Phantasy Star Online 2

Strictly SEGA related discussion.
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Reknoc
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Post by Reknoc »

Okay a few hours in and level 9 and I'm ready to throw down some impressions.

It's good... really good, in fact this my favourite PSO ever (including Universe and the Portable games), the UI is a little wonky and not entirely intuitive, but other than that everything about this game is amazing... well I have a few niggling problems but I'll get to them later.

D-D-Dash (cancel)

I think, the best place to start would probably be the combat. The difference in combat between this and the original game is like night and day, hell even between the more recent games its pretty amazing. Now admittedly I'm playing as a Force character (mage) so my experience in melee is limited, but even so it's enough to know just how different it all is. First of all you can jump, this means you can also do air combos to enemies in the air or even rain down magic/bullets upon them from some where safe. It also allows for more interesting level design. For ranged characters you can change the camera to a third person shooter style camera which works amazingly well if you want to hit an enemies weak spot without dealing with the finnicky auto target or lock on mechanics. For melee I've heard people refer to guard and just guard (guarding as soon as an enemy attacks to negate all damage) mechanics. You can also dash evade attacks granting invincibility frames, not only that but dashing midcombo cancels you out of the combo and into the dash. Combos are similar to the PSP games, you can still combo by pressing the button constantly like an idiot (or even holding it down) but you can also time it to do the nostalgic "shwoop" noise and hit for a bit more damage. Now compare this it PSO1 where you clomped next to an enemy, slowly hit on it, hoping you timed the combo just right so you aren't frozen awkwardly for a second, or hoping that the game will decide to autoblock for you... yea. Again, I'm a force, but I think I can tell what makes melee characters interesting is the make a combo feature, basically allowing you to put 3 different or the same special attacks into your special attack slot to make your own combo.

A matter of matter boards and quests

The structure of the game is rather similar to the portable games. Instead of being able to just waltz into an area, clear out a couple of maps and fight the boss, you have to select a quest. Most of these involve going through a couple of maps and fighting a set amount of enemies. There are also "free" missions, which are basically more traditional quests that involves clearing out a couple of maps and fighting the boss. And now areas are not entirely instanced, some quests have "multi-party" maps. What these are basically are larger areas where parties doing the same quest will converge. This is really awesome, one quest has you all working together to exterminate several bugs. But you all get EXP as long as you're near the enemy, and loot is player based so no one can kill or loot steal.

Of course, cutting through quests isn't the only way to get EXP and Meseta now. Around the lobby you'll see NPCs with glowing exclamation marks blue notices over their head, this means they want to give you a "client order" now these range from the boring simple tutorial stuff to teach you how to use some features around the lobby, to bland MMORPG "kill x of y" or "get x amount of y from z" quests which honestly aren't too bad since you'll do most of them through the space of playing the game and the EXP given is always a good chunk. Some of them are however rather neat, more challenge based, like go through a quest with only a certain weapon or S rank it with just one NPC partner. One characters client orders are pretty important, she'll give you quests which will reward you with you MAG, or allow quests and areas to be unlocked. A nice touch is, you can easily tell which quest you can do a client order in by looking to see if it has a blue notice next to its name when choosing your quest.

The matter board is basically where all the story missions are, this is a nice, it basically acts similar to the license board in FFXII. When you do a quest, all adjacent quests on the board will unlock unless there's another requirement for it. This is nice, part of me likes to see the board slowly fill out and gives me a big incentive to finish it, now I can't understand a word of the actual story, but I'm going to err on the side of videogames and assume it's probably not very good.

Butter Face

Graphically the game is, not great. I do appreciate that however as it means the game runs on my... less than amazing laptop. So while I cannot say how amazing it looks on full (it has terrible motion blur, that I can say) no amount of good graphics can hide the terribly ugly characters that populate the game. I mean the NPCs as well, not the player characters that even with the chance to make monstrosities look better than most NPCs in the game.

The music and sound is spot on however, nostalgic, PSO-ey, good. A nice mix of new and old.

Pantasy Star Online

I said it wasn't perfect so allow me to just mention my problems with it at the moment. 1) The structure means you spend a lot of time in the forest area. Like I said I've played for a few hours now (though some of that is dicking around in the lobby) and I still haven't seen the caves. Now this is super unfortunate for me because one of my biggest gripes with PSO1 is that after the forest the level design gets really bad and nothing more than square rooms connected by corridors, and I wanted to see if that was true here. 2) I don't like that you don't get the quest for your MAG until level 5, and the drops are not the easiest to find meaning you could be level 10 before you actually get it. Now I don't mind character slots being a cash shop thing, but only 1 is ridiculous especially since characters are bound to the ship you created them on.

Of course, this is the beta and those things may be fixed by the time the full version is out.

Basically I highly recommend playing this, just do it, the beta runs fine. There's no reason to be intimidated by the language barrier, there are plenty of guides and a translation patch in the works and after a while it all becomes second nature. Plus, the likelihood of a western release is grim considering SEGA's current state.

If you do decide to play then Ship 2, blocks 20-23 are where most english speakers hang. It's basically the foreign quarter.
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Reknoc
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Post by Reknoc »

Wait, I'm an idiot, MAGs don't work like that at all. They work exactly the same as they did in PSO, the bar I was looking at is a "hunger meter" it's supposed to go down!

edited.
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Tru
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Post by Tru »

Oh wait, that's what that is? Well that's useful to know xD

I've been playing this for a few days now. In a way, it feels like they've taken the best bits of other PS games and mashed them up; the room system, customisation and missions from from PSU, the loot system and dodging/rolling/fast combat from PS0/PSP2, the Team system from Blue Burst (Which I'm very happy has returned!) and, of course, everything else from the original PSO, including Just Attacks, MAG's, Grinding items, etc.

And as Reknoc says, the music is quite nostalgic. Lots of reused sound effects too.

There are quite a few little additions here and there that are welcome too. There is a Skill Tree-like system for each class, which makes levelling up slightly more unique to each character. The menu system is also improved I think. You can send items to your storage straight from the menu, and even 'lock' them in to the menu, to prevent them from being accidentally sold.

I can't really comment on the graphics as I'm playing on the minimum settings. My PC isn't really a gaming computer, but it runs pretty smooth most of the time, just a bit of lag here and there!

I'm enjoying it, but I feel that I would probably be more immersed if I could actually understand the game more. It IS easy to navigate through the games and menus despite the Japanese, so the Open Beta is definitely playable, but I wish I could get more out of the game too. Hoping for a English patch soon!

Overall, which I said on Twitter the other day, PSO 2 also kinda feels like PSO HD. The two starting areas, Forest and Cave (They have proper names that I can't remember) look like what PSO's Forest and Cave might look like if they were HD. But this isn't necessarily a bad thing. I hope we get more interesting and diverse locations later on though, as much as I loved PSO, just playing the same four areas over and over got boring, and I liked PSU's mix of locations more. So far in PSO there is the Forest, Cave and Desert, and also a bonus City area which I've found once.

Which reminds me... Things are definitely spiced up this time round with random events that happen mid mission, plus emergency missions which occasionally appear in the City! These are pretty damn fun actually, especially when random folk come together.
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Reknoc
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Post by Reknoc »

Yea, the emergency codes are amazing. What's more amazing is the announcer for them, I wish they showed up more often just to hear the announced "EHMERGANCY COHD ATTAHCK"

I just unlocked the Caves are and it's stunning, it also shows that it is so far pretty consistent in having more varied maps than what PSO had. There is still time but PSO after like 3 maps didn't even pretend it wasn't just squared rooms connected by corridors.

Not knowing the story doesn't bother me, I spent a lot of time playing PSO on PC and couldn't tell you what the story was as I never once bothered to check it.
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Post by Gavvie »

Will throw the couple of posts that Rek and CapnCloudchaser have posted into an article tomorrow to help people out who're trying to play.

I have to admit that PSO2 is a game I'd love to try, but I've kinda gone off PC gaming a little bit so I'm a bit apprehensive to go and download the Open Beta. Might have to at some point, though I'm not too sure when.
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Reknoc
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Post by Reknoc »

Servers going down in about an hour for some special maintenance. They'll be down for about 27 hours :(

http://bumped.org/psublog/pso2-the-open ... intenance/

edit: Since the downtime is to help with the lag, let me talk about the lag. The game has lag, so yes the servers are in Japan but people over there are also suffering from it. Recently it hasn't been too bad but large spikes do happen. It has lag okay, but it's not nearly as infuriating as saaaay Diablo 3. All it does is mean there's a delay between hits registering and when you pick up items. It's a little annoying but still perfectly playable.

Basically this action game in beta with servers in Japan by a struggling dev runs better than a clickathon with local servers by a prosperous dev.

Oh there may also be some PSO2 english release news soon maybe.
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Tru
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Post by Tru »

27 hours?!

*dies*
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Post by ShadowRemix »

I think what I really enjoy so far about the beta is after it ends the characters will carry over to the game when it goes live.
In the fact of evil... I stand strong, but first I have to figure out how to get out of this bottle!!!
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Reknoc
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Post by Reknoc »

If for whatever reason you were waiting for PSO2 to get out of beta you have the super long wait of... Wednesday! (or Tuesday I guess depending on timezones)

http://bumped.org/psublog/phantasy-star ... -july-4th/

[youtube]wt2dQG1aZ_Q[/youtube]

It'll likely go "live" after the next maintenance which is tomorrow and will be another 27 hours deal.
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Post by Gavvie »

Hang on...Does that mean that PSO2 releases this week? o_O
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