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Hatefull
Member EpicPosts: 2,503
in Age of Wushu
I am looking for some clarification on this game. I keep hearing Sandbox associated with this game and I am curious as to how people came up with that.
1. Is there a player driven economy?
2. Can players make their own houses/castles/guild area
3. Can I craft water transprt or over land transport (carts, boats, etc)
4. Is there a linear story?
5. Castle sieges or large scale open world pvp does it happen?
I appreciate any input.
If you want a new idea, go read an old book.
In order to be insulted, I must first value your opinion.
Comments
The game is not as PVP centered as some will tell you. Someone HAS to do PVE to get recipes in order to make gear. Someone HAS to make food because NPCs don't sell it and your toon will take a major health debuff if they get "hungry". Someone HAS to farm mats for all of this stuff. Gear doesn't really drop in the dungeons, just the recipes to make them. I have seen gear drop from NPCs during certain events, like when 2nd internals were unlocked on my server, but other than that it isn't common. That's the price you pay for having a player driven economy, even though it's thrown out of whack from gold purchased from both Snail and the usual f2p gold spammers.
I'm sure an AoW White Knight will come dashing in here and telling me I'm wrong, but that is from my experience when I played.
"If I offended you, you needed it" -Corey Taylor
Those were my experiences as well. I am trying to figure out how people claim this to be as sand box as SWG, Eve, etc. It has sand box elements, I agree but it is a very restricted sand box in my opinion. I was asking the questions to see what I had missed, and evidently thus far I have missed nothing.
To be clear, I am not hating the game, I am not a fanboi of the game either, I am just trying to discern why people call it a sand box, when it clearly is not. It is a game with Sand Box elements, yes, but not a sand box in my opinion.
Thank you for your post.
If you want a new idea, go read an old book.
In order to be insulted, I must first value your opinion.
1) Depends on what you consider player driven economy. Any game is basically player driven economy.
If you are thinking between the lines of market driven economy, I would say No, it isn't.
There are too many obstacles in production and trade system to create anything meaningfull one could consider market driven economy.
2) You do not really build any structures, also guild "territory" is an instance...
4) The story is just a part of tutorial and includes 1st chapter only.
The game is heavily focused on PVP and I guess that is a reason why people mistake it for sandbox, which is a common sight on these boards. I guess it spins from passion for PVP and when a game is offering less restrictions in that regard, it gives them false illusion of "freedom", thus they consider the game to be a sandbox.
/shrugs
You know I keep hearing that sandbox term tossed around but what game really is a sandbox anyway? All games have limitations as to what you can and can not do. So what differentiates the sandbox that you are talking about OP, from a game that simply has so many things in it to do that you never have to focus in any particular direction on any particular day if you don't want to?
Age of Wushu has character building, i.e. levelling. And it's not really levelling in as much as it is developing one particular buff in a fashion so that you take less damage (and subsequently have more time to use your offensive skills) than you would if you didn't cultivate that particular buff. The cultivation of that buff is not necessary in order to win a fight, but it definitely helps, and so in this way you can call it levelling.
Age of Wushu has crafting. But it's not just get this recipe make this weapon. There are a lot of variables and a lot of hidden easter eggs within the game that allow for one crafter to create a completely different item than another. So yes, there can be that Hatori Hanzo guy who makes better swords than anyone else just like there can be a ton of guys who all make the same swords, armor, medicines, foods, and poisons.
Along with crafting comes harvesting, and again, it is a simple enough thing to pick up but not so simple when you figure out that there are a lot less resources, almost all the time, then there are people looking for them. This makes the controlling of resources, in a fully open pvp world, quite sandboxy when it comes to the true use of that term.
Artistic skills are about as varied and unexplained as anything in the game. We still don't know exactly what all of these skills, painter, singer, wequi player, etc.... are going to end up doing.
Likewise market skills, Begging, Divination, are also mysteries. Someone told me once that because I was good at begging that the city would actually tax me less on my real money sales.
Real money plays a great role in the exchange of goods and services, and that's about as sandboxy as you can get. Sure, it's pay to win to a certain respect, but it still comes down to who is going to pay the most, and there is no telling yet if that model is even really true. I lived in that game for weeks as a free player beating up a lot of the VIP's (paid accounts) that I came into contact with, and this was simply because I was more social, more skilled, and willing to go out and extend myself in more directions in order to learn more about the game. In this way, as long as they keep the content coming and keep things somewhat a mystery, the game provides a HUGE amount of satisfaction because you can still, as a smart player, get in there and take your place among those willing to spend a little more cash.
There are politics in this game, laws, cops, and robbers. There are random jobs like escort missions, assassin missions, missions to rob escorts, and plain old area quests.
People say that you don't have to quest, and that is true, but you don't have to NOT quest either because there are benefits to doing that also. Then there are territories to manage, guilds to manage, guild houses to build.
There are training options such as "How am I going to train today?" that make a real difference in the growth of your character,
But most of all there are factions and morality marks that define how you, the individual, are reacted to by your environment. You can choose to be good or evil in Age of Wushu. Chivalrous or insane. You can spend your day walking around setting slaves free like Moses, or you can spend your day kidnapping them and selling them into bondage. You can make it your personal quest to stop kidnappers, or you can travel to some parts unknown, get a job doing some menial task like sweeping the floor or tending bar, and spend the majority of your day creating paintings that you might later be able to sell in order to buy some really neat stuff.
So what I am saying here is, what is really sandboxy? Is it the ability to do nothing or is it the ability to do a whole LOTTA different stuff if you want to, because if it's the ability to do a whole lot of different stuff, then Age of Wushu is the place to be.
Things I left out. Random encounters, club challenges, forbidden zones, arena battles (team or man vs man), guild raids, surprise guild attacks (where everyone votes on who is going to be the biggest problem this week and we all band together on a specific day and attack them). School wars, script stealing events., spying, school patrol.
Age of Wushu is like the freaking Kings Dominion of MMO's right now.
And it's greatest selling point is that no one save for the developers, and perhaps a couple of really savvy beta testers really knows exactly what the truth is about how it's all supposed to work right now.
It is a mystery, a lot like life. So what exactly is sandboxy in comparison to that? Because I can not build a cart or wagon at this moment does not mean that I will never be able to, it's that kind of game. No one even knows the answer to that question to answer it because it takes a deep dive into all that is there in order to figure that out.
Hope that this has been of some help. I am really enjoying the game and so if I can talk a million people into playing I will because more people will only make it a better experience for us all.
Oh wait, there is also individual faction in the game, meaning that each and every NPC in the game has the chance of being some unlockable form of quest or item based entirely on how they feel about you today. And there are literally thousands of NPC's just walking around.
You walk buy some guy why you are doing something totally unrelated to him and suddenly you see these blue plus signs rise off of his head as though you just made a friend in the Sims. You go back to him and say hello every once in a while, maybe drink some wine with him and suddenly he is telling you some stuff that you didn't know that is leading you somewhere where only his friends know to go.
LIkewise there is gossip which is this whole entire mystery questline that no one really understands.
So yeah, there is a lot.
My definition of sand box is what you describe, plus the ability to build and destroy. What you describe sounds to me like a very free theme park.
Again, I don't dislike the game, I played it, I beta tested it, and I think it is a wonderful game. I got no where near the amount of fun you get out of it, but to each their own. My questions weren't about play it don't play it, hate it/love it. My issue is with the term sandbox. It isn't a sandbox. In my opinion. When I think sand box I am talking about SWG. Player economy, housing, cities, the players built and destroyed within the sand box.
Anyway, I am glad you enjoy the game and thank you for taking the time to answer.
If you want a new idea, go read an old book.
In order to be insulted, I must first value your opinion.
Hey thanks, and no problem. I actually didn't get as much out of SWG as a lot of people, but then I was playing (who knows what) when that game came out, and by the time I got around to it the dreaded initials had already happened.
I did play Vanguard though, and that was a pretty sandboxy kind of game in the way that you say you like it. We were not worthy of that game in my opinion however. And all anyone ever did with it was grind to the top and raid the warehouse. All the things you said, boats, buildable and destroyable buildings,diplomacy, etc....etc....and no one utilized it. So I am willing to try to gather everyone to the closest thing I can find to a happy medium if for no other reason than I can see the potential in this thing.
It's a bot driven economy and a player driven economy.
There are about 10 bots for every player, there are even bot guilds. Nodes are static. Quests are static. People bot out the resources and drive the prices insanely low.
This means that raw resources are going to be severely under-priced and the crafted materials severely overpriced.
When you craft an item the game randomly assigns properties to it. To get a decent item, you'll have to craft dozens upon dozens of the item. If you want to enhance the item you will have to deal with two other crafting professions and again get random enhancements (depends on some factors, some enhancements are predictable)
This boils down to lots of junk items that can barely be given away (emei chat is full of daggers nobody wants..for free) and rare items that have astronomical prices.
Drop the next-gen marketing and people will argue if the game itself has merit.
The problem of AoW crafting is that the product itself is worthless, thus materials needed to produce that item are worthless as well.
Only value of any gear is made of enhancements and that is where the real costs come in - liang spent on enhancing, boosted by randomness of the enhancing process.
The system works great as a money sink but kills product chain value. You won't build any solid market economy on random number generator because supply-demand mechanics will be severely hindered in such system.
I disagree. From top to bottom all items in the chain have value. You know that 500 wen for lead? I buy 200 of those a couple times a day so that I can craft my items.
The person mining that ore it making good silver. From top to bottom the economy is alive. You don't get stuff for free in AoW. you have to work for it.
Oh really? For how much do you sell fully enhanced brawn/sta piece of gear you made of his lead?
Brwn stam gear? probably about 700L for a ring. That's about 10 stacks of lead to newbie miner.
Oh dear...
So you pay 1D just for lead to make an item you sell for 700L? :-)
Also, 2k units of ore at 4 units per cycle and 8 minutes of respawn time on node is about 65 hours of mining.
[mod edit]
The bottom is owned by bots. You buy lead, you are feeding the gold farmers/botters.
The main money makers for non-botters are selling scripts/skills, and selling high level rare armor and weapons. Commodity professions like chef, herbalist, poisonmaker, don't seem to get much traction despite apparently requiring more time input.
Drop the next-gen marketing and people will argue if the game itself has merit.
Cooking and herbalism and poisons are strange. I lteraly have a bag full of food and drugs. I just ran out of Jade Dew, I'm like a junkie. I don't by my drugs and food off the market though, I buy from a couple guildies and poisons from a friend.
They make good money off me, 100L here 200 there. I also have farmers who send me Chinese yams, so that I can send to my herbalist, and my cook.
I eat/take them all day, as you know one hour each. I don't need my dealers daily though, once every week or so.