So, unless you've been under a rock for the last few weeks, you already know that TrionWorlds, the publisher that brought us Rift, is set to release a brand new game on Monday. Technically. Since that's when head start happens. Trion's been hyping ArcheAge as a plush sandbox MMO, where you can play your way without any penalties or having to sacrifice form for function. They boast over 100 classes, each one a different three-part combination of their skillsets. It offers an intense housing system, large-scale realm and guild-based PvP content, aerial travel, and even naval warfare. As in you can become a motherfucking pirate king.
Okay, that's how it's being sold. So far, in my HIGHLY EXPERIENCED level thirteen opinion, they're doing a decent job of delivering on their promises. And considering the game lost a lot of potential hype to its neighboring releases (Wildstar, Elder Scrolls Online, and the World of Warcraft and Rift expansions), it's actually gathered a pretty healthy community. There seem to be sizable clusters, even in beta, of players from every major sphere of gameplay. Hell, there are even Lineage2 style criminal guilds that focus on ganking and stealing, and anti-red police guilds that hunt them.
My nostalgia is probably getting the better of me here, but I am really excited to see the community taking a turn-of-the-century shape. I'm one of those oldschoolers that waxes poetic about the lost days of the East Commons Tunnel, and bot-hunters, and guilds putting reputation before epeen. I get giddy when I see a chat that's almost like vanilla Barrens chat, but with a healthy dose of pre-Dragons of Norrath Plane of Knowledge.
Ultimately, a lot of evaluation is going to have to wait until I get to spend more than five hours ingame, but so far it's looking good. My biggest pet peeves so far are Firrans, the labor system, and only having one skill until like...level ten. (Only a slight exaggeration.)
Firrans are the requisite cat people, and they comprise one half of their faction. (The other half is an ambiguously Asian race of humans.) My biggest complaint? The males all either look like Morpheus or like they got stung by a bunch of those bees from the Hunger Games, and the females all look like twelve year old prostitutes on speed. And holy shit. The run. THE RUN. Remember the Worgen "racial mount", where they run on all fours? Firrans do that. Only when the females run, their tails are held half-up like they're presenting to be mounted. Yeeeeeah.... It's gross. And when they swim- which, why the FUCK do so many of the cat starter zones throw you into water when, like, cats hate water- they look like goddamn dolphins. Their hats look ridiculous, their mounts are totally cute when they're babies but look like derpy battlecats...
You get the picture. Firrans bug me. But wtf is the labor system?
I'm glad you asked! Please. Have a seat. This is going to be a bit of a rant.
You know how almost every Facebook and app store game has a limited "stamina" resource that determines how many missions you can run? Labor in ArcheAge is like that, only it dictates how many dropped bags you can open, harvesting nodes you can use, and crafting combines you can do. You generate labor at a rate of one per minute, in five minute ticks. Being the farming whore that I am, I was harvesting every single resource node I passed, never thinking that I was burning up a limited resource.
Yeah...
So I got to the obligatory crafting introduction quest, and I had no labor. At all. And the combine requires a whopping fifty labor. Fifty minutes' worth of standing around and doing nothing (or running in circles looking for quest updates that are right in front of my face, and bitching about camp stealing) to do ONE. COMBINE.
wtf.
I know I shouldn't be that surprised. The game is free-to-play. It has to have restrictions to bait people into the cash shop and get them to spend money on the game. And honestly, the price tag on labor potions isn't that high. Maybe a dollar? Two? And it gives you a thousand labor. Pretty decent exchange rate, compared to other games. I wouldn't expect any less from Trion though. They've done better than most other western publishers with their development of a micro/macrotransaction-based f2p system. (Probably because the company was founded by venture capitalists, and not programmers, writers, and engineers.) Still. The fact that just about everything short of questing and grinding xp eats up labor bothers me. Maybe if you generated labor while offline at a reduced rate, it would go over better, but you don' get ANY while you're logged out. The only way to get labor points is to be logged in.
Time to get my quarter-stuck-in-keyboard and auto-run into walls in the middle of nowhere mojo on. >.> I haven't had to keep a character logged in with timeout cheats in like six years.
My issues with the skill system are really just a reflection of an issue I have with MMORPGs in general. At level one, or even level ten, you have like...NO BUTTONS. And the ones you have are very basic attacks. In ArcheAge, this becomes sand-in-the-snatch-esque because every ability but your basic ranged and melee strikes has a cooldown. It's like being a Crusader when Reaper of Souls first launched. ARROW SHOT! And...now it's time to lean on my attack button until it comes back up. And while archery takes a 20% damage penalty for being in melee, they get no ability early-on to snare, root, reverse lunge, or otherwise gtfo melee. Just once, I want to have access to my core abilities from level one, and develop them with complementary abilities, buffs, an debuffs over the course of my character's development. It doesn't have to be the FINAL class toolkit, but it does have to be a complete kit. If I'm ranged DPS, give me a snare or root, a strong ranged blast attack, a decent ranged aoe (cone or taoe, I don't care), and some kind of self-heal or mitigation cooldown. That's all it takes. If I'm a healer, the kit is almost the same, only you give me enough damage to be able to solo, give me a solid single target heal, and either a group heal, damage absorb, or mitigation buff. Tanks need taunts. Rogues need stealth or stuns. That kind of stuff.
Maybe I'm asking for too much. I don't know. I would feedback all of this to Trion, but their version of ingame feedback is their knowledge base on an ingame browser. Less-than-ideal.
Anyway. In spite of my rambling list of peeves, I highly recommend ArcheAge. Official live date is sometime next week, with head start beginning on Monday. If you're curious or on the fence, drop by my stream tonight at 5pm EST. I'll either be playing my Firran trickster, or I'll have rerolled an elf something or other because I can't take the yiffing any more. And apologies for the missed days here on the blog. It's been a busy week.
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