Looking to branch out

Comments

• Aganazer Member Posts: 1,319

  April 2009

  You might want to check out the free trial for City of Villains. I think you may like the variety of character types and how they develop. The combat is also very strategic once you build up a few powers.
• Quizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,524

  April 2009

  Your crafting comment confuses me, as you make it sound as though WoW and Vanguard are at opposite ends of the spectrum on crafting.  WoW's "something stupid to grind levels in" system could arguably be at one end (and quite a crowded end at that).  Vanguard's crafting system has quite a bit more to it than that (which isn't saying much), but isn't terribly deep either.

  So ignoring crafting, I'm going to say Guild Wars.  It does have a free trial.  It's a one time purchase, not a monthly fee, so while it isn't completely free, it's still cheaper than most pay to play games.

  Guild Wars ran all right on the computer I bought seven years ago, though I had to turn settings way down.  If you have 1 GB of memory and aren't using Vista, you should have plenty for it.  If you have Vista, you may need 2 GB of memory.

  I can't tell you what the customer service is like in Guild Wars.  I've never needed to use it.

  Class design is definitely the best I've ever seen.  There aren't any redundant classes.  Nor are there hybrid classes that, whatever they're trying to do, they won't do as well as some other class.  There aren't canonical archetypes, either.  Every class has its own special uses, and for every class except perhaps assassin, there will be times when you'd like that particular class, at least if you know what you're doing.  An assassin can be plenty useful if you get a player, I guess; the hero AI doesn't work very well for the class, though.  But don't worry that you'll be spamming endlessly saying you need a monk; you can bring a hero (AI party member) of whatever class you happen to need.

  The variety isn't merely from one class to another, but there's a lot of variety within a class.  Any class could easily come up with half a dozen good builds, no two of which have more than a couple of skills in common.  And you do need to use your whole skillbar, as nearly everything has a long enough cooldown that you can't just spam it.

  Combat is pretty fast paced.  If you're playing as an interrupt ranger or mesmer, you could even call it twitch-based, though it really isn't unless you're interrupting.  Default attack speed ranges from 1.33 to 1.75 seconds, except for bows, which are slower. Most skills activate either instantly or pretty quickly, with only a relative handful of skills taking more than 2 seconds to activate.  In many battles, the first mob you kill may come after about 5 seconds, and relatively few battles will drag on past a minute or so.  There's virtually no downtime between battles, as you refill energy (equivalent to mana in some other games) quickly during battle, and once the mobs are mostly dead, you're refilling as you finish the battle.  There is a good bit of strategy in picking out builds before starting a mission, but once combat starts, it's too fast paced to really devise strategies on the fly.

  The game basically doesn't have a crafting system.  The crafting system consists of, you go get materials, you bring them and some gold to an NPC, and he crafts what you want for you.  That's a better crafting system than WoW on the basis that it isn't a nuisance, but if you're looking for a deep crafting system, Guild Wars doesn't have it.  That you describe Vanguard's crafting system as being overdone makes it sound like that's not what you're after, though.

  And there is one other big advantage to Guild Wars:  it's a better game right now than whatever you're waiting for is likely to ever be.

   

   
• judepipi Member Posts: 5

  April 2009

  you can try shadow of legend and guilds war, both are f2p mmorpg games and feature pvp if you like it. they also have extensive crafting and huge map to explore. massive quantities of particular types of enemies to kill, making grinding or questing enjoyable and lucrative. hope will help u.
• Farrox Member UncommonPosts: 43

  April 2009

  Well, I think Vanguuard's system was very deep - not quite overdone, but it definitely was at a different level than any other mainstream MMO I've had the luxury of playing. It was a whole sphere of the game. There were whole sets of crafting armor/clothing that boosted any number of crafting specific stats. There were three different continental styles of crafting, and if you were crazy enough to devote the time to it, you could master all three. You had to have a certain number of countering items when you crafted as each step of crafting could produce various problems that would weaken you as a crafter or lower the quality of the item you were making (splinter in your hands, bad materials, overheating the forge, etc) and even with the best gear and a wide variety of items to counter errors, sometimes bad luck would net you a long series of errors turning your powerful item to an unsellable C grade item.

  Compare that to Horizons, being my middle of the road, which had a very neat gathering/material processing system, but was ultimately - gather materials A and B, throw on enchant C, profit.

  I have yet to play a game with a crafting system like Vanguard's, which oh so gladly threw me over a haystack and had its way with me.

  Now I'll grant you, there are probably deeper games out there. Saga of Ryzom definitely has a great craft system where you can combine any number of harvested/dropped materials to make an item unique. But in my eyes, Vanguard can definitely represent the upper tier of crafting systems, at least in mainstream games.

  Anyhoo, off that tangent, tried DOMO and Rappelz. Blah to both of those. Will download a trial of GW since you both suggested it.

  ~Farrox
• Quizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,524

  April 2009

  Most of what you describe about Vanguard's crafting system is merely more things to level in.  If WoW's crafting system made you grind levels up to 5000 in each of 10 different things in order to craft the best items, would that make it a deep crafting system?  Hardly; it would only be a much grindier one.

  Vanguard's crafting system is, at its core, a single crafting puzzle with a bunch of different skins on it.  How well you do at that one crafting puzzle is dominated by level and gear, far more so than what you actually do in the puzzle itself.   Now, you might not want anything more than that.  You cite "mainstream" games, and crafting is certainly a niche activity.  But having played A Tale in the Desert, which has a crafting system that you could break into a dozen disjoint parts, each of which would by itself have more depth than the entire crafting sphere in Vanguard, it just seems wrong to me to look at Vanguard as being one end of the spectrum.
• Farrox Member UncommonPosts: 43

  April 2009

  I yield Quiz

  Vanguard is at the far end of the spectrum, but only in terms of preparation/grind posing as complexity, heh