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[General Article] Skyforge: Review in Progress - My Ascension Slows
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
My epic ascension to god-hood slowed down this week. The reason was twofold. On one hand, I had to review Kyn (a fun little Indie RPG), but on the other hand I was actually very glad to take a break from Skyforge. After putting in over 40 hours since Open Beta Head Start, the repetitive nature of Skyforge’s content is starting to get to me.
Read more of Bill Murphy's Skyforge - Review in Progress - My Ascension Slows.
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Wanna be a weirdo? Costumes allow that, if not much else.
Comments
Perfect review. The game is fun as long as you are not grinding but playing for fun. The second you find yourself grinding for those next sparks you need to get closer to your goal....done. You grind to get that next class so you can do the same thing you have been doing all the way there just with different animations and skills. The game really is fun, love the combat, but basically it skips the MMO journey and takes you straight to the progression grind end-game. You grind out the same dungeons over and over so you can get more powerful and grind out the same dungeons over and over.
Will still play, just not as much. I have gotten more quality hours out of this game than most I paid for though!
Ty for the reddit link Bill! Was a fun read.
The grind is real! heh
Still, I like the combat, so I play PvP a lot (which I almost never do in MMOs). The queues are super short (1min), and matches are fairly fast. It's a bit different than MOBAs, so I alternate between Skyforge and MOBAs to get my RPG-PvP doses.
Many people play the game to pump the grind, even with anti-grind hard caps in place. I can't see them playing past month 1, but I for one like the way some 5-mans work, am excited about larger/harder grp content, and like the PvP so far. They've added some GM organized 10v10 PvP games as well that pushed queues down a lot during that timeframe. (<5min)
Your assessment is puzzling to me but then I am having a huge amount of fun in the game and my guild has a waiting line for those wanting to join the pantheon that already has 50 players in it.
The game definitely leans toward small group instances rather than solo questing in open zones. And it definitely expects you to repeat those instances but what game doesn't expect you to repeat its instances? And this game has over 30 small group leveling instances. I certainly have never seen that amount before. Not to mention 8 5 mans which are very challenging and 10 open zones.
Maybe its is just because I really enjoy group content and often do a lot of leveling in other games by way of the group finder. So yeah, it has a lot of group instance repeating. Would it really have been better with fewer repeatable instances and more one time solo quest grinding?
All die, so die well.
For me considering I play very little each day I am loving it. This game you're right Bill you cannot play like a lot it will definitely create a feeling of too much grind but if you play it like I do about maximum 2 hours a day and usually less it works out and I only repeat the instances may be once in two weeks so considering my earlier game was repeating FFXIV ARR dungeons ad nauseam this is fine for me and often I just do the main objective and ignore the instance objectives when asked to go back to the same instance. I've done that with the Factory 501 when I was asked to get the book in fact it was close to the entrance so I just cleared my way there did it and left .
Of course each of us will play at our pace and I am not going to stand here and lecture anyone when I have played straight 40 hour Fear and Hate raids in Everquest. It would be false on my part but this game right now at the stage of my life is the perfect hobby game for me.
I do enjoy the character progression however and love the Ascension Atlas idea and am enjoying working my way towards the class I want to unlock. It gives me something to look forward to and then to work at learning and playing.
Thanks for the partial review. It is a fair review
I have thought about this allot. Like The Barrens in WoW. I ran back to the same area on that map sometimes 5 times, with quest keep sending me to the same area. I think what makes it feel more like a grind is when you are sent back to the same instance, you are faced with the same tasks all over again other then sometimes being asked to talk to someone. I am not board of it yet myself but I know I would find it more interesting if there was say 20 objectives in a instance and every time you went back it would randomly give you 5. Same with the open world maps. As far as the Pantheon, Bill is judging Skyforge as a finished game and this is mmorpg.com's policy, they charge money its a finished product and will be treated and judged that way =-) Myself, I will wait till all systems are in and polished before I do the same lol
The thing I really don't mind about the instances, is that they seem to keep adding them. I'm at almost 5K prestige, and have like at least 20 instances unlocked, which seem to cycle in and out of like 10-12 at any time, and the three PvP arenas (FFA, 3v3, and 10v10). There are a couple instances that they tend to send you back to more for story (I'm looking at you Kyris!), but most have interesting enough bosses, and nicely designed areas that it usually doesn't feel -that- bad.
When you come to the open world areas, they're actually fairly large...like, some are zone large from other games, just without the back and forth running and "hubs". I don't really think of Skyforge as a "Main" game though, it fits more to me in being a "side" game, fun to play for a while with something else, knock out a few dungeons and story and whatnot, do your adepts missions, then put it down for a while.
I would agree that having the make storyline send you back to the same instance a second or third time is surprising and a bit disappointing. But as far as repeating instances in general I guess I just don't mind going back to do the fights over. At least the bosses have reasonably interesting and varied mechanics and given the class diversity a fight can play out very differently when you pull randoms that are playing unusual classes.
I wouldn't mind also seeing extra rooms open up in instances when you repeat them that have alternate bosses. Have an instances say give you 3 random bosses out of 5-7 each time you play it. But that would involve a lot of level and encounter design work. Again, being able to choose between 30+ small instances once you have unlocked them still strikes me as not bad at all. We should also be seeing multi instance queuing and prestige scaling for random groups eventually.
All die, so die well.
The game is an arcade mmo. It reminds me of the days of 'missile command' and 'pac-man' when you would spend hours everyday putting quarters into the arcade machine, yes going over the same content millions of time in a quest to get the high score. So I'm right at home with this game for the moment.
I agree about the lack of instructions and it's a good move on their part to have a guide contest so now their are lots of guides popping up in the forum, I've found some very helpful but you do have to dig. It would help if the tool tips were better. On some damage skills don't even have numbers, they just say 'does lots of damage' 0.o
I here there is a quest for god form around 30k. Don't know if I'll still be playing then but for now I'm having a ball. I would like to play a Warlock but it's too far on the tree to go for a class that you still have to level from scratch and has it's problems as nearly all classes have problems to deal with. So far I like Knight, Cryo, and Archer best for pve content. Yep, I would Warlock class if it was for sale just to give it a go.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
I am currently at 11k prestige and I not only haven't played every squad and dungeon that has been unlocked yet, not to mention that I keep unlocking new ones.
It really depends on how you are playing... If you are a lifer and are playing it 8+ hours a day, you will get burned... but that is the same thing for many different games.
I rarely have enough time to play more than 4-5 hours at a sitting, and still having boat-loads of fun.
Pretty much everything I can, since it's my goal to experience as much as I can before scoring it next week.
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The game is designed to be very comfortable to play:
- hub system,
- movements and graphics are ok,
- the bosses are not hard but neither too easy. They have enough mechanics to avoid that you fall sleep on the keyboard. Also, the mechanics are not to do action 1, action 2, action 3 in that exact order or you are busted. More important, bosses cannot bugged like you could do in Neverwinter (have they fixed this yet? Two years ago, was impossible to find a non-bug-boss party) ... well, I have seen 2 bosses bugged but not on intention.
Regarding the repetition of squads (1-3 man parties) and dungeons (5 man parties), as you gain more prestige, you unlock more difficult versions of them: mobs/bosses with more health and additional abilities. Again, nothing terrible challenging but the first time it may catch you and get killed because of being too confident.
- limits your progress per week. Yes, I think this a good thing against of what I thought in my first impression.
The worst part of the game for me is the targeting system. If a friendly player crosses your way while you are making a melee combo or casting a spell, it can be interrupted (and the combo reset and wasted) because "It is not a hostile target". It can happen even if you focus an enemy with the "F" key, which it is supposed to attach your attack to it. If the mob moves from your front vision area, you can loose the focus and hence waste the cast or combo even if you follow it and regain the vision of the mob (you can do some combos and casts while moving).
^.^'
Honestly, it was expected it was a grind. Just how the system was, smelled of grind miles away.
The fact that the content is repetitive? Expected as well. And please, aren't other games are repetitive as well, like Rift or Wow where you end up in the same raid for *months* trying to beat it? Ok, they are WAY more challenging than Skyforge content, but ... please don't talk about repetitiveness: ALL MMO are repetitive.
Also, the fact that it hasn't a crafting isn't so necessarily a bad thing, it has the adept thing as an alternative, might be annoying or boring or reminds of farmville, but at least is a change.
The game is decent - it's a game I am playing atm as I don't have other games that pull me in so much. I know I won't last and I know I won't spend too much money on it.
After only a few days in Skyforge I decided to wait. For a game that has taken the better parts from other games, and as told to me by others also caters to casuals and thus soloer's, it really does not stand out in any way. Except maybe the class system, that punishes you if you use it too much. The combat was said to be like the Asian action-combat mmorpg's, it's not. It uses a clunky hybrid system that is not as good as even the one in GW2. If you, like me, except something like Vindictus, you're gonna get disappointed.
The game lacks the smooth feeling Tera Online, Vindictus, Blade and Soul and Black Desert gives me in combat. It's jerky, to say the least. (Edit: Hint: It still uses the tab combat system most of the time)
Also it being targeted to casuals; You still need to pvp in order for you to improve your order/temple. And soloing will be harder the longer you play, up to a point where you hopefully choose the "right" advance (like berserker) class to be able to handle harder instances.
Yeah you can scale it, by one point down, but some classes will have a very hard time anyway. So later on in the game you might need to group up with people. PvP and grouping is not something I see as belonging to the casual department. And if you just want to have fun and switch classes, forget it. The game punish you, severely, for doing so.
I doubt anything will change, except some balance issues. So even if I said I will wait I doubt I will be playing it anymore. I'll wait for B&S and Black Desert instead.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
Well you fill the sparks cap in like 1-2 days (premium), after that you can login much less and ease the grind feel (although I went straight for Gunner from start, through nodes typically costing 650 sparks and didn't really feel any grind yet).
Costumes are huge fail, there's not a single good looking one, bar the default class ones. Those funny-wannabes (stupid tuxedo, rave party shiz) are utterly ugly, the costumes which you get for mastering class are EVEN WORSE.
So they gimped itemization in favor of costumes, but there really aren't any costumes
Born from blood,
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I can relate.
While I really enjoyed my first week, capping the sparks on week number 2 was a daunting task for me, maybe the fact that I picked a support as my main class and that I wanted to work towards unlocking the knight "the hard way" didn't help either.
for me though the main deterrence in queuing for yet another map is not the grind itself or the fact that I have already done that adventure a dozen times this week, but boss and trash fights. It feels like they simply have too much health to make killing them, something to look forward to. Someone else before me described them as a meatshield, feels like they just increased the hp pool to adjust the completion times of each adventure.
First, quitting at 3K prestige is like quitting any other MMO at level 10 and then declaring "I've seen all it has to offer". Your entire post lost all credibility.
Second, why the F don't people enjoy trying things out, exploring, dabbling in choices and learning games anymore? WTF is the point of reading up on games to the point of being a self proclaimed pro? Why do people care so much about keeping up with the Jones'? Or even the status quo? Why not just play and have fun, make friends and have more fun in groups?
Third, all the info is in the game. Character stats, mouse overs, etc. it's all in there! People are just so disgustingly lazy that they refuse to think for themselves and then bitch when someone hasn't written a handholding guide for them so that they don't have to give a single thought to building their character in an RPG.
I HAVE NEWS FOR YOU GUY, YOU DO NOT ENJOY RPGs! Move on to a different genre.
I can tell two things by your post:
1. You are referring to your solo experience, this is an online multiplayer game. You weren't meant to pick support and then solo your way through the game. Are people really this ignorant to RPG? RPG=Role Playing Game. By design you are supposed to take on a role that contributes to a group effort. This is the exact meaning of playing a Role in an RPG.
2. You gimped your character with poor stat choices. You have too much might, not enough good stats, not enough DPS. This is the part in other games where you'd delete your characters because you made bad choices (or respec if an option). You may be able to salvage with the right set of rings. You tried, you learned, now you can try something different and see the outcome.
P.S. Do the bosses really have anymore health than in any other game? Do they really take any longer to kill than in any other game dungeons? I really feel like people are bitching about anything and everything whether it is good, bad or indifferent.