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Eimi posted:Well those are quite a bit of tonal shifts that at the least, don't sound boring. Oh and Kefka shows up lol.
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Nov 11, 2021 00:26
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getting sad this beta closes soon 
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Nov 11, 2021 01:48
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I'm going to be loading up the RU client after this. There are still a lot of systems that I want a better understanding of.
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Nov 11, 2021 01:50
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poemdexter posted:Uh... my summoner's "pants" aren't really pants. I only noticed this because my new chest armor is a dress that purposefully splits at the bottom so you can see that you aren't wearing pants. Can I get some pants for my summoner? The woman characters get more and more naked as you level up. This is peak Korean MMO design but I dont understand why.
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Nov 11, 2021 06:17
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I said come in! posted:The woman characters get more and more naked as you level up. This is peak Korean MMO design but I dont understand why. One of the female gunner outfits in character creation was really cool, but they forgot to put pants on them????
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Nov 11, 2021 06:24
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Pragmatica posted:getting sad this beta closes soon Edit: Nevermind checked the 1st page again. Yeh All we can do is just play on RU until NA launch which is fine to practice. Dr. Video Games 0155 fucked around with this message at 13:17 on Nov 11, 2021 |
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Nov 11, 2021 12:16
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LITERALLY MY FETISH posted:One of the female gunner outfits in character creation was really cool, but they forgot to put pants on them???? It worked for Path of Exile!
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Nov 11, 2021 17:12
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Had a great time with the beta, played it way more than I was expecting. With Endwalker coming out shortly I'm not too bothered with release being so far out, but I'm definitely hoping for earlier in Q1 rather than later. Ultimately the biggest issue I ran into during the beta was trying to figure out what class to play. I ended up trying out almost all of them and found something to like in most.
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Nov 12, 2021 01:05
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Post-beta thoughts: The core gameplay at level 50 is extremely polished, tightly designed, and fun with a very Monster Hunter feel to it so it's on them to drive people away by messing up the other stuff, which they certainly could do. I had intended just to test leveling and see if there were any pitfalls, but ended up playing the whole week because it was just that fun. After you slog through the abysmal first 30 levels, the game starts to give you occasional glimpses of the good level 50 stuff in between 'run and spam next' questing. Monetization (in the Korean version because all kMMOs once released tend to revert to Korean monetization) looks to be on about the same level as modern WoW and the game seems to avoid most of the standard mobile/kMMO dark design patterns that push players into spending infinite money, which is about as good as you could hope for. Glaring issues that may stop the game from being successful: 1. The beginning of the game is atrocious, a tedious zero difficulty slog through paper enemies and bottom of the barrel quests to progress generic fantasy story #523. The alpha class prologues that they replaced with cutscenes were unique, well done and a good hook to set up your character's conflict with the antagonists before the first macguffin quest. The new generic island tutorial is not. If you are blasting through on a fresh character/account knowing exactly what to do the first impressive content in the game (The King's Tomb dungeon around level 30) is over 3 hours in for a speedrunner, and probably 6-8 hours for a new but experienced mmo/arpg player avoiding sidequests and the skippable cutscenes. Just look at this thread to see how many people quit beta in the early 20s and are (rightly) saying they have no idea why people are interested in this uninspired garbage. 2. They are trying to mimic the original game at release with the current Korean version that includes multiple expansions of catchup mechanics and difficulty nerfs and still need to make significant changes from the beta version to revert/remove the catchup stuff. If they don't change things I would not be surprised to see some streamers beat all the endgame content inside the 3 day founder's pack headstart period. Right now it's akin to playing base Monster Hunter World with the overpowered Iceborne starter armor. 3. There is obvious potential for different social dynamics in the western servers to create some pretty toxic outcomes across a variety of game systems, from player-enforced elitism forcing people to buy power/carries or abandon off-meta classes (ala WoW), to an unwillingness to play bard/paladin ruining raid compositions, to public world bosses with mechanics like 'heals to full if anyone attacks them in this phase' made for the average MMO griefer. It's hard to picture a Korean developer effectively dealing with these sort of social dynamics if they do end up ruining people's fun, and hard to picture Amazon paying for non-AI GMs to police bad behavior.
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Nov 12, 2021 01:42
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cyrn posted:Post-beta thoughts: I watched the podcast with Zizaran, Raiz, Sywo, and Saintone last night. Apparently the questing has been heavily modified and that's why we now feel like we are wearing out our G key. All of the quests you do where it's like kill 2 mobs and loot 2 items? They used to be kill 20-30 mobs and loot 10 items. So with the revisions it seems like we are spamming through quest nov dialogue and not playing. I don't know if this is better? But that's what they explained. As for beating the t1/t2 content in a few days this was brought up as well and is a concern for all parties involved. The big issue seems to be 5 islands giving insane amounts of gear progression materials. This should be easily tunable. Also this is one time only per account I believe. I don't think each islands rewards are obtainable on each character, although I don't know that for sure. Either way I can see some easy tuning on those rewards to bring the progression back to a decent level. I don't think they should expect us to hang around on t1/t2 raids for half a year though. Zotix fucked around with this message at 02:40 on Nov 12, 2021 |
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Nov 12, 2021 02:33
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Lost ARK Online: Like Diablo, but with no pants
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Nov 12, 2021 02:35
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Zotix posted:I watched the podcast with Zizaran, Raiz, Step, and Saintone last night. Apparently the questing has been heavily modified and that's why we now feel like we are wearing out our G key. All of the quests you do where it's like kill 2 mobs and loot 2 items? They used to be kill 20-30 mobs and loot 10 items. So with the revisions it seems like we are spamming through quest nov dialogue and not playing. I don't know if this is better? But that's what they explained. I'd argue that pressing 'g' endlessly is better than collecting dozens of bear asses and then pressing 'g' endlessly. The real issue here is that delivering text one line at a time is Really loving Stupid. I love it as an option, but the way WoW delivers quest text is way superior. If you give a poo poo, you can read stuff. If you really don't care, the friction can be zero.
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Nov 12, 2021 02:40
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Canine Blues Arooo posted:I'd argue that pressing 'g' endlessly is better than collecting dozens of bear asses and then pressing 'g' endlessly. The real fix here is that delivering text one line at a time is Really loving Stupid. I love it as an option, but the way WoW delivers quest text is way superior. If you give a poo poo, you can read stuff. If you really don't care, the friction can be zero. I don't know if WoWs is superior. Asmongold touched on this in the whole FF14 hype. He argued that the way WoW delivers quest information has such an abysmally low interaction rate. I'm not sure what FF14 does exactly but IIRC it's a bit more on a screen than LA, but far less than the way WoW does it. Apparently the FF14 community loves that method so take of that what you will. On the podcast Sywo argued for a different leveling system as they generic leveling is so dated at this point. The PoE guys had their gripes with the way LA does it, but they naturally like leveling because PoE is an alt friendly game and speedrunning the leveling is a skill of its own. Personally leveling in MMOs needs to be rethought out. It's dated. Takes up too much of the development resources and less than 5% of the player base cares about it. Look at new world. 60-100 to get to max level and its all tedious best rear end poo poo anyway.
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Nov 12, 2021 02:45
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Zotix posted:The PoE guys had their gripes with the way LA does it, but they naturally like leveling because PoE is an alt friendly game and speedrunning the leveling is a skill of its own. As someone who loves PoE the problem for me is that Lost Ark leveling is literally nothing like standard ARPG leveling and everything like a MMO, and like you said that method feels extremely dated at this point. In PoE there are very few actual quests, it's really just killing monsters and you only return to town once or twice per act to turn in a quest. There's almost zero backtracking, collecting or any of the other things that feel like a pure way to waste your time as a player. It sounds like the endgame for Lost Ark is something I might enjoy but I cannot see myself ever playing the game to get there because of how bad the leveling process is.
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Nov 12, 2021 02:49
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Zotix posted:I don't know if WoWs is superior. Asmongold touched on this in the whole FF14 hype. He argued that the way WoW delivers quest information has such an abysmally low interaction rate. I'm not sure what FF14 does exactly but IIRC it's a bit more on a screen than LA, but far less than the way WoW does it. Apparently the FF14 community loves that method so take of that what you will. FFXIV employs the same general strategy as WoW at pretty much every turn. The difference is that FFXIV, especially Shadowbringers, has outstanding writing and presentation along side in-engine assets that allow for much more expressive story telling. The way to get people to interact with your story more is to make the story worth interacting with. People aren't going to pay attention because you add a lot of friction between 'NPC Interact' and 'Quest Accepted' - they are just going to get pissed off. At least in the world of MMO and MMO-adjacent games, I give credit only to FFXIV for pulling that off successfully. In other news, apparently the main scenario writer from Shadowbringers is also doing Endwalker, so I'm actually very excited for the story telling FFXIV's latest.
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Nov 12, 2021 02:56
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Cinara posted:As someone who loves PoE the problem for me is that Lost Ark leveling is literally nothing like standard ARPG leveling and everything like a MMO, and like you said that method feels extremely dated at this point. In PoE there are very few actual quests, it's really just killing monsters and you only return to town once or twice per act to turn in a quest. There's almost zero backtracking, collecting or any of the other things that feel like a pure way to waste your time as a player. That's a shame because after level 30 or so the story gets better. Not great, but much better. The first 30 levels are the usual finding your way as a hero nonsense, and figure out who the players are. Once you get introduced to the villains and they start making their appearances it gets a lot better. The locations become quite varied as well. If you skip the side quests, and only do the main story and read all dialogue, and watch cutscenes you probably have about 20 hours of content. If you skip it all you can cut to down to about 9-12 hours. Doesn't seem bad to me because the game has fucktons of poo poo to do at endgame. I'd imagine you could probably watch the whole story on YouTube if you wanted to as well. After probably 3-5k hours in PoE(I don't run the steam version), I still have no idea the general lore of the story. Piety did some poo poo. Kitava did some other poo poo. Tala Moana warrior! Both styles have their faults, and unless players truly want to learn the story they will just skip over it. And the majority do that. My New World guild of ~50 people, only 1 person read the quests and knows the story. Seems like a lot of effort every developer puts into world building for sure a small amount of the player base to honestly care about. Gamers just consume content in the fastest most straightforward path, and then leave the rotting husk of the game behind in search of the next one. Zotix fucked around with this message at 03:09 on Nov 12, 2021 |
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Nov 12, 2021 03:03
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Canine Blues Arooo posted:FFXIV employs the same general strategy as WoW at pretty much every turn. The difference is that FFXIV, especially Shadowbringers, has outstanding writing and presentation along side in-engine assets that allow for much more expressive story telling. I don't think it's correct to say that FFXIV and WOW use the same general strategy. They use the same tools, but very different strategies, probably because blizzard is afraid to put too much story in their game and SE set out to make a JRPG with an mmo attached to it. LA doesn't take the time to set things up in the beginning, the cutscenes are annoyances instead of setting up story, and because of the nature of the quests they've built and the maps they take place in, you'd have to either remake maps or delete entire areas to have it be shorter in the beginning, which is probably what you'd want. I didn't make it far enough to see, but I somewhat doubt that the plague area set up anything other than as a random moment for what's his face to use ~dark powers~ that doesn't matter. It felt like darkshire, which is great in the moment but like, nothing gets set up in darkshire and paid off elsewhere.
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Nov 12, 2021 04:19
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LITERALLY MY FETISH posted:blizzard is afraid to put too much story in their game if only
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Nov 12, 2021 04:34
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Games need to cut quests when shortening leveling instead of making quests shorter.
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Nov 12, 2021 04:35
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30.5 Days posted:if only Nah, it’s true. They do like two cutscenes per patch and then rely on either characters monologuing a shitload of exposition or outside novels to actually tell the story. They’re afraid to show story in the game because people didn’t like reading quest text (because quest text is an awful way to tell a story).
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Nov 12, 2021 08:17
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They have entire quests these days that are just following a plot character around while they yammer at you
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Nov 12, 2021 17:19
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Honestly the intro was so bad I uninstalled in an hour. Don’t give me cool combat and no chance to use it because I’m following some goon around and stuff dies in one hit. Revamping the first few hours of the game would help a lot but I doubt it will happen.
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Nov 12, 2021 17:59
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Ort posted:Honestly the intro was so bad I uninstalled in an hour. Don’t give me cool combat and no chance to use it because I’m following some goon around and stuff dies in one hit. Revamping the first few hours of the game would help a lot but I doubt it will happen. I see this happening a lot... as I was playing I had the constant thought of "this is it? Why are people hyped for this?" then I got to the first little dungeon, saw I met the gearscore requirement for 'hard' clicked on the mathmaking queue and had a blast running through baby's first dungeon. The content with combat is amazing! it's just buried beneath the most awful open world design and quest system imaginable.
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Nov 12, 2021 19:55
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cyrn posted:Glaring issues that may stop the game from being successful: Wow I had kind of assumed that the whole "explain your character's backstory in a cutscene and then immediately teleport to a void where God shows up and has you pick an advanced class" was a time saving conceit for a week-long beta and not, like, how starting characters will work normally? That's kind of dire. Give us back those and put the skip from 10-30 then, you won't miss much. I've played only a handful of MMOs seriously enough to make immediate comparisons and the first one I would is obviously FFXIV; as others have mentioned XIV puts a hell of a lot more emphasis on storytelling and world building to keep people engaged in the leveling process and pretty much zero of that was found during my leveling in LA. One of the other MMOs I put a lot of time into was TERA and I got incredible amounts of deja vu in LA compared to that. Both TERA and LA treat leveling in exactly the same method - the "plot" takes you to a zone, main quests drag you on a linear path through the zone (with additional side quests to make sure you're moving in the right direction), sometimes there's a dungeon to break up the tedium, repeat. Compare to XIV and WoW which make efforts to give the various areas character and detail. XIV's areas feel like places, LA and TERA's leveling zones both felt like conveyor belts. I couldn't tell you a single thing I retained from the first 10 hours of areas in LA. The dungeons pretty much kept me in the game as I had to deal with actual combat mechanics and really dig into how I can make cool combos with my character as well as working with other players and were easily the thing that sold the game the strongest. I give LA a little bit of leeway here because I remember that FFXIV's first 10-20 hours aren't terribly engrossing either but LA definitely is a harder sell to deal with the same problem.
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Nov 12, 2021 21:20
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TERA also had BAMs, so if you wanted to go fight something that had teeth you could. The stronger mobs I'd come across in LA (I think they were crowns or something on the minimap?) Were just sacks of health with zero danger to fighting them, so they really didn't fulfill that same role. I used two maps I found that were keys to go into side treasure dungeons, and even those were absolute jokes.
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Nov 13, 2021 00:17
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LITERALLY MY FETISH posted:TERA also had BAMs, so if you wanted to go fight something that had teeth you could. The stronger mobs I'd come across in LA (I think they were crowns or something on the minimap?) Were just sacks of health with zero danger to fighting them, so they really didn't fulfill that same role. I used two maps I found that were keys to go into side treasure dungeons, and even those were absolute jokes. I guess the alternative is having an entry boss fight like mervail that 80% of instead don't complete. Zotix fucked around with this message at 00:27 on Nov 13, 2021 |
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Nov 13, 2021 00:18
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Zotix posted:I guess the alternative is having an entry boss fight like mervail that 80% of instead don't complete. One alternative is just ditching the horrible intro to MMO experience but for some reason no game feels confident to do that. New World did a good job of giving you a 30s tutorial and throwing you into the game, actually.
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Nov 13, 2021 01:56
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Ort posted:One alternative is just ditching the horrible intro to MMO experience but for some reason no game feels confident to do that. New World did a good job of giving you a 30s tutorial and throwing you into the game, actually. Shame about the rest of the game
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Nov 13, 2021 04:10
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Zotix posted:I guess the alternative is having an entry boss fight like mervail that 80% of instead don't complete. You didn’t have to fight BAMs to level in tera or do a main story quest, it was just an option.
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Nov 13, 2021 10:26
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The only world boss I fought was the level 19 Salt Giant, because the world bosses are rare enough and the map terrible enough that even when one is up, it's likely not in your channel and in a part of the region you can't organically learn the location of. Fight itself was the exact same as all the dungeon bosses, which all just seemed to boil down to "is your dodge on cooldown? ok, don't go into melee range yet", except with like umpteen times the health. I don't remember if there was a meaningful XP reward, but there is some collection achievement for it and enough drops of things you won't replace for at least 2 hours that killing it felt like not a waste of time.
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Nov 13, 2021 17:00
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Much as I love ff14, the first 20 hours of levelling from 1 are dire as well
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Nov 13, 2021 19:24
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This game has a double whammy effect where MMOs are notoriously awful before max level (unless you're particularly hooked by the story) and ARPGs are also notoriously awful before max level. Both genres are inherently about fine-tuning your gear/stats/whatever and tweaking your final build but before the max level anything you do is going to be obsolete after you play just a little longer so there's no point in spending your time on it. It's like chasing a carrot on a stick and there's no mechanical benefit to it other than making the players play longer and feel a sunk cost/sunk time effect when they consider quitting. Even when combat clicks like in the dungeons, there's still no meaningful reward for it while leveling. Every ARPG with an active playerbase has found some way to skip the tedium and start mimicking end-game play right away - Diablo 2 had rushing and ubers, diablo 3 lets you go straight into Adventure mode which is okay but still forces dumb grinding before anything you find becomes useful and your high level friends can powerlevel you anyway, path of exile has uhh... tabula rasa and labs carries I guess, and generally after your first character you end up carrying a bunch of speed potions and movespeed gear and running past everything. In a game with as many cool classes as Lost Ark has it's worrying because I'm going to want to try them all but I dread an endless onslaught of MMO Intro content and I hope there's a way to skip it that doesn't involve spending real money. deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 00:28 on Nov 15, 2021 |
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Nov 15, 2021 00:20
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I seriously don't get the bitching about a leveling experience that takes 10h to get to max level. We aren't talking the 100 hours that new world takes or the 150 that wow classic takes. It takes 10h to go from 10-50 the first time on an account with cut scenes that aren't skippable the first time. I'm sorry, but some of you guys I feel like are complaining for the sake of complaining. Not only that but the story gets better as the experience goes on. The intro to a leveling experience needs to be designed in such a way that a player with no gaming experience isnt lost. If you have loads of experience it shouldn't be hard to get past the beginning parts. It takes like 3h to get to level 30.
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Nov 15, 2021 01:36
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Eh, I got a few levels in and decided that this was a leveling experience I wanted to do as little times as possible, so I decided to wait until the full game.
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Nov 15, 2021 02:09
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Zotix posted:I seriously don't get the bitching about a leveling experience that takes 10h to get to max level. We aren't talking the 100 hours that new world takes or the 150 that wow classic takes. I can't even begin to understand why you're quoting speedrun numbers when people are talking about first impressions. I have a huge amount of experience in this genre and the character I played most was a Paladin who got to maybe level 22 in about 8 hours. The low level content feels like it came from a bygone era and every shred of story I saw in the beta was pretty grim. If you think those are unfair "bitchy" criticisms, it sure is weird that the entirety of your refutation was to insist how fast all of that great great content can be gotten over with.
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Nov 15, 2021 02:16
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Scoss posted:I can't even begin to understand why you're quoting speedrun numbers when people are talking about first impressions. I’m sorry but if it took you 8 hours to get to 22 that’s not the games fault. I don’t even know what you could have been doing to take that long to do 12 levels.
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Nov 15, 2021 02:28
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Scoss posted:I can't even begin to understand why you're quoting speedrun numbers when people are talking about first impressions. My first play through took me 13h to hit level 50. You were doing something wrong.
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Nov 15, 2021 02:58
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Ten hours is probably reasonable if you're the kind of player who sticks to a single character but that is unfathomable to me.
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Nov 15, 2021 03:08
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I'm curious if people who take that long did any side quests? They're definitely a trap if you want to push through asap. If I'm not mistaken, they also have boosts and sometimes give them out? I wouldn't be surprised if some alting is done without having to completely re-level. Getting through all of the POE story every ladder reset (I play a lot of SSF and SSF HC) is way more of a slog than this felt, for me personally - especially some of the more boring long zones with set layouts and bosses with immunity/rp phases. Interestingly, their community manager Rox was on Sywo(sp)'s podcast and the current rate of advancement is going to be slowed down, as well as fixes for the auto refresh of deals in the store and some other things. Sounds like they're definitely headed in the right direction.
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Nov 15, 2021 04:03
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Sintor posted:I'm curious if people who take that long did any side quests? They're definitely a trap if you want to push through asap. ...why would slowing advancement be the right direction?
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Nov 15, 2021 04:06
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