Random Thoughts on Random RPG News

Etrian Odyssey 4 comes to North America on February 26, 2013. Hurray!

There have been a few interesting tidbits to pop up regarding RPGs that I'm looking forward to over the course of the day, so I figured I'd make this post as a bit of a catch all where I talk / gush about this stuff.  It's all related to handheld RPGs, but we only know that one of them will be seeing a western release, and that's a bit of the news right there.

So, what am I all excited about?  Well, first of all Atlus has finally announced a firm release day for Etrian Odyssey 4.  Up until now we just knew it was coming to the west at some point in 2013, but we didn't know when.  Now we have an answer to that question, or at least people in North America do, and that's February 26th.  With that I say hurray because I've been quite excited about the game since it was announced, and it's nice to finally know exactly when it will be available.  I've not spent anywhere near as much time as I would have liked with the previous games in the series, but I'm not going to make that same mistake with number four.  It will be mine day one.

Idols are coming to 7th Dragon 2020
Part II, and charisma is an important
stat for them.

The other bit of news that caught my attention is that 7th Dragon 2020 Part II is in the works, again for the PSP.  I sincerely doubt that this game will ever see a release outside of Japan given that the first two parts of the series were never localized.  Nonetheless, there seems to be some interesting tidbits trickling out about the game like how there is a character class called an idol, and that its primary stat is charisma.  Even without further details, I find that kinda neat.  I always look at charisma as the stat for opening up extra conversation options, and that's about it.  Hopefully it'll do a little more than that here.

Oh, I should also mention that Phantasy Star Online 2 has a release on the Vita confirmed for Japan next year.  It'll be coming along as a free download as well as a special edition physical version that will run about 5300 yen.  I'm happy to hear that this version of the game is still a thing, especially given how lackluster things have been on the software front for the Vita.  Hopefully the game being free to play will help to generate some more interest in the handheld, and move some units.  Obviously we should be realistic here.  PSO2 is still a pretty niche game, and isn't going to single-handedly save the Vita, but it's still a quality title, and it would be nice if it could contribute to a healthy uptick in sales for the system.

Phantasy Star Online 2 is confirmed for Vita in Japan next
February.  PS - Wired lances are pretty awesome.

Anyway, just some random bits of RPG news that popped up over the last day or so that I thought was pretty interesting and / or exciting.  It's nice to see this stuff, especially in the run-up to Christmas.  I wonder if there will be any more interesting announcements before the end of the year.

Guild Wars 2: Here Comes the Gear Grind

One of the things that I've really grown tired of as far as MMORPG gameplay conventions go is the gear grind. Your character hits max level, and it's time to smack around particularly powerful monsters again and again until you finally shake out that extra fancy piece of equipment that you've wanted for your character. Mission accomplished, Wizzy the Wizard is now +11 more intellect than she was this morning. All it took was killing the same boss 47 times before that Staff of the Undead Muffin Master finally dropped. By the way, is now a bad time to tell you that a new batch of dungeons is going live in three weeks with all new weapons and armor, rendering all of your current gear obsolete? Yeah, sorry about that!

The whole process quickly becomes an exercise in tedium, as players run the same dungeons over and over again to get all of the gear that they want. Much of the time it's not even that it's a challenge. After ten or so trips through these places, most of the people know the fights, and are just in it for the loot. Up until now Guild Wars 2 has been able to avoid this, and Arena.Net talked up how the game was not going to be grindy, but now it looks like this is going to change with the addition of ascended gear.

It's been a way of getting players to keep playing a game by keeping a carrot with slightly better stats dangling in front of them, but the whole gear treadmill is getting tired. Sure, games need a way to keep certain subsets of their player base happy, usually those who plowed to level cap and are thinking, "What now?" but I'd hoped that maybe Arena.Net would at least try and do something different instead of the same old same old.

I'm not entirely sure what would be a good alternative to a gear grind, but it's not something I'm looking forward to in Guild Wars 2. In fact, I don't even see myself participating in it. I'll be taking my characters to level cap at my own pace, explore the world to my heart's content, maybe craft some stuff, and that will be that. I find myself gravitating back towards single-player RPGs of late if only because they have one feature that trumps anything an MMO can throw at you: a pause button. Seeing one of the few MMORPGs I've enjoyed of late tapping into one of my least liked facets of that genre is actually turning me away from the game, and it's a shame.

Final Fantasy XIV: So How About That New Trailer?

I completely missed the boat on Final Fantasy XIV when it came out. I was busy playing World of Warcraft at the time, and the hype train was going full speed with the upcoming release of the Cataclysm expansion, so I wasn't really paying attention to the run up on Square-Enix's MMORPG. Moreover, when it finally did come out, there were a lot of complaints swirling around it, which convinced me not to bother with it.

Now after a year or so of heavy retooling the game is about to get rebooted with Final Fantasy XIV: A World Reborn. There was a big in-game event to commemorate it, and also a really snazzy trailer. I've not seen any of the festivities that took place on the various servers, but I did have a chance to check out the trailer, and it looked pretty good.

I particularly liked the visuals, but that's always been a strong point of Square's. More importantly, the video was able to quickly give me the gist of what's going on in the game right now just through music and video. There wasn't even any annoying narration, which was nice. About the only things I didn't like about video was Bahamut going around torching everything (I know this is meant as a bit of badassery, but I was getting quite the Deathwing vibe from it what with being a giant dragon burning stuff), and the music was also kind of cheesy. I'm told that the music is related to a bunch of recent events in the game, so I guess it will have a greater impact on those familiar with it, but as an outsider looking it, I didn't much care for it.

Nonetheless, it looked pretty impressive. I'm still not sure if I'll ever give it a try, though. I'm just not a fan of subscription-based MMOs anymore. Not to mention that I'm pretty happy just playing Guild Wars 2 and Phantasy Star Online 2. How about you? Have you had a chance to check out the trailer? What did you think of it?

SWTOR Going Free to Play Next Week

If you don't play the game, this guy will come to your house

It didn't take very long for Star Wars: The Old Republic to change its business model. A year ago at this time it was still being hyped up as the next big thing, and that it had a good chance of dethroning World of Warcraft as the dominant MMORPG in the market. Now here we are less than a week away from the game going free to play.

The question is how many people will come and check it out now that they don't have to pay money to play it. If you go full on F2P in how you approach it, SWTOR will be a very limited experience, though, granted, a lot of games of that type can be described the same way. Players will only be able to enter a limited number of PvP matches, instances, and space battles per week, chat communication will be limited, and their characters will receive experience a lot slower than normal. So, it looks like the game is really trying to encourage people to fork out some cash to get the most out of the experience be it through purchases on the cash shop that is about to be implemented, or simply subscribing, which gives players access to all that the game has to offer right away.

Jedi vs Machine

I played SWTOR a fair bit when it first came out, but eventually got tired of it after a couple of months. A lot of the gameplay mechanics were too similar to WoW for me, especially coming off that game which I played pretty consistently for seven years. Instances and PvP had a very similar vibe to Blizzard's MMO juggernaut, and combat was pretty much hot keys and cooldowns. For all of the hype that SWTOR had saying it would make surpass WoW, I thought it was just too similar, and eventually gave up.

Maybe now that it's free to play, I'll go and fiddle around in it now and then. I'd be taking a very, very casual approach to it. I have no interest in the PvP, the instances, or the space battles. I pretty much just want to enjoy the stories, and explore the game world. That's about all I would do in it, and at a very leisurely pace. So, maybe it could be worth it at some point. I'll need to clear a bunch of space on my hard drive first, but possibly one day I'll get to playing it again.

When you fart, don't try to pass the
blame to a jedi. They don't like that.

It's weird, though, because the only things I'm interested in about the game are ones that could just as well have been implemented into a single-player experience, and that's kind of what I would have preferred in the first place. I'd have liked it if Bioware hadn't made SWTOR, and just did KotOR 3 instead. Give it a big galaxy to explore, and maybe toss in some limited multiplayer in the same vein as Saints Row 3. That would have been pretty great, I think. For now, I'll just have to make due with a free to play SWTOR.

Guild Wars 2: Time for an Elementalist

'Tis my elementalist.  She's rather easy on the eyes. ^_^

During my time with Guild Wars 2 I've mostly played characters that use the conventional weapons of fantasy gaming warfare. I've played a ranger who uses bows and arrows, and an engineer who burns and / or blows things up. However, I've not bothered with magic users yet so I've decided to do something about that and have went and made myself an elementalist. Now I'm setting off to burn, freeze, electrocute, and crush my way to a better tomorrow with her.

First things first, I rolled a Sylvari this time since I've not tried that race yet. They're a sort of plant people all covered in leaves who live in a really big forest, but I still prefer to look at them as Guild War 2's equivalent to elves. Their behavior is extremely similar to those mythical creatures present in so many other fantasy RPGs. As you can probably tell from looking at my character as well as the one from my last post, I'm quite fond of the color blue. If I can work it into my character I most certainly will.

Fried bandits.  Add some plum sauce for extra flavor!

Anywho, questing time. Like every character in the game, the first little bit of time I spent with my elementalist was in an instanced starting area. In this case, a magical forest called The Dream. This is where Sylvari first gain consciousness before being born into the real world. The place has seen better days, though, because now it's being attacked by something called The Nightmare, so I had to go fight a bunch of its minions, mostly wolf-like things, and a giant tree dragon. It was very straightforward and didn't last very long, which I liked because some of those early areas when you roll a new character run a little too long for my taste.

After finishing this area it was off to the regular game world where I've mostly been hopping around doing random quests. I started out in the area around the Sylvari capital but quickly got bored there, and have since been doing this and that here and there, making use of warp gates to get to other factions' capitals quickly, and do some quests in those parts of the world instead. I've headed to the realm of the Norns, enjoying the frozen mountain tops and viking-like motifs, as well as some quests in the human lands with all of their green, pleasant, rolling hills. I'm quite a bit more partial to those areas of the game world than the other races' areas.

Human zones have a lot of pretty
fields in them.

I've also dabbled a bit with the story quest for my character. These things can be pretty entertaining I've found. Usually I just tune out stories in an MMORPG, but Guild Wars 2 has been doing a decent job of their's to this point. About the only thing I don't like about the one I'm doing now is that it's introducing this big bad called "The Nightmare Court". After playing Kingdom of Amalur, I'm not really in the mood for yet more elven courts at war with each other, with me being dragged into the mess. It's getting very cliched very fast, but I guess game story writers think it sounds cool to have factions with "Court" in their name, so I may be stuck with it for the time being.

Combat with an elementalist is pretty neat. They can shift between four specialized auras: fire, air, water, and earth. The one you have up is the one that will dictate what kind of attacks you will have. This is compounded by the fact that different weapons also have different attacks, so a dagger would have different fire attacks than a stave would, for instance. So far I've only tried the stave, and a combination of scepter and focus (an off-hand weapon). Of the two setups, I much prefer the stave. It's abilities hit way harder than the scepter, and it has one really neat attack when using air aura that causes lightning to arch between multiple nearby targets for quite a bit of damage. It's pretty great for melting enemies while leveling. I'm actually surprised the game starts players off with the scepter, because it's not much fun at low levels, and left a bad taste in my mouth. I'd much rather have had a stave from the get go.

Picturesque!

All in all, I'm liking my elementalist so far. It's a pretty neat class, especially with how it can hop between so many different types of attacks. She's not as survivable as other classes, but I can manage. So far it's been enjoyable the time I've spent leveling her. I'll write more soon on the subject after I've leveled her up a fair bit more.

Eden Eternal: Searching for a Cutesy Game to Fiddle Around In

Fireball, goooooo!

Usually when playing an MMO I go for something with fairly realistic graphics. Stuff like WoW, Guild Wars, Lord of the Rings, and such have received the majority of my time. However, for the last little while I've had a hankering for something a lot more cartoon-y in the aesthetics department. The change of pace would be nice, I figure, as they seem to be such a carefree environment with a much more Saturday morning cartoon feel to them. So, I've gotten to fiddling around in Eden Eternal for a bit, as it does indeed seem rather cute, and they even let you play as this little mouse character, which is kind of adorable.

It looks like the game has some sort of job system similar to the Final Fantasy series where characters can switch classes as they please, but most of these get unlocked as your character reaches a new level. When starting out I only had two classes to choose from: warrior and mage. I chose to go mage because I like playing magic users in these sorts of games. There are also heroic traits that I had to chose from before starting that permanently augment my character's stats. You can only pick one of these, and from what I can tell they're permanent. They cannot be changed later like classes. I opted for one that would improve my character's intellect and magic critical chance.

So, with that I finished making my character and was plunged into the game world. It's certainly a colorful place with cheerful NPCs, and rather friendly-looking enemies. They're not such a friendly lot when they start hitting you, though (but still cute). The music is peppy, but extremely repetitive. It's just the same little ditty over and over again, and it started getting on my nerves after a while. The worst part is that the tunes started getting stuck in my head after a while. I recommend listening to your own music while playing.

Quests are extremely typical fair: kill ten of these, collect five of those, etc. and the game has an auto-pathing system to it so you don't even need to manually move your character to the next batch of baddies that you're supposed to smack around. Just right-click on their names on the little quest list thing to the right of the screen, and your on-screen alter ego will start running there by his / herself.

When your character gets where she's going, and it's time to start bonking monsters over the head, combat is also traditional with a series of hot keys and cooldowns. My mage just cycles between his fireball and lightning spell, occasionally tossing in an ice spell. I haven't had much use for other abilities that he's learned so far like area effect attacks. Maybe those will come in handy at higher levels, but I'll have to wait and see.

The visuals are bright and colorful

This has really been the pattern up to about level 10 for my character: gather up all of the available quests that I can find, run to each area, kill many monsters, then move on to the next to do it again. It's absolutely not a hugely innovative experience in that regard.

Character development seems pretty standard too. At each level-up I get a point to spend in a talent tree which helps to make my character a little more unique in terms of its abilities. So far I've focused on a talent that will reduce the cast time of spells, as well as one that increases magic crit rates. I've not seen a huge improvement from this, but my fireballs do seem to be launching a little quicker now. There's also points that can be spent on improving the level of spells that my character knows. I'm not sure why this is here, as I always seem to have enough points to max out all my spells at each new level. There doesn't seem to be any choices that need to be made in terms of having to choose specific ones that I want to focus on and make into my character's specialty. Maybe this is something that happens at higher levels.

I've yet to try changing classes yet, but my character does have the ability to turn into a priest now, so maybe I'll try that for a bit. I'm not sure if I'm able to carry over abilities from other classes during these changes, effectively making a hybrid class, so I'll need to check that as well. I do think I'll need to grind a lot on monsters in order to get my character's level up on the other classes, though, as I've already completed all the lowbie quests, and can see no other way of going about that.

The second zone that I went to
seems to have a seaside town

Anyway, Eden Eternal certainly doesn't offer anything new from what I've seen, and I suspect some will find it a boring grind. For now I'll keep it on my computer, and try leveling up a bit more to see what there is to see. It's pretty relaxing, as I just keep it in windowed mode, and play it in the background while doing other stuff. Just set the auto-pathing for its next destination, then go back to reading the news or whatever, and come back after a bit to smack around some monsters, then repeat the process all over again. I'm not looking for a hardcore raiding or PvP experience here, just a cute, cartoon styled game to futz around in when I've got some free time, and so far this game is filling that want reasonably well.