouldn't blame anyone for passing on this one. However, if the game dropped the cash shop tomorrow and moved to a 100% subscription model, I'd probably enjoy it a whole lot more.

Anyone who wants to get in on the action fun freestyle boating, we're on Enla, and my handle is Miguelito (go fig).

The Breakdown:

Graphics3) So Asian
Gameplay4) Tab hell
Originality8) All the features
WoW Clone4) Eh?
PvP Type2) Safezones Galore
PvP Risk2) Tradepacks
Racism-82623) Faction-driven race war.
Final Score: Turbocharged Assmachine

http://www.ihatemmorpgs.com/2014/10/archeage-blueprint-for-greed.html#.VDOVivldV8E