(no subject)
OK, so here are some more game reviews (not very professionally done, but I'm not getting paid)...
Silkroad Online (Revisited):
In my previous review of Siklroad Online, I rated it as an 8 on a scale of 1-10. It is important to note that this judgment was made after playing for only a few hours (4 or 6 maybe) and not having any single character at a level higher than 15. Why is this important? Because most games make the first part of the game very different from the rest of it with the sole idea of getting you hooked as soon and as significantly as possible. This means that if the game sucks right from the start... move on. But if the game does not suck right from the start (as Silkroad seemed not to), it does not mean that it will never suck further down the road. Silkroad sucks further down the road.
The quests start out seeming like they are better than in a lot of games because they have some RP purpose to them to more of an extent than those in other games often have. This is a surface issue though, and as you progress you will eventually (quickly) discover that the quests are not worth doing. The quests are all hack and slash, the quest item drop rates are ATTROCIOUSLY infrequent, and the rewards are generally not worth the time and effort put into them.
Leveling is a total grind. The time it takes to go from level 12 to level 13 is roughly the same amount of time it takes to go from level 1 to level 10. That's pretty extreme, and I cannot (and do not want to) imagine how bad it is at even higher levels like level 35 or so.
The developers take the usual in-game economic problems to a whole new level. Gold farmers, particularly those run by bots, constitute probably at least 10% of the player population. And since the developers chose an "Item Mall" business model (where in-game items are sold for real cash via a website run by the company or a middle-man company), and since the botters are the ones most likely to spend the most money on items from the "Item Mall", almost nothing is ever done to try and curb the botting... after all, that's where they make their money. And for those who don't know... in an economy which is inherently and exponentially inflationary, gold farming bots multiply the inflation problem by a MINIMUM factor of 10.
Lag and over-population is also a big issue with this game. I have a pretty decent system... AMD Athalon 64 3700+ CPU (2.4GHz), 2GB RAM, nVidia GeForce 6600 256MB graphics card, and DSL. Despite this fact, when I try to move, it takes up to 5 seconds for the server to recognize the movement, and that's the NORMAL condition. During a lag spike the latency can be as high as 30 seconds. And in cities it's even worse because there are ALWAYS some 50-200 characters who are running a player owned shop in the middle of the street, usually near the bank, and almost always AFK. This contributes to the over-population issue as well... There is a hard cap on how many characters can be logged into a given server at any one time, and when you have a couple hundred characters logged in PER CITY who aren't actually even playing, it makes it harder for people who want to actually play to even be able to connect.
The graphics are still quite beautiful... some of the best I've seen in MMO's as a matter of fact. But graphics don't make a game.
I still love the skills-based system, but with the other problems the game has, it isn't worth playing for that sake alone.
I haven't played in some couple of months or longer, and don't foresee myself playing again anytime soon, if ever.
So in conclusion, there are basically a couple of things to consider... Price, time involvement, overall fun and enjoyability (based on things like game-play and graphics)...
Price: 10 (it's free after all)
Time Involvement: 1 (the rewards do not justify the time spent)
Overall Fun: 2 (boring, boring, boring, but beautiful)
Weighted Average (price counting as 1 rating, time as 2, and fun as 5): 2.75
Last Chaos:
Lots of hack and slash.
A typical level grind (BORING, but tolerable for the first few levels).
Tolerable graphics.
Quests which consist of nothing but more hack and slash are useful for only two things, a little bit of material wealth, and letting you know what is appropriate to hunt at your level... Not sure what to hunt? Go find a quest and it will tell you where you ought to be.
Economy is typical... in bad shape. When are developers going to start trying to solve that issue rather than throwing up their hands and saying, "Nothing to be done about it, so let's not take the time"? There are MANY things that can be done about it, and if you do them all, the in-game economy could be pretty stable, you're just too lazy to think of any creative solutions, you lousy bastards! OK, so it's a pet peeve of mine, sorry.
The community of players seems... polite. Not friendly, but not particularly rude either, they're just kind of there.
Price: 10 (free)
Time Involvement: 2 (not as bad of a grind as Silkroad, but bad)
Overall Fun: 3 (because of the high-intensity action you get in the solo dungeons where you cannot have a group and you WILL get swarmed... survival is up to your skill in playing the character and your strategies as much as anything else)
Weighted Average: 3.625
Martial Heroes:
I played this for about 3 or 4 levels (or maybe 5), which took about 30-60 minutes maybe. That was enough for me to realize the following...
Mediocre graphics at best, laggy, level grind, fucked economy, little to no inter-character/inter-player communication, few quests, all quests are hack and slash quests.
I'm not even going to give a breakdown of the ratings for this one... call it a 1 or 2 overall.
Rappelz:
If you read the above, and also have read any of my other game reviews, you may start to notice a pattern... a trend in MMO's, particularly Korean developed MMO's (most of the new ones come out of Korea, though not all, and the problems are not exclusive to the Korean ones, but seem to be worse with the Korean ones)... They all have the same problems.
Those problems, namely, are level grinding, a bad economy that can only get worse, average graphics (usually), lag, level grinding, nothing to do other than hack and slash, even quests and crafts require a certain if not near total amount of hack and slash, level grinding, hack and slash, and did I mention level grinding and hack and slash?
Rappelz is no exception to this rule. And while I tend to keep playing a game even after it gets boring in the hopes that it will get better after a level or two (even though I know it most likely will not), what made me finally decide to stop playing Rappelz (after some 3 hours or so of play), was not the usual problem of being bored with the level grind, but rather the fact that when I went to an area that had grass, even with the graphics settings for grass clip range and density set way down (to almost nothing, such that more than half of the viewable terrain had no grass at all) I still could barely move the character. And as I said above, I have a fairly decent and capable computer. I can play Oblivion with little frame-rate problems if I run it at 1024x768 screen resolution (rather than my normal resolution of 1280x960), and Oblivion is notorious for frame-rate lag, but Rappelz KILLED my frame-rate as soon as I came across grass.
So again, I'm not going to give a breakdown of the ratings on this one, just call it a 0... unplayable except on a computer from 10 years in the future (good luck finding one of those today). Or a 1, playable if you turn OFF the grass, but not worth the time because of the usual issues that seem to plague the genre.
The Saga of Ryzom:
Decent graphics, not merely tolerable, but somewhat nice even.
A sort of Skills-Based Multi-Classing hybrid system. There are 4 classes, each with their own skill set. You choose which skills you learn and use, and can even fine-tune them yourself for slightly customized skills. You can level up to a maximum of 250 levels PER CLASS and can do so in all 4 classes. The skills are not particularly many, and the skills-system in general is not very impressive, but the concept, to me, has potential.
Leveling up did not seem like a terrible grind, however I only played to about level 15 per class (so level 60-ish total out of 1000). A part of the reason for this is that in the "Free, Unlimited Time, Trial Period" will not allow you to play past level 20 per class (level 80 max), and if you want to continue playing, you either start a new character, keep playing where you are but with no character advancement, or start paying a subscription fee every month ($13.00 I think but I don't recall for certain). Given my extremely limited experience with the process of leveling up I cannot say that the game is or is not a level grind.
Quests are normally a hack and slash deal as usual, though occasionally not, especially for the crafting class. The quests are usually a challenge in the sense that though quest item drop rates are quite decent, the quests usually ask you to kill creatures that will naturally be a challenge for you.
One feature, which I can't decide if I like or not, is that it is nearly impossible to get a clear idea of what level a creature is compared to your own. When you target a creature, it displays a certain "level identifier" which narrows down it's level to within a range of 10 or 20 possible levels. This gives you some limited help in deciding if it's a good idea to attack it or not, based on the total of all of your class levels from all 4 classes, but still leaves room for error.
The economy is troubled, as is typical for these games, but it seemed to me to be much more stable than most games these days. The economy is almost totally player-based, which should be expected since every character can take levels in the crafter class, but rather than have player-run shops, you go to an NPC merchant and use them as a sort of "auctioneer"... your item that you are trying to sell is listed in their inventory list and with the price that you set for it... when it sells the NPC takes a commission (this helps with economic inflation issues because it removes money from the economy just as killing a creature adds money to it), and the remainder of the selling price is transferred to your character's inventory.
I didn't notice any lag, except when my internet connection was having problems and I had lag with everything, even email.
Price: 5 (free software, but an average monthly subscription fee)
Time Involvement: 5 (felt tolerable, certainly better than most of the new games, but I can't say for sure)
Overall Fun: 5 (was enjoyable, but nothing special, and could be worse at higher levels)
Weighted Average: 5
So here's my rant...
I love games. I love computer games. I love online computer games, because I can't cheat at them (easily), and I have little to no willpower to not cheat when I can do so easily (ok, absolutely none). But I HATE, absolutely and vehemently ABHOR, the recent trends in Fantasy MMORPG development. Namely, "look at all these games that have made a profit... let's make one just like it!" "No, we don't have to make it better than the others, we just have to make it good enough to turn a profit." So what we are now left with is a massive pile of MEDIOCRE games and a set of some 50+ developing companies who don't give a shit and make no efforts to make a GREAT GAME. And the reason I hate this is that it means that no matter how many games I try out (and so far I've tried some... uhm... at least 15, probably closer to 25, but I don't feel like trying to count them all right now), none of them will ever be worth playing for more than a month.
Every time I come across a game like this I want to hunt down the developers and rip their eyes out and tell them to grow a fucking brain, or at the very least place more priority on making good games (which by nature would make money) then they do on making as much money as possible, as fast as possible, with little or no concern over how long the game will last (making even more money over time, rather than being short-sighted about their profits). It also makes me which that I was in a position to make these games myself, unfortunately the industry is exceedingly difficult to get your fit in the door on, and even then you have to be there for some 10 years before you have the authority within a major and established company to actually be able to influence the quality of games the company makes.
So end of rant, and here's hoping that my 30-50 year trek (probably) toward getting into such a position of authority within a game dev company will be successful. And also hoping that in the meantime some company or other manages to make a game that is worth playing for at least a year.
And despite all of it's problems, which are certainly many, I think I am forced to say that EverQuest is still the best MMORPG I've ever played, and even it was only able to keep me going for about 18 months or so.
Now back to studying for finals, which are next week for me.
Silkroad Online (Revisited):
In my previous review of Siklroad Online, I rated it as an 8 on a scale of 1-10. It is important to note that this judgment was made after playing for only a few hours (4 or 6 maybe) and not having any single character at a level higher than 15. Why is this important? Because most games make the first part of the game very different from the rest of it with the sole idea of getting you hooked as soon and as significantly as possible. This means that if the game sucks right from the start... move on. But if the game does not suck right from the start (as Silkroad seemed not to), it does not mean that it will never suck further down the road. Silkroad sucks further down the road.
The quests start out seeming like they are better than in a lot of games because they have some RP purpose to them to more of an extent than those in other games often have. This is a surface issue though, and as you progress you will eventually (quickly) discover that the quests are not worth doing. The quests are all hack and slash, the quest item drop rates are ATTROCIOUSLY infrequent, and the rewards are generally not worth the time and effort put into them.
Leveling is a total grind. The time it takes to go from level 12 to level 13 is roughly the same amount of time it takes to go from level 1 to level 10. That's pretty extreme, and I cannot (and do not want to) imagine how bad it is at even higher levels like level 35 or so.
The developers take the usual in-game economic problems to a whole new level. Gold farmers, particularly those run by bots, constitute probably at least 10% of the player population. And since the developers chose an "Item Mall" business model (where in-game items are sold for real cash via a website run by the company or a middle-man company), and since the botters are the ones most likely to spend the most money on items from the "Item Mall", almost nothing is ever done to try and curb the botting... after all, that's where they make their money. And for those who don't know... in an economy which is inherently and exponentially inflationary, gold farming bots multiply the inflation problem by a MINIMUM factor of 10.
Lag and over-population is also a big issue with this game. I have a pretty decent system... AMD Athalon 64 3700+ CPU (2.4GHz), 2GB RAM, nVidia GeForce 6600 256MB graphics card, and DSL. Despite this fact, when I try to move, it takes up to 5 seconds for the server to recognize the movement, and that's the NORMAL condition. During a lag spike the latency can be as high as 30 seconds. And in cities it's even worse because there are ALWAYS some 50-200 characters who are running a player owned shop in the middle of the street, usually near the bank, and almost always AFK. This contributes to the over-population issue as well... There is a hard cap on how many characters can be logged into a given server at any one time, and when you have a couple hundred characters logged in PER CITY who aren't actually even playing, it makes it harder for people who want to actually play to even be able to connect.
The graphics are still quite beautiful... some of the best I've seen in MMO's as a matter of fact. But graphics don't make a game.
I still love the skills-based system, but with the other problems the game has, it isn't worth playing for that sake alone.
I haven't played in some couple of months or longer, and don't foresee myself playing again anytime soon, if ever.
So in conclusion, there are basically a couple of things to consider... Price, time involvement, overall fun and enjoyability (based on things like game-play and graphics)...
Price: 10 (it's free after all)
Time Involvement: 1 (the rewards do not justify the time spent)
Overall Fun: 2 (boring, boring, boring, but beautiful)
Weighted Average (price counting as 1 rating, time as 2, and fun as 5): 2.75
Last Chaos:
Lots of hack and slash.
A typical level grind (BORING, but tolerable for the first few levels).
Tolerable graphics.
Quests which consist of nothing but more hack and slash are useful for only two things, a little bit of material wealth, and letting you know what is appropriate to hunt at your level... Not sure what to hunt? Go find a quest and it will tell you where you ought to be.
Economy is typical... in bad shape. When are developers going to start trying to solve that issue rather than throwing up their hands and saying, "Nothing to be done about it, so let's not take the time"? There are MANY things that can be done about it, and if you do them all, the in-game economy could be pretty stable, you're just too lazy to think of any creative solutions, you lousy bastards! OK, so it's a pet peeve of mine, sorry.
The community of players seems... polite. Not friendly, but not particularly rude either, they're just kind of there.
Price: 10 (free)
Time Involvement: 2 (not as bad of a grind as Silkroad, but bad)
Overall Fun: 3 (because of the high-intensity action you get in the solo dungeons where you cannot have a group and you WILL get swarmed... survival is up to your skill in playing the character and your strategies as much as anything else)
Weighted Average: 3.625
Martial Heroes:
I played this for about 3 or 4 levels (or maybe 5), which took about 30-60 minutes maybe. That was enough for me to realize the following...
Mediocre graphics at best, laggy, level grind, fucked economy, little to no inter-character/inter-player communication, few quests, all quests are hack and slash quests.
I'm not even going to give a breakdown of the ratings for this one... call it a 1 or 2 overall.
Rappelz:
If you read the above, and also have read any of my other game reviews, you may start to notice a pattern... a trend in MMO's, particularly Korean developed MMO's (most of the new ones come out of Korea, though not all, and the problems are not exclusive to the Korean ones, but seem to be worse with the Korean ones)... They all have the same problems.
Those problems, namely, are level grinding, a bad economy that can only get worse, average graphics (usually), lag, level grinding, nothing to do other than hack and slash, even quests and crafts require a certain if not near total amount of hack and slash, level grinding, hack and slash, and did I mention level grinding and hack and slash?
Rappelz is no exception to this rule. And while I tend to keep playing a game even after it gets boring in the hopes that it will get better after a level or two (even though I know it most likely will not), what made me finally decide to stop playing Rappelz (after some 3 hours or so of play), was not the usual problem of being bored with the level grind, but rather the fact that when I went to an area that had grass, even with the graphics settings for grass clip range and density set way down (to almost nothing, such that more than half of the viewable terrain had no grass at all) I still could barely move the character. And as I said above, I have a fairly decent and capable computer. I can play Oblivion with little frame-rate problems if I run it at 1024x768 screen resolution (rather than my normal resolution of 1280x960), and Oblivion is notorious for frame-rate lag, but Rappelz KILLED my frame-rate as soon as I came across grass.
So again, I'm not going to give a breakdown of the ratings on this one, just call it a 0... unplayable except on a computer from 10 years in the future (good luck finding one of those today). Or a 1, playable if you turn OFF the grass, but not worth the time because of the usual issues that seem to plague the genre.
The Saga of Ryzom:
Decent graphics, not merely tolerable, but somewhat nice even.
A sort of Skills-Based Multi-Classing hybrid system. There are 4 classes, each with their own skill set. You choose which skills you learn and use, and can even fine-tune them yourself for slightly customized skills. You can level up to a maximum of 250 levels PER CLASS and can do so in all 4 classes. The skills are not particularly many, and the skills-system in general is not very impressive, but the concept, to me, has potential.
Leveling up did not seem like a terrible grind, however I only played to about level 15 per class (so level 60-ish total out of 1000). A part of the reason for this is that in the "Free, Unlimited Time, Trial Period" will not allow you to play past level 20 per class (level 80 max), and if you want to continue playing, you either start a new character, keep playing where you are but with no character advancement, or start paying a subscription fee every month ($13.00 I think but I don't recall for certain). Given my extremely limited experience with the process of leveling up I cannot say that the game is or is not a level grind.
Quests are normally a hack and slash deal as usual, though occasionally not, especially for the crafting class. The quests are usually a challenge in the sense that though quest item drop rates are quite decent, the quests usually ask you to kill creatures that will naturally be a challenge for you.
One feature, which I can't decide if I like or not, is that it is nearly impossible to get a clear idea of what level a creature is compared to your own. When you target a creature, it displays a certain "level identifier" which narrows down it's level to within a range of 10 or 20 possible levels. This gives you some limited help in deciding if it's a good idea to attack it or not, based on the total of all of your class levels from all 4 classes, but still leaves room for error.
The economy is troubled, as is typical for these games, but it seemed to me to be much more stable than most games these days. The economy is almost totally player-based, which should be expected since every character can take levels in the crafter class, but rather than have player-run shops, you go to an NPC merchant and use them as a sort of "auctioneer"... your item that you are trying to sell is listed in their inventory list and with the price that you set for it... when it sells the NPC takes a commission (this helps with economic inflation issues because it removes money from the economy just as killing a creature adds money to it), and the remainder of the selling price is transferred to your character's inventory.
I didn't notice any lag, except when my internet connection was having problems and I had lag with everything, even email.
Price: 5 (free software, but an average monthly subscription fee)
Time Involvement: 5 (felt tolerable, certainly better than most of the new games, but I can't say for sure)
Overall Fun: 5 (was enjoyable, but nothing special, and could be worse at higher levels)
Weighted Average: 5
So here's my rant...
I love games. I love computer games. I love online computer games, because I can't cheat at them (easily), and I have little to no willpower to not cheat when I can do so easily (ok, absolutely none). But I HATE, absolutely and vehemently ABHOR, the recent trends in Fantasy MMORPG development. Namely, "look at all these games that have made a profit... let's make one just like it!" "No, we don't have to make it better than the others, we just have to make it good enough to turn a profit." So what we are now left with is a massive pile of MEDIOCRE games and a set of some 50+ developing companies who don't give a shit and make no efforts to make a GREAT GAME. And the reason I hate this is that it means that no matter how many games I try out (and so far I've tried some... uhm... at least 15, probably closer to 25, but I don't feel like trying to count them all right now), none of them will ever be worth playing for more than a month.
Every time I come across a game like this I want to hunt down the developers and rip their eyes out and tell them to grow a fucking brain, or at the very least place more priority on making good games (which by nature would make money) then they do on making as much money as possible, as fast as possible, with little or no concern over how long the game will last (making even more money over time, rather than being short-sighted about their profits). It also makes me which that I was in a position to make these games myself, unfortunately the industry is exceedingly difficult to get your fit in the door on, and even then you have to be there for some 10 years before you have the authority within a major and established company to actually be able to influence the quality of games the company makes.
So end of rant, and here's hoping that my 30-50 year trek (probably) toward getting into such a position of authority within a game dev company will be successful. And also hoping that in the meantime some company or other manages to make a game that is worth playing for at least a year.
And despite all of it's problems, which are certainly many, I think I am forced to say that EverQuest is still the best MMORPG I've ever played, and even it was only able to keep me going for about 18 months or so.
Now back to studying for finals, which are next week for me.