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Mini Review of Archage
Scores are based on a scale of 1-10
Mob Placement 0.1 – The mob placement when I got in game was insanely terrible. It was downright lazy. Just a cluster of the same mob all in one place so you could just keep hopping down the trail and completing the quests.
Game world 2 – the minute I stepped in the game world I knew where I was….another horrible FTP game that has nothing to offer. The game world is plain and boring…there is nothing that stood out whatsoever.
Character and creation 4 – you get to do some pretty good work on the face, but nothing else. No height adjuster so everyone is the same size. Character movement is typical of a FTP grinder and the combat graphics aren’t much different. Feels very stiff
Combat 4 – Combat animations are standard fare, sometimes overdone, never underdone. You cannot avoid attacks by movement which is something almost every new MMO has installed. The issue is that this new design feature that most mmo’s now use seems like an upgrade and one that should be implemented in any new game if you are a good developer, so it really feels like lazy design rather than deliberate strategy.
As a whole I had heard so many good things about this game, but the minute I stepped into the game world I felt as though I’d been fleeced. The game was reminiscent of any other Asian grinder with no real rhyme or reason to anything, poor implementation of everything and lazy design implementation. On top of all this there is a cash shop that will be needed as seen with Labor points, which happen to be something that should automatically set an alarm off in anyone’s head.
Did I play long enough to actually be able to make a fair review? Yes, the game wasn’t just “not my thing”, or “good but not great”, it was downright terrible. Didn’t matter how long I tortured myself for (I did it for 3 hours). This game should be used for interrogation purposes.
Comments
I literally could not keep playing...only other time this happened is when I played RYL....no other game has ever been so intolerable to play
I love people claiming the "A" game that is ALREADY RELEASED outside of the U.S. is still in it's "early" stages.
*Slow clap.*
RAWR
To us it is an old client/build. So yes it's still early whatever way you slice it
*returns the slow clap*
on the other hand I did say any game if you actually read so I was speaking in general terms not just AA. You see ppl all the time making so called "reviews" of games by playing very little of it. That's all I'm saying... As for AA, how is the class system generic when you literally have over 100 combinations? That's unheard of In this very stale time of mmos
Mob placement it is obvious they added clusters of mobs for quest. I would agree that is negative. But no more so then any other major mmo that came out in the last 8yrs they all do that. 7/10 at the worse because litteraly every mmo with quest hubs has done this.
Game World: You have not explored much of it there are some good looking areas. I would give the world a 6/10. There is nothing that over the top, but it is also not horribly designed either. Not sure what plain and boring is. The bigger issue I would say that did not mention is the player created structures and AA allowing people to input graphics. People adding thing to joke around really break the imursion of the game. Aka a house with a massive troll face for example. The swamp and some forrest look great, but then there is too many areas that look barren and void of creativity. The other positive is you can effect the world, plant forrest, clear forrest. It is also seemless, no zones or loading.
Combat is a 6.5 to a 7. The main complaint on everyone with combat is it is not action combat. That is not an advancement in the genre... it is a different playstyle completly. Compairing the 2 would be like saying the action combat sucks because Call of Duty has how many million ppl and this game does not play like it. You cannot downgrade a mmo because it does not have the interface you like. It does what it is designed to do well. Action combat for me and many many others is a major negative to a mmo.
But on Combat in AA is meh. You can mix and match skills. Attack animations I feel are very lacking. There is not much group focus in attacks it is all solo. I have not noticed any kind of resistances and weaknesses of mobs so it lacks dept it could have. With the recent change to MP you have to choose your attacks or you run out of mp and it takes awhile to recharge. This drastically slows combat down if you want to not burn yourself out every other mob. Combat in AA is not about spaming rotations and fast paced attacks and dodging. It is much older style of combat. The positive parts are the effects of using cross class skills to improve/modify attacks. And the ability to litteraly do everything without the need for an alt.
Character and Creation. 7. You can modify the characters to an extent. The game limits you to making something that is not absurd. Example a 2foot tall midget with a bobble head. I say it is enough. Could of used a few more races. They are working on them but they will not be at launch.
The problem with this review is you didn't review the game. You reviewed things you disliked. Nothing about the economy, trade, ships, pvp, endgame, dungeons, gathering, party play, rifts , wars, crafting system, mount system, quest, lore, story, housing, farming, monster capture.
You titled this as mini review and you are right you reviewed less then 1/10th the game. But it should be titled things I dislike about AA not a review of AA.
So what did you do other than quest? I can't gather much info from you other than the questing is boring and the mobs are poorly placed? You talked nothing about the game's features. I don't really care about animations and character creation, it's all about the features. I've not played the game so maybe there is something very disturbing about the opening few quests or something.
Edit: Good review by the poster directly above me. I would think a seamless open world would be a massive positive.
We knew these sorts of reviews would come in after the beta. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
I get what you're saying about reviewing a game based on the early levels, but Archeage early on presents itself especially poorly.
Some games like all these Western cash grab MMOs are pretty much the same thing from start to finish whereas Archeage plays very differently once a player has some experience in game and knows what they are doing.
It is fair to blame our impatience but we have to keep in mind that we as players have been conditioned by a decade of horse manure MMORPGs which start out bad and end worse that this sort of first impression can be reliable. The last few MMORPGs i've played including one released this year I hated early on and I still hated it at max level.
I guess all i'm saying is, Archeage is to blame at least a little. If it doesn't show its strengths early. And it has a lot of strengths to show. That is a failing of the game. These guys with their horrible first impressions and bad reviews where they obviously don't really understand what the game is about can't be fully blamed. We knew the weekend beta wasn't enough to understand this game's strengths.
if you could not keep playing long enough to do a review, maybe you should have skipped the review and just gave your opinion, that the game isn't very good (to you) and you didn't play long enough to really offer much more than it "wasn't your cup of tea."
one of my favorite MMOs was Lineage 2, so a lot of what you didn't like was the way L2 was set up....anyways its F2P, so I wont lose anything by trying it out for myself.
At the end of the day, IMO, you didn't play long enough for me to take your "review" seriously.
but, thanks anyways.
"Combat is a 6.5 to a 7. The main complaint on everyone with combat is it is not action combat. That is not an advancement in the genre... it is a different playstyle completly. Compairing the 2 would be like saying the action combat sucks because Call of Duty has how many million ppl and this game does not play like it. You cannot downgrade a mmo because it does not have the interface you like. It does what it is designed to do well. Action combat for me and many many others is a major negative to a mmo."
I think you misinterpreted what I was talking about. FFXIV is by no means an action MMO, but you can move out of the way of any stronger skill being used on you by mobs and players. I do not mean action combat. Im not a fan of action combat.
When you've played as many mmos as most of us have, especially the OP (You can tell in his writing)... you can judge a mmo on a trailer. Like you said... watching a 2 minute trailer of a movie, once you've watched enough you know if its gonna be bad or good.
GG Transformers.
Thanks, I appreciate that. I've played at least 50 MMO's...probably more. If you want a list I can give you it...it starts at EQ, AO and DAOC and probably most every other MMO after those. I been there done that...it's very easy to tell what a good, great or horrible MMO is. This, unfortunately, goes in horrible. I wish it didnt....sounded very promising....but was baffled when I got in game.
Im in the same boat. I couldnt log off. I guess different strokes....
Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
George Washington
AND to be honest I didn't even hear bad talk about the game in zone chat (odd for a beta). Everyone I talked to in game were saying how much they are enjoying it.
I think these forums are now a place to complain rather then discuss the game
I seriously hope you are not lying and just ignorant.
You can avoid attacks by moving. You have to "move".
Go to any ranged mob and engage it and essentially run in a circle around it and all its attacks will miss you.
As for melee, if you get out of the way in time by "moving" you can miss an attack.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
This is true. I spent tons of time dueling melee vs melee and there were many times that I would win with hardly a scratch on me....range vs range is a bit different but that because of tab targeting....but yes you can avoid attacks easily most of the time
bro what u described is literaly action based mechanics which is were ur actions in the game have an affect on the fight such as moving skill based mechanics is when u press a button to activate a skill that blocks an attack reduces an attack redirects an attack etc
To be honost I am actually suprised seeing this "minireview" coming from a experianced MMORG player. But it coulde be just me thinking due to experiance you would have know not to judge a MMORPG when you're still in the learning curve....which seems to be at about level 30ish when it opens up. Yeah yeah a game needs to be 100% compeling in the first minutes....From experiance I know MMORPG's are not your typical "games" There for take time epecialy in a MMORPG that is more sandbox natured.
I saw this same behaviour in SWG where people only understood doing quest aka being guided but ignored most of what the game really was about.
OP don't misunderstand me in saying you're wrong about your feeling about the game. It's just I expect abit more info even in a minireview especially from a vet. MMORPG player.
From my limited experience during beta the game felt cheap. Getting to higher levels will not fix this.
Everything about the game screamed CHEAP! The world design is terrible and completely devoid of detail. It really fails to impress. I tend to agree with the OP, that this game really feels like a garbage F2P game. The interface was horrible and the minimap took half my screen even at the smallest option. Mobs were just placed there in the most unnatural way. They were just like clusters of the same mob with nothing in between just like the OP said.
But the actual world design is the worst. There is grass and trees and not much more detail to it.
Overall my first impression of the game was that it is a cheap Korean MMO which has the worst and most retarded one liner quests I have ever seen. The quests were not even worth reading at all. And this is saying much given that each quest has like 2-3 lines of text lol so not that much to read anyway.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
I played the game for about 8 minutes total before I uninstalled. I was not having fun and the disco light dancers completely killed any interest I had. If a game is not fun on login, it is failing at the single purpose of playing game. To be entertained.
Back to EQ1 and SWTOR I guess.
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If it takes a vet to sniff out an aberration such as this game 30+ levels, then maybe you a good threshold for pain....I do not. On top of that, if I had a dollar for everytime someone tried to defend a game by saying "you need to play it more" I'd be a millionaire. When someone says this to me, it's a clear indication that I should never play that game again.
You nailed it! Cheap is the best way to describe it