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[Review] RaiderZ: Equally Fun & Frustrating
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
We've been putting Perfect World Entertainment's RaiderZ to the test over the past several weeks. Today we offer up our final review. Check it out and then leave us your thoughts in the comments.
Graphically, RaiderZ is great. The engine that is being used provides great visuals, although some elements can seem a bit off sometimes. Zones are well crafted and each one has its own theme which provides for some variety when crossing through to the next zone. Much like Tera scenery, characters are very vibrant and colorful. Each armor set, weapon and area are all blasting with vibrancy, making good use of the games "anime-ish" art style, standing quite highly amongst free-to-play MMO's in the Aesthetics department. The UI is very simplistic, I didn't encounter any problems with it. All in all very easy to navigate through menus and the like.
Read more of George Dimmock's RaiderZ: Equally Fun & Frustrating.
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Comments
Forgot to comment about the gear dupping that ruinned the game economy? And what about glitched characthers killing bosses in one blow? Forgot to comment about that either?
Terrible review.
I agree. The game is good, just not anything I would make my main game. But I find it enjoyable.
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"you are like the world revenge on sarcasm, you know that?"
One of those great lines from The Secret World
I would have given less for aesthetics.
Sure things look good but it's a hodge podge mess. You have a sort of medievi armor and sword thign and then some of the armor looks a little anime bondage and then you have ships and a town that look like the 1700. At one point I just stopped as the ship I was looking at just didn't seem to belong.
It's just a mess of good looking stuff. For some that won't be an issue but to me it seemed a bit junky.
There are some nice things like the crafting showing up in the quest tracker and a list of what beasts drop what parts. It essentially felt like a cheaply made Tera but without some of the more cohesive elements. I took it off my computer. However, I can see some people enjoying it.
I liked how sometimes the monsters would drop parts which you could pick up and use as a weapon during that fight. That was a bit novel. I also liked how sometimes health powerups would drop so that you could get into the next fight without waiting too long.
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
@DukeDu
Or how about given time, and through supply and demand, the prices will normalize. Cry elsewhere.
Well said.... Heres hoping Capcom makes a Monster Hunter MMO,.. Wishful thinking i guess
Actually it's a pretty decent review. It's about the game, so it isn't necessarily focusing on something happened a week ago and hopefully will get some solution as we speak (there's a maintenance right now, exploits are fixed previously, and if all is going well exploiters will be banned too. Or not.)
True, the game and the economy is not in a top shape right now... but it doesn't effect the mechanics, or the gfx, etc., all the parts that are detailed in the review.
I have only one problem with the review:
So, I'm not quite get it when George wrote:
It's also worth mentioning that as of now, there's no competitive PVP at this time outside of duels. Players looking for that sort of action, won't find it here. But whether PVP is important or not is purely subjective: just note it's lacking in Raiderz.
I wish... since I don't pvp. Too bad that's not true.
There IS a mandatory open pvp area, which is sadly pretty populated. It's not rare to see a 10vs10 clash there (or a 5vs1 gankfest...) It's strange you didn't noticed, so far the luckiest pve guy I know was ganked there "only" 6-8 times until he finished the questing in that area. I wasn't that lucky, I didn't even counted in the end my deaths, I was glad if they were gracious enough to let me use / talk / pick up my quest object and only after that ganked me... At least this way I could advance the quest.
He wrote about endgame, I thought he went to 35, that's why I put in my comment the lucky dude reference... since with some luck and logging in by off-peak times and constant channel switching one can go through Mt.Eda with only a few deaths (but not without noticing there's pvp)
Weak game desing: we discussed it lately, and I'm pretty sure it's there because of the money. Since until lvl22 the game is focusing on pve, you ditch the pvp-oriented skills from your skill tree. So when you reach the pvp part, and you decide you want to fight back, you need to retrain. Meaning, you have to visit the store... and it's not a cheap purchase. Then when you finish Mt.Eda, the game goes back to pve so if you don't plan to duel or stay there for some easy kill on the newly arrived players, you need to retrain again... clever :I
That's why I sucked so bad in there, my main is a full healer, with only healing and focused strike (-> not much dps) and I said -"no f*ing way I'm gonna retrain for only 3-4 levels of pvp..."
It would've been pointless anyway, since pvp is all about stunlock (even the heavy pvp'ers are complaining of it, basically who stuns first, wins), and you don't get your "escape" skill until lvl25, so between 22 and 25 you're a free kill for the high level gankers.
There are two PvP zones... Mount Edna and the epic version. In fact the main quest lines lead right into the middle of the war zone. How did you manage to miss that?
You also didn't mention the stat stacking bug, that had people roaming around one shoting other players, and farming epic dungeons for epic weapon and armor upgrade mats.
Nor did you mention the wide spread dupping problem that was going on. That allowed many people to end up with +9 armor sets and +9 weapons.
Both appear to have been finally patched at this point. But from the looks of it, PWE isn't going to take action against the accounts of those who seriously abused those various issues.
Its too bad, as I quite enjoyed the game. The combat system is in some ways more flexible than TERA's. The graphics aren't quite as good, but are good enough. But I totally agree about the lack of content.
Actually there's 5 (or 6) quests + the 2 repeatable, and you have to grind those 2 first until you reach Very Friendly with the chosen tribe, only after that can you start the other 5.
Or at least this was the case in the beta. I admit, after the live launch it became easier, but still no word from PWE that it's a bug or they listened the numerous complaints and changed it deliberately.
(since the live launch there's no gating on the 2 repeatables, you take them and right away you can hand in, regardless of your faction status, meaning you can continue with the 5 story quests in Mt.Eda. Who knows, maybe only a bug
or not.)
So yep, after the launch, and after you know the ropes you can finish Mt. Eda in a few hours, if you find an empty channel.
I don't pvp but I guess you won't have any problem with sorc. Most of his skills are dps, or dps/slow or dps/stun (all of them are good for pve and pvp both), not to mention sorcs are the stunlock masters, which is very useful since pvp is a stunlock race - so I heard
Edit: I'm building my sorc based on this: http://s11.postimage.org/fgaavlf8j/skill.png (from a pvp/pve thread)
It skips mostly the crit increase things. My sorc is only at lvl15 though...
but it seems a pretty good build, only I plan to move one point from flame armor to ice for better soloing.
Hmm...You could be right it might have been 5 or 6. In any case It wasnt that bad or even very hard to get them done. Heck I even grouped with the opposite faction to take down Diago. they were trying to kill me at first till they realized I was in there group. It was kinda funny!
I've put a decent amount of time into Raiderz and I agree that it will get boring after a while, like the review said.
I could have sworn the game DID have PVP, unlike the reviewer mentions. Other players have told me it exists, and in the 3rd zone, I did walk into a PVP area, and other players using field chat were talking about how they killed eachother and such.. so again, I'm not sure what the reviewer was talking about there.
In a nutshell, this game is yet another Asian grinder, but a much more polished one than I have seen. I've played and tried a TON of them, so I'm veteran there, and with most MMO's since UO.
There's a rather annoying bug that the reviewer didn't mention. There was an update yesterday, but I'm not sure if it fixed it... Anyway, sometimes when you zone, the game hangs. It happens to everyone I've come across. The only way to get around it is to alt-f4 and relaunch. There's also another where sometimes you cannot interact with NPCs, forcing you to relog.
I also have NO IDEA how the reviewer didn't comment the INSANE amount of gold-seller spamming. In the first 2 zones, literally as soon as you start the game, your are inandated with a scrolling window of jackass goldsellers, spamming the hell out of all chat methods. For almost each login, you have to spend 5-10 mins using the chat command /block to block each one of them. They use names like "ashfhshdf", and so on, which makes it even harder to block them. Not only that, they are all advertising the same gold farming web site. So, it's like walking into Best Buy and have every single employee in the store announcing on the PA about a specific item on sale, non-stop!. In other terms, "I GET IT, STFU!!".
I'm a software engineer, and it's actually EASY to code a spamming filter like countless other games have. I mean really, it's EASY to code. You could even automatically delete the accounts for gold-sellers that spam the exact same text, over and over again. PROBLEM SOLVED!!!!
It's extremely annoying, and without blocking all of then, field chat becomes completely useless, and even /shout text. No one will see your text as it will be lost in the spam in about 2 seconds. It's really THAT bad.
The game also gets grindy. So, for some rare items you want to craft (everyone HAS to craft their armor - there are NO armor/weapon drops - again, how did the reviewer miss that?), and to get the rare items, you will have to run the same dungeon, about 5-10 times, which is monotonous and boring. You also need a group, and if you can't find one (many times I waiting 40 mins for a group), then you can't craft up the better/rare armor, which is so much better than the standard junk.
The game relies on collecting mats to a point that I've never seen in a game. I would LOVE to see armor and weapon drops from mobs, chests, bosses, etc. They make you craft *everything* and yes, there's 0 challenge to crafting. It always succeeds if you have the mats.
The combat system in Raiderz is a bit more flexible. But the graphics and polish are FAR below what one finds in TERA. There is also much more content in TERA. I have three level 60s in TERA (Lancer, Slayer, Warrior), and an archer and zerker in the 30's.
I have a level 35 defender and a level 34.5 zerker in Raiderz. Unless they add some new content, there is really no reason to continue to play the game. I went back to the Land of the Panda, and I'm running my level 85 rogue up to 90 now.
I found RaiderZ rather fun until I hit my late 20's. You get tons of quests most of which just has you running back and forth to the same area ALOT, picking up certain things, or killing certain name mobs, only to go back and kill the other named mobs running with the previous mobs you just killed, etc. The dungeons are fun, but I also descover if you run the same dungeon with a group to get the materials needed to craft your latest superior weapon/armor, by the time you get all the materials needed you are already out leveled it and ready to build the next suit. So you must spend a lot of time playing the auction house, selling materials you've already acquired and don't need just to buy the stuff you do need for your current level.
Another annoying factor in the game as was stated in the review there is nothing to do at cap level "end game." So you end up having high level players coming back to low level zones to farm the bosses you need in the open world for their rare material drops, only so they can sell it on the auction house and make money off the new players. Case in point I got in a group with three other players my level to take on this epic boss. We downed it once (barely but it was a lot of fun), only to have two high level (I believe level 55) come in and start kill stealing the boss, farming it. It is the type game however gets the first hit owns the loot rights. We had to kill this boss multiple times to get the amount of rare material we needed for our gear. When we complained to the two high levels, they laughed at us, and then said they'd help us kill it for a fee, or they would just keep farming. We didn't need help! We were having fun killing it ourselves as a challange.
This is just an example of what you face in this game, in non-instance boss fights. I met a few really cool players in the game that I friended and we would level together. Outside that the community as a whole is horrible. Don't expect to make many friends, and get prepared to be treated like a "n00b" by high levels rolling in to kill steal from you.