[Nobody]

I recently got a chance to play the Korean OBT (after begging and pleading with a contact) and this game is the most exciting one I've seen so far on the horizon for those that like open world pvp. The easiest description is that it's what happens if you smash Minecraft with a regular old mmo game where you can kill your own faction.

I'm going to link liberally to articles on Mark's fan site as it's the best English place to check out ArcheAge stuff at the moment.

The basics of the game:

• You start out as a newbie on either the eastern or western continent. Each continent currently has 2 races. Character creation stuff. You can flag yourself for pvp and kill your own faction, so factions are "soft".
  
  
• You can then either or steal your way to being a pirate. If you're going to do that though, be aware that you'll get arrested and probably jailed. There is also some kind of community service I think because I had this Korean in a jail suit walk up to me and beg me to plant trees. At level 30 you can also join a jury system to try people for prison sentences. Pirate guilds can have members from an race and so are kind of the "player driven" side.
  
  
  
  
• The game is all about the sandbox and from a very early level you start building things - first planting and raising chicken and later full gardens and then you get to even bigger stuff. Imagine creating your own fortress with your guild - it's doable on the Northern continent. Below are some pics of all the stuff you can make or buy - most of it's from the neutral island Mirage Island where you can click on miniature versions and buy the full sized thing for yourself. Here's where you start to see how much detail is in this game.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Speaking of details, a guide to hunting for buried treasure in the sea. Note the balloons you have to use to raise the treasure from the sea floor.
  
  
• All characters consist of skills they get from 3 main classes. You can reset your classes and relevel their skills, but it will cost you. The classes are fairly normal for the genre, except a little more spread out because of the mixing and matching. Combat is fairly regular for the genre, except that there are a lot of combinations off of the buffs/debuffs. Here's a big listing of skills and classes and a very complicated diagram of the combos here.
  
  
• The economy seems to be based off of tokens you earn yourself (you use to buy things like houses) and tradeable items. All the gear that you craft (which you start crafting at level 20) seems to be initially tradeable when it's crafted. You can wear plate, leather or cloth as a set - each has different bonuses. Cloth has +speed associated with it and leather has +crit for example. You get to decide what you want to wear or when you want to wear it.
  
  
• Questing - it's fairly standard mmo stuff where you kill or collect mostly. The mount quest I got at level 6 though was just epic as was the glider quest at level 11. In the screenshot circles are things I need to go and do and the tear shape is done and needs to be turned in. And yes, that's my mount at an early age.
  
  

IMHO the details that this game has are going to keep me busy for a long while. There are even delivery quests where you wear a large backpack and move very slowly. Imagine the pvp when you go out to try and gank the people doing these quests or try to protect your own people doing them. It's cool because there's a reason to fight.

[dirtyklingon]

thanks snoozle, i'll be sure to link this liberally!

[Device]

The ground texture looks terrible.

[Nobody]

And I've heard a complaint that the level 40 gear isn't shiny enough. Ask me if I care.

[dirtyklingon]

wyhat is level cap?



so update: i went into the archage chan on qnet and it's all my mmo bros from the past 2 years in there idling away!

[Device]

Nobody, on 10 January 2013 - 08:29 AM, said:

And I've heard a complaint that the level 40 gear isn't shiny enough. Ask me if I care.

Do you care?

[Nobody]

nope - I want to hunt treasure under the sea and gank delivery people. I don't think either matters in terms of how pretty my clothing is lol.

Max level for obt is 40, but I believe it's 65 for the full game.

[dirtyklingon]

then why worry if level 40 gear looks purtty or not. it's the level 65 gear you have to worry about really.

[Nobody]

There was some interview with the guy that reached level cap first and he complained about the armor. That's what I heard lol. Personally, I don't care, but you know as well as I do that some people will go nuts about it.

[GurrenLagann]

this is easily the most anticipated mmo for me, which i think is bad because every anticipated mmo has disappointed me recently.

but still, the game looks really promising, from classes to sandbox housing and making ships, putting people in jail, pillaging others.

Looks like i could have a lot of fun with it. Question is how many years until it comes to the US.

[Neb]

Question is actually how much of what they say will be in the actual game. And how much of it would actually see a transfer into the Western version.

I imagine the 'prison' system will be scrapped if it is made for Western audiences. Good luck with that working here.

But no, do get your hopes up.

[Nobody]

Everything that I said above IS in the real game. And yeah, I'm totally worried about however they localize it here, because NA has a bad habit of localizing Korean games poorly. Like if they scrapped the prison system then it becomes a ffa gank fest because there's no reason not to.

I'm actually going to try (cross my fingers) to figure out a way to keep playing the game once obt is done in Korea. It's working very nicely so far in Korea. Also, I heard a rumor that the Chinese version may be f2p - for those that remember Chinese Aion that may be a good entry point to the game in case the western version fails miserably.

There is work on an English translation of the game because the Russians apparently broke the encryption on the language files. I am not bothering with it because of how poorly it will be done - easier to type in the korean if I have a question about a quest rather than look at some bizarre google translate.

[Neb]

Are they actually fleshed out and working well in the game though? You're the only one here who's played it.

It's easy to list features, but whether or not they are actually functioning well and will stay features is no small matter.

Look at GW2's "personal" story where your choices "matter" for a good example. It's technically there, is it anything Anet said it would be? Far cry from that.

[Nobody]

Well, most of the game is a pretty common mmo game if you look at it and it works like the common mmo game stuff works. Are there bugs? Yes, definitely. I had them fix a low level crafting quest like in a second day patch and they're doing a lot of patches right now. I think some people have problems on their machines and so you see the same range of technical issues that you see with any new launch - I've seen a couple of odd things graphically, but they seem to be getting patched fairly fast. Nothing so far that has been game breaking for me though. I'm sure there are balance issues somewhere - there always are and I've never seen a game launch without them.

The stuff that is different would be that the pvp system is much more like lineage than like wow (in terms of soft factions and a penalty for ganking). Not surprising since the main designer was a primary designer for lineage. I personally think the wow 2 faction system is broken all to hell for many reasons, but in the end it's going to be a personal choice for people. I want to be able to gank the jerk next to me for being a jerk - it's just how I am.

The other thing that's different is the sandbox part - you can build houses, plant gardens, etc. Appears to work as far as I can tell. Again, we've run into a few odd things - a guildie accidentally got harpooned from our own ship the other night as they're apparently not that easy to control. It was funny as all hell.

The game does also have instances, but I'm not sure what role they play - they don't appear to be the end game.

It's going to take a while before I see if the penalty system and economic system work - those aren't things that you can figure out overnight. The beginning month is always very chaotic before people start hitting cap and getting to the end game. That's when we're going to learn if it's a good game or not.

And of course, there are probably ways they could completely break the game in the west like with an obscene payment model or something.

[Neb]

Again, flesh out some of these things.

'You can build houses', How? Do you just gather 456593420962509 wood, give them to Jack the carpenter NPC and a building pops up? Are they instanced places? Do they appear in the real game world? Do you have to buy sections of 'land' before you can start building the house? Do you furnish the house? How? Is it just more 65434009 materials to Jack the carpenter?

The actual working mechanics of the thing is far more important to me then just saying it has them.

This post has been edited by Neb: 10 January 2013 - 01:10 PM

[Nobody]

Neb, on 10 January 2013 - 01:10 PM, said:

Again, flesh out some of these things.

'You can build houses', How? Do you just gather 456593420962509 wood, give them to Jack the carpenter NPC and a building pops up? Are they instanced places? Do they appear in the real game world? Do you have to buy sections of 'land' before you can start building the house? Do you furnish the house? How? Is it just more 65434009 materials to Jack the carpenter?

The actual working mechanics of the thing is far more important to me then just saying it has them.

You buy plans using the token currency and build using materials like wood - so there's a gathering and a bought part of it. There are rentable land places to put houses on the western/eastern continent and land on the pvp northern continent is something you take and hold. They are not instanced. Furnishings are also things that may be bought for tokens and then some of them are made with in game mats.

Another important thing is that you can take somebody's territory in the north from them, but large items like houses will go back to the person that owns them into their inventory (I think it gets mailed to them). I'm not sure how re-placing them works yet. With ships there's a "repair" cost when it goes back to you after being "killed" to get it back out.

The important part of all this is that every day you have X labor points to spend - what this means is that a solo person isn't going to be able to build a castle as they don't have enough points. You can give your points to somebody else though, so guilds can get together to build stuff. As far as I can tell, it makes it very hard for solo people to try to corner the market on anything because labor is spread out among different people.

[Neeni]

Okay the whole idea of this game seems like something i've been looking for in years. A game where you can pvp and by pvp I mean really pvp, not just look for someone from opposite faction for hours but actually nuke this annoying nyerk nyerking behind your nyerk


I mean all the known games lately are using the faction system, and instead of changing that they try to implement stuff that no-one really cares for just because they want to stand out. Having a pk system is great and always was, people are more polite to each other and hold their rage against people in good guilds or good players in general. How much I missed this kind of pvp is beyond american imagination so I won't say it here

Aw I thought archeage will be just another boring mmo where the only difference would be targetting system like they do it now with games like tera/raiderz. Really happy that the game is going this way and I'll actually read around tomorrow and see what else is there that interests me about this game.

[reflexion]

YOU ARE TALLER THAN THE HOUSES? WTF?!!

and yea graphics are horrible, it's like back to year 2003

This post has been edited by reflexion: 10 January 2013 - 03:25 PM

[dirtyklingon]

can you talk more about the combat snoozle?


between wow/aion/rift vs gw2 vs tera styles, which is it most like.


if it's like wow/aion/rift, which of those three would you say it's most like?

hard casts on the move? yay/nay?

how many bars can you have/and reasonably expect to use(i say this remindming myself everyone seems to be hellbent on using 2-3x the number of bound skills i personally tend to have)

iv'e seen people talk about combos... can you describe this a bit for us?

[Neeni]

It would be so nice to play together, shame you're all Americigars

Also... should i say snoozle or nobody? im confused now. Anyway, after how many kills do you get a penalty and what's the penalty? I assume it's prison but how long do you stay there for?