Other MMOs and their issues

(Lots of posts recently! If you haven't checked in a while, go back and read the recent guest posts by Ark & Caoimhe! They're quite informative!)

I've bounced around a few MMOs over the last two years. As you can see, none of them have really managed to hold my interest. Hopefully FFXIV can do so, but we'll have to see. Here are some of the MMOs I've tried out, what I liked about them, and why I eventually quit.

Star Wars: The Old Republic
This was the first MMO after FFXI that actually looked like fun. Quite a lot of people from FFXI played SWTOR, including Fuji, Val, Ark, Ghiren and Rooks.  Done by BioWare (famous for the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series), it had a large amount of voice acting, decision wheels, and of course, a long extended storyline. Actually, 8 long extended storylines covering the 8 different main character types.

The Bounty Hunter with her companions at the end of the story. (Last time I posted I only had a trooper character. I created and finished a Bounty Hunter with Ghiren earlier this year)

Gameplay wise, this is a classic MMO with the trinity (tank, healer, DPS) with hotkeys and a global cooldown, similar to FFXIV. There is also a companion system which lets you have a NPC come help you fight, or heal you, similar to the chocobo companion of FFXIV, but a little more detailed in the equipment and orders you can give to them. There's also a relationship storyline with the various companions and you can marry one of them. Gay and lesbian marriage was added in a later patch, though I haven't checked that out yet!

Whee, romance!

Content wise, there was quite a bit. Space battles, the classic questing system, dungeons (called flashpoints), and finally, endgame operations. The last is considered the endgame activity with 8 or 16 people needing to go through a number of fights and boss fights.

Star Wars! See? Stars? And they're fighting!

Some things that stood out about SWTOR:

• The storylines were generally pretty good and interconnected. They basically created a ton of content for you to go experience. To get the full SWTOR experience, you'd have to finish 8 different alts. Each character takes between 1-2 months of casual gameplay to finish the story.
• Unfortunately, the filler quest content is the same for each character to create, so while you might create a Smuggler and a Jedi Knight, other than the individual class quests, all the rest of the quest experience is the same. 
• Crafting was very easy. All you had to do is select what you wanted to craft, then your companions would go craft it for you. You can even set them to go gather materials for you if you have the credits for it. The only thing is that as you go up in levels, it will take a longer time to complete. Some of the crafting missions took ~2 hours to finish.
• PvP was generally fun. There are 8v8 arenas with different objectives, like "Huttball", a football-like game where you can shoot up other players, or a capture 3 flags type game. The PvP and PvE gear are clearly separated so you'd have to earn your way through either one.

Fooling around and dancing before starting an operation. Are those lightsabers safe to be waving around like that?

The biggest problem with SWTOR is the lack of endgame content. The existing endgame content is very solidly tiered. As in, you start off doing the most basic operation, and only after you farm enough gear from that operation will you be able to do the next operation, and the next after that. If you don't have gear from the lower tier, you have no chance of completing the next tier. In theory, once you get through the first few rounds of the endgame content, you can turn on a "nightmare" mode to get the *next* tier of gear. Even though the operations themselves are initially interesting as you learn the different tricks that they throw at you, it quickly becomes tedious as you're literally doing the same thing every time your group gets together for weeks at a time. You're also locked out of doing operations for 3 days after you complete one, meaning you can only do an operation at most twice a week. Once you hit level cap, there is very little to do in terms of variety. A friend of mine still playing told me that after they raised the level cap to level 55, they went back and simply slapped new labels on the old operations, raising the level for those to level 55 and making you redo everything all over again.

Phantasy Star Online 2

This was an unusual MMO to try out. For starters, it's only released in Japan at this time, though a US release is supposed to becoming out in 2013. There is also a PSP Vita client which lets you play on the goal. Whether SEGA will actually release it in the US or not is still up for debate as they have delayed it many times. Still, since it's a free-to-play MMO there was no harm in trying it out. Ark & I created accounts on the JP server and toyed with it for a few hours! 

Fan-created patches also make the game playable

PSO2 is a lobby/instance type of MMO, where you can interact with people in the central hub, create a party, then select an instanced mission to go do. There are cutscenes and dialog of course, but I have no idea what they were saying!

Yay squigglies!

Gameplay was highly simplified, a few buttons to press and relatively simple classes (Long range gun shooter, short range close combat, and spellcaster). I'm guessing this was to handle the PSP Vita players as well, though I remember Phantasy Star Universe as being relatively simple too.

Combat consists of lots of dust!

The "pay" store seemed to be focused on cosmetic items, event items and stuff. The whole thing definitely felt like a Phantasy Star type game and story, though the gameplay and graphics are quite dated by today's standards. The character expressions are very robotic (I mean, even the non-CAST characters looked robotic!) 

The game as a whole definitely didn't feel very big, though it might have been fun to play around with once in a while. If they ever come out with a US release, I'll probably play around with it! 

Big gun, big sword or big staff?

One interesting thing about PSO2 is that they have a benchmark program where you can design your character and then use the designed characters in the benchmark cutscene sequence that they run. The designed character can then be saved and the profile information loaded into the actual PSO2 game to use as your character. The FFXIV team has announced the same feature for a FFXIV 2.0 benchmark, with this character designer scheduled to be released between beta phase 3 & 4.

Tera Online

Tera was the next MMO that a bunch of us played after SWTOR. Many of the same suspects.. Fuji, Ark, Val... I guess it was really lolipedo and skimpy outfits online!

Bunnies! Just one of many races such as kitties, squirrels and other cute sexy animals!

Graphically, the game is quite impressive, very pretty areas, great graphics that probably rival FFXIV in terms of quality and in-game cutscenes. The leveling process is very WoW-like... run to new area, pick up quests, kill X mobs, collect Y items, turn in quests, move to next area and repeat.

Cutscene with in-game model. Also, fantasy low-level warrior-type armor that only exposes the belly

Gameplay wise, Tera was a nice refreshing change compared to the standard tab-targeting type MMOs like FFXIV and SWTOR. The actions you did were in the world and whether you hit the enemy or not was almost entirely due to your own skill. Dodging and avoiding big enemy moves is a big part of gameplay, and if you want a challenge, there are open world "big-ass monsters" (yes, that's what they are officially called) where you can go up against for a challenge. Easy to fight against when you're in a party, but they can be taken down solo by a skilled player.

Highly configurable UI. You can do *some* of this in FFXIV as well with the chat boxes that can be broken out into different places

The control scheme is also quite interesting and in many ways, similar to FFXIV. You have the standard keyboard 1-= hotkeys that you can use, but if you use a controller, you can also simply use the four face buttons on your controller to trigger actions. You can also use the triggers to access even more buttons, making it very much like FFXIV. The action-oriented gameplay made this controller-type play very fun, like playing an action game on a console. One thing I really liked in Tera was that combos can always be done by pressing the same key (spacebar, or X on a controller). Unlike on FFXIV where you have to press different buttons to pull off combos.

Did I mention the skimpy outfits?

When it came to endgame, this is where Tera showed its Korean roots. The basic endgame sequence was to just go grind... grind grind grind... repeat the dungeon multiple times to get weapons, use the same weapon to upgrade your weapon. You can upgrade the weapon by sacrificing weapons and expensive catalysts for a probability of increasing the quality. Try to upgrade the weapon to a +9 by farming weapons and money, or repeating daily events... erm... daily to get points to get more gear. There is a "Nexus" event for people at level cap that happen at specific times of the day. Virtually everyone at endgame level would go to these places and fight enemies to get points to get gear. Of course, this lead to huge amounts of lag and graphical glitches. For a game that ran smoothly in all other places, you'd drop down to around 5 frames per second.

Whee... people as far as the eye can see.

The dungeons are a decent amount of fun the first couple of times through, and many have interesting mechanics. For example, in the screenshot below, at some point during a boss fight you have to assign one person to go to a cannon and shoot the boss to prevent it from launching a special move. 

If I miss, you all die!

Overall, the game was a decent amount of fun. If not for the randomness of the endgame upgrades, it might have made it for a long-term game. The problem was that there was only a limited amount of endgame activities to do, and they were extremely repetitive with very little advancement. The Korean grind was too much for me.

Still... Tera did have a lot of vanity items too, and fanservice!

Glowy high level weapons, plus a halo, bikini and glasses!

Guild Wars 2

GW2 made for an interesting change of pace. Unlike most other MMOs, the concept of the tank-healer-DPS "holy trinity" was not used in GW2, but instead every job was a hybrid job, capable of doing a variety of roles. This also created lots of different types of gameplay. I played a Mesmer, basically an illusionist that can multiply her damage with extra clones, or fool enemies (and players) with illusions. 

Three Ascys attacking one mob!

You could also change what attacks and abilities you had available by switching the active weapon you were using. You could do this in the middle of battle too, giving quite a few different options for poking things. For the basic leveling, they did a modified version of the WoW-questing model. Instead of having to pick up quests, whenever you entered a new area, you would get the quests automatically with the objectives popping up for you. There were also dynamic events that occur either on timers, or can be activated when someone talks to a NPC, almost exactly like the FATE events of FFXIV. There are also instanced dungeons for group play, or for advancing the storyline, just like FFXIV.

Yay, I'm like... 4 people!

One fun aspect of gameplay was the "realm vs. realm" where different servers would fight against each other in a grand battle royale across a huge map. This included siege weapons, defending and taking castles, and coordinating a ton of people. Unlike Tera, there was little-to-no lag or performance problems during these big events.

To mix up gameplay, there were also various environmental weapons you could use... siege weapons, battle armor, random weapons lying around, so if you wanted to do something different instead of your usual class, you could.

What's a gun doing in a fantasy world... oh well, pew pew!

Graphically, the game isn't as good as Tera, at least in my opinion. The engine seemed simpler and the character models are less detailed, but it does allow for a variety of environments and armors. Much of the story is told through these cutscenes which have a NPC across from your character, like an old-style RPG...

Yes, I'm having trouble breathing in this outfit! Thanks for asking!

Like Tera, there is a fair amount of fan service in this game... Lots of revealing outfits, and even the beginning outfits show a lot of skin. I guess that's the trend for many of these MMOs. At least FFXIV isn't like that!

As a Mesmer, I'm supposed to... mesmerize people?

One thing that stood out for GW2 was the equipment dyeing system. Unlike other MMOs, you could change the color of your gear in different places. Up to three different choices of color could be made in your gear, changing things like the trim or colors of the design. It made it so that everyone in the world had a different look.

Whee... I'm a magical girl!

Overall, the game was a lot of fun to go from level 1-80. The real problem came at the end. Well, there were two main problems. The first was that the final, FINAL dungeon was bugged. As in... you could not access it... At all... due to bugged quest chains leading to it. As you can imagine, not being able to finish the final dungeon in the game due to bugs is very annoying, especially after spending time to set up a group and fighting our way to the entrance.

The other is the highly annoying jump quests which require you to jump around like Mario would to reach certain areas to complete quests. These are present not only as one-shot things, but daily quests, and special events. I don't like this sort of game to begin with, and having to do it online is... well... it frustrated me.

Big event mob. I'd rather fight than jump all over them :(

Neverwinter

Neverwinter has the distinction of being the first (and hopefully only) MMO I've played where I felt like I've finished all the content the game has to offer before it was officially released. As a free-to-play MMO, Neverwinter had nearly two full months of open beta where you could play all content, from level 1 to level cap. Ark & I finished everything in... maybe 3 weeks of casual play.

I'm a generic looking rogue that shows off my belly... hmm... another MMO outfit standard

Gameplay is nothing special, standard holy trinity, quest hubs where you click through, pick up quests, run around, turn them in and move on. You can only set a small number of abilities to use in combat (I think 6?) so you have to pick & choose what you want to do. Sadly, for my class, at around level 8 I found a combination that worked really well and used it all the way to level cap.

Fighting a generic dragon...

Neverwinter had a unique capability of having player created dungeons that you could play. While some people put together somewhat interesting storylines, you were still limited by what the engine could do, limiting most of the stories to blobs and blobs of text. Of course, when you let players have access to tools, people quickly figured out that they could simply make exp dungeons where you can attack or instantly kill tons of mobs without a way for them to fight back. Many many wizards went from level 1 to cap in a couple of hours from this system. There were also many other bugs in the game, allowing for exploits which eventually lead to a server rollback. Definitely a game to avoid!

Conclusion

That's a tour of most of the MMOs I've been through since stopping FFXI about 2 years ago! None of them held my interest for very long for various reasons. I think the longest was SWTOR for 4 months before losing interest there. Hopefully FFXIV will break this pattern! I'm hoping that the good system of having a single character to do everything instead of needing to create alts will be as addictive as it was in FFXI! 

To close, here's a pic of Limsa Lominsa from the FFXIV 1.0 Alpha!

(P.S.: For FFXIV beta phase 4 and release, we will be on the Hyperion legacy server. If you have a 1.0 character you'd like to play with us, please remember the deadline to apply for world transfers is July 15! New players should be able to create characters straight on Hyperion. It's currently a medium population server)