Instead of writing a BIG WALL of TEXT (tm) I'm just gonna list down what features that I think is cool and what I think needs improvement and what I don't like. I realize the game is still in open beta so there's a ton of promised features not in the game yet like the crafting system.
What I like about Asda Story:
- The graphics of the game is pretty and anime style which some people might like or some might not.
- The skill system is pretty customizable and allows a semi-free form of building your character. In closest term it's kinda like WoW's talent system. Each job has 3 trees that specializes in certain aspect of that job. Example: Mages can be healer type, nuker type or debuffer/buffer type. You can mix and match or focus on one tree.
- The soulmate system is pretty neat basically having a soul mate encourages you and a friend to play together and doing so has tangible benefits such as a slight boosts to your attacking power. Leveling up your soulate relationship also grants you some soulmate exclusive skill which is useful when you two are in a party together.
- A lot of quest in the game. Don't expect really great quest tho as most are just GoFer quest or Kill X get Y quests. But there's definitely a lot of them. Quest actually rewards you with significant amount of XP and some rare loot.
- Exchange marketplace, it's pretty simple, easy to use and pretty much like WoW's auction house system. There's nothing too remarkable about it but non the less it's pretty useful and a great addition to the game.
- The world is very colorful and feels like it's like something from Disneyland. No wonder they call this game Kingdom Hearts Online. I think this is a positive thing coz I don't like worlds that are too gray. Although some areas are sooo bright and yellow-ish that I had to adjust my monitor's contrast/brightness settings.
- I like the avatar's designs and clothing/costumes. Hey I am a person that likes bright shiny things :P
- The mining feature is interesting, you basically get a shovel and starts digging you can get interesting things from scrolls, soulstones, gems and a whole lot of crafting materials from digging. Upside is it could spawn a new wave of hobby called digging syndrome.
What I don't like about ASDA Story:
- The controls which is completely click to move with no option of having WASD/Directional Key movement. I think a modern 3D game pretty much need to have WASD/Direction Keys movement.
- Only 1 hot bar and you switch around different hot bar using the F1 keys. I really wish there's at least two hot bars showing at any given time at leas make it an option but I think they probably did that so the interface won't be cluttered.
- Differentiation of male and female armor. We'll that's probably just me but I don't like having to watch out if the armor I'm about to buy is for male or female only. The only sign which shows if it's male or female only is the ( M ) or ( F ) tag on the item's name. I wish there's something on the item descrption that turns red if it's not usable by your character's sex. I realize it's probably inherent in the game's initial design to separate both male and female armor.
- I have an Nvidia 9600 GT in SLi mode but sometimes the game stutters and freezes momentarily for me. I think it's probably due to the lag (it's open beta after all) or lack of game client optimization.
- The game does support widescreen but not all common widescreen resolution. I had to edit the config files to use my monitors 1360 x 768 resolution.
- From lvl 1-10 the levels are pretty easy to acquire once you hit 10 you suddenly get hit with the massive grind factor that is so prevalent in asian F2P games (I loathe to use the degatory terms "asian grinders"). Doing quests can somewhat ease this grinding.
- The game uses gameguard. I'm not sure if it's activated yet but looks like it's not yet activated for the open beta. But personally I loathe games that uses gameguard due to past negative experience where gameguard was thrashing my computer system and it took a lot of work and research to figure out how to remove this diabolical piece of software.
Comments
Every thing u say is right, every thing, but for me the oly annoying thing in this game is probably grinding at later level.
i havent seen bugs yet since im still lvl 18. let get claim and count how many games dont have bugs, rly few, rly rly few. there is no such game as no bugs, not even once, in a million years they have to get at least 1 once in a while.
and rly does it mater walking with WASD in the end ur just going to stop when u attack so there is no point in it.
i don't know about much of technical stuff so i will skip tht.
the constant game lag is due to the SERIOUS issue this game has with bots which is causing this game to lag constantly even at 1am in the morning the game is pretty crowded. This game would be great if they found some way to stop those bots.
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Crap. I was just about sold on your review, until bots were mentioned. Strange how many companies don't seem to give 2 shit's worth about their game going to hell in a handbasket by letting farmers and botters run rampant and ruin the economy.
Edit: Well, I gave it a go. Doesn't seem that bad, there's only 1 server but 9 channels, and I figure most of the crud would be on ch1 so of course I avoided that one.
Seems fairly sparsely populated (no pk/pvp?), which IMO is a good thing when you're trying out a new game. I only encountered 1 bot (could've been a reeealy antisocial person, but he would've told me to shut up or something at least), but since most people don't really talk it's kind of hard to judge.
Nobody mentioned stats are allocated automatically as you level, this may be the reason not many are playing. You can allocate your skills though... however, there are 3 skills trees for each class type (warrior, archer, mage), and most of the later skills have fairly high prerequisites on the same tree, so you'll pretty much be stuck on one skilltree unless you dilute your skills across the trees a lot (not good).
Given that I live on the other side of the world (GMT+8) I've kinda expected MMOs to be a bit laggy, but I don't see why they should since SOME games can pull it off fairly well. For example Flyff is hardly laggy at all, in fact I can play a hit-and-run AoE type there. However most other games lag like crap. I think it's mostly due to the game companies not having enough b/w.
Asda is sort-of in the middle grounds: there's lag, but it's tolerable. I won't be aoeing or hit-and-running though, unfortunately (it's bad enough to discourage that). Plus I noticed it's pretty easy to lose mobs chasing you, they return to their spawn spot after a mere couple seconds' chase.
Grind seems quite okay, still doing around 1%+ per kill at mobs my level around level 20. Killspeed isn't too fast though, actually it's pretty slow, and you'll want to haul a bunch of pots around. Natural regen while sitting down is fine early on but it's not fast enough.
There's a little skill animation lag, and you don't transition immediately from one skill to another when pressing the hotkeys, but it's bearable. Still, the overall kill time is pretty slow, plus the walkspeed could really use some increasing.
Overall not bad, I'll probably dabble in Asda Story for a while more, but it really doesn't offer anything new except for a couple of minor novelties, like the pathfinding and digging.
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