A Forsaken World Review

oldfwplayer

Forsaken World, from screenshots, is a relatively appealing game.  The first MMORPG to draw me in since Ragnarok Online.  Unfortunately, the flaws of the game are enough to make anybody with an IQ greater than potato look elsewhere.

 

The mechanics of the game, as far as gear is concerned, are not the most difficult to learn.  Obviously, purse defeats everything, but that's likely to be expected in any F2P game.  This is somewhat balanced by the fact that defense in this game is nothing like what I saw in Ragnarok Online, which is to say defense in FW is nearly useless.  What truly balances PVP is their 'Wrath' system which allows your defensive abilities to simulate effectiveness.  To build great DPS, one must stack high base attack, high 'mastery', high Crit Damage, decent Crit Chance and the ability to maneuver yourself over 'Wrath Orbs' in a fight.  To form a proper defense you need to stack the reverse of all of the above and have a shield (or two) or most classes above level 60 (max 80) will kill you pretty quick, with max wrath (= 100% damage.)

 

The other option is to stack Evasion, which can effectively be stacked higher than the max possible accuracy you can achieve.  Unfortunately, besides assassins which can use a self-buff that gives them 100% accuracy for a few seconds, building enough accuracy to hit some of the top evasion players means dramatically weakening your character in most other areas, besides the most costly. ($$$)  Typically, Very High Accuracy players must rely on max level Gems and Max Mastery, arguably the most expensive mechanics in the game, to have any kind of damage output.

 

The greatest problems with the game, however, have nothing to do with the mechanics of the game.  The technologies, such as the 3D engine, are so old that multi-core processors are completely unsupported.  This means that only the latest and greatest processors can possibly hope to achieve greater than 5FPS even during some of the smallest battles, unless you turn effects down so low you can't even tell which skills enemies are using.  (Alt + K)  What I mean by this, is that only processors that can achieve supreme single-core performance, such as an i7 920 at 4.2ghz or a later generation is required to hit in the neighborhood of 15-20FPS in a merely mildly congested setting.

 

Now, PW is implementing something called 'ARC' (which is sure to use up CPU resources so valuable that it can only be compared to real estate in Tokyo), which I think is meant to alleviate the fact that file integrity checking in the built-in patcher.exe client never got it right.  This means that every answer to a problem with patching or corrupt files requires a complete reinstallation.  If you play this game, you will find yourself required to have a backup copy on an alternate harddrive.

 

Their technical support is nonexistent and their forum moderators are constantly making excuses for why this or that has yet to be implemented.  They spend most of their time deleting complaints on their forum for the sake of SEO. (Search Engine Optimization)  90% of the players left in the game have over $2000.00 in the game and a majority of which admit they'd have left long ago otherwise.  Despite the amount of money invested in the game by players, the server has connectivity issues such as lag and downtime, content is updated at a snail's pace and engine bugs will NEVER be fixed.  ALL of the 3D technologies are rendered by the CPU, which means all of which must be disabled for PVP.

 

RATING: 3/10

rojoArcueid

horrible engine. I would have played it longer if they had developed it using the Cryptic engine but i think at that time cryptic wasnt part of PWE yet. I liked the game (played beta and post launch, a lot) but never reached high level (kept making alts and stuff). A lot of people say its Pay to Win on the PvP side but i never did pvp there so i dont know.

 

Anyway, the engine (same engine and same problems that PWI and Jade Dynasty have) is the main reason i have no desire to install it again.

Po_gg

Originally posted by rojo6934

horrible engine. I would have played it longer if they had developed it using the Cryptic engine but i think at that time cryptic wasnt part of PWE yet.

Is it? I'm curious, not trolling or anything I first tried FW about a year ago, and it was quickly turned out it's not my cup of tea. And as far as I can remember, it didn't looked like a Cryptic one. I mean in Neverwinter, right at the first beta I could see (I guess I even posted on it) which ideas and mechanisms are from CO or STO.

But maybe I left FW way too quickly...

(PWE got Cryptic in 2011 I think)

oldfwplayer

just a quick follow-up.

yea, the engine is the greatest hindrance to the game, without a doubt.  there other problems, mostly to do with staff.  most downtime occurs during weekends and they don't have so much as a low level network engineer on standby during that time.  this means we've experienced weekends where the servers would die, possibly getting stuck in a reboot loop of sorts from friday until monday.  all the major pvp events occur on weekends, too.  they've even done things like release items in their cash shop by accident on a thursday and people would spend lots of money specifically for those items.  then, that sunday the server would go down followed by a server rollback on monday.

all the content is developed in china, but the communication between their chinese and international counterparts is slim.  so what happens is that the international side doesn't know how to implement new content correctly.  In china, they rolled out 'cross-server' pvp.  it came to us in a content update and broke pvp entirely because they didn't (and still do not) know how to implement it.  they are saying time-zones is one of the problems because of literally, the time.  like, the game server clocks don't run on UTC; they are literally on local time.  i'm sure once they solve this dilemma they'll realize that they also need things like additional middle-man servers, etc.

If i had to guess, in china the servers share a single database whereas in the US each server has it's own database.  which makes sense, really, but i suspect they don't have any kind of database architects with the knowledge to make an intermediary server interact with the other databases, etc.

eitherway, the technical problems with this game are absurd and numerous.  and the gameplay really isn't exciting enough to look past these problems.

i don't think i've interacted with a company so deserving of a class action lawsuit before.  they pretty much just take our money and go sailing or something.  some of these people should be behind bars.