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Convince me - Please
Sharajat
Member Posts: 926
Okay, so background. I've played many different MMOs. My most recent three were AoC, Tabula Rasa, and LotR. Of them, I enjoyed TR most for its combat, LotR for... eh... why was that fun? It kinda was. And AoC... was the most polished piece of unenjoyable dreck I've played recently. Seriously, were MMOs meant to stop you from playing them?
I've played others of course. Obviously WoW. Ryzom. CoX. DaoC. EQ. Even a bit of AO. And Hellgate London and Guild Wars if you count em.
Currently, none of these hold my interest.
Horizons was supposed to be a disaster. I avoided it on general principle (- as you can see from that list, I've hit a few disasters in my time.
I've heard nothing but good things about the dev team for Horizons 2.0.
What I want:
Gameplay: Grouping encouraged. I enjoyed instances, I know that many people don't, deal. It's fun to sit down with a group of friends and do something. Grouping for actual goals would be very nice (not just PvP)
PvP: Optional. Sorry, I'm a carebear.
Graphics: Don't care
Gameplay: Fun would be good. Fast would not suck. Grind would suck. Interesting is obviously a plus.
Crafting: How good is it?
Community: Friendly to noobs? Can I find a group before 4-10 days /played?
Basically, convince me and I'll give this a shot. I know nothing about it, so I'm a blank slate.
In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.
-Thomas Jefferson
Comments
These are all subjective, thus unanswerable except by you in your own trial of the game.
Not as good as some people claim, but better than most. It is not very deep, but it has these things going for it:- Crafted items are, for the most part, better than looted items.
- Plenty of different types of items to craft: Armour, decorative clothing, weapons, tools, potions, dyes, gadgets, spells, containers, mobile storage, food (death penalty removal and a few other effects), etc.
- Some flexibility in the stats of an item via Techniques, which are applied during item creation to add statistical bonus, enhance/add spell effects, allow the installation of looted crystals that give various bonuses, etc. Techniques require special resources that can only be obtained by looting in combat or by buying from adventurers who've looted them in combat.
- Building. You can buy a plot (biped) or lair (dragon). These buildable pieces of land are not instanced, but their locations are predetermined. There are many of them though, and choosing an optimal location from those that are available (plots/lairs owned by unsubscribed accounts are periodically reclaimed) is part of the fun.
Once you have a plot/lair, you can build a variety of structures on/in it. Houses, storage, decoration (no furniture though), trees, machines required for crafting, etc.
It has these things going against it:
- No item durability. Once crafted, an item exists forever unless deleted or possessed by an inactive character/account. This results in low demand and high supply to some extent, although the issue is reduced a bit by some Technique resources being difficult to obtain.
- Very dull harvesting system, in which you simply click on a resource node, use the gather key, and wait one minute with absolutely nothing to do until the node depletes. Then you move on to the next node and repeat. You do this until your cargo disk (the aforementioned "mobile storage") is full, then drag the disk to the nearest appropriate crafting machine and mass-produce an unTechniqued item with one click and two seconds. Wash, rinse, repeat.
To summarise in analogy: Istaria's crafting is like pita bread. Broad, flat, and a Pain In The Ass.
That said, I have been enjoying Istaria for almost a year. I'm just spoiled by Ryzom's crafting and harvesting systems.
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In memory of Laura "Taera" Genender. Passed away on August 13, 2008.
Horizons scores very poorly on this point.
a) It discourages grouping. Bipeds (non-dragons) can multiclass. While this extends the game's longevity and makes solo gameplay a bit more interesting, it also kills grouping. The only time players team up is when someone needs to kill one of the mega-boss types for a quest.
The most you get by way of player interaction when it comes to combat is players buffing each other in passing.
IMO this is the game's biggest problem.
b) There are no instances or raid type situations. The closest the game has are a few mega-boss types (all outdoors) that are needed for quests.
You're in luck. It's totally optional and arena only.
A lot of folk complain about Istaria's graphics and admittedly they're not the best, but they're not terrible either. Character animations are actually pretty good, though the landscapes/buildings etc. look dated.
Gameplay is quite grindy, especially for multiclassing bipeds. They reach a certain point and it's nothing but grindfest after that. The fact that it's also largely solo makes this worse.
Istaria has one of the better crafting systems around, though it can get quite grindy. Better than WoW. Not as good as Ryzom.
Where it shines is with building - no other mmo comes even close to Istaria in this department.
It's mixed. Order's community seems to have a better reputation though I personally played on Chaos. The better elements of the community are very good. But Istaria has more than its fair share of truly unpleasant players and there's a long history of them having free reign to do things other mmos wouldn't allow.
As mentioned earlier, this isn't a group oriented game. Where the social element in most mmos centers on combat, in Istaria you find it in crafting/building and guilds.
Not sure
sorry, wrong game
Okay, well thanks everyone. Having done the non-group thing way to often frequently, I think I'm retreating until I see a group-oriented MMO come out. Nothing against single-player MMOs, but not really my thing.
Thanks for the honest review. I may give the trial a shot, but based on the grouping deal, I probably won't. I'll watch the dev blog and see if they add any grouping activities.
In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.
-Thomas Jefferson
Looking at the list of games you've played, I've played those and then some.
In terms of group oriented mmos I haven't seen anything that tops CoX. I particularly liked the way that some powers could be used in totally different ways depending on the powers of other team members. That really made teaming more interesting. The game eventually gets monotonous for other reasons but they did a really good job on this element.
Ryzom is also pretty good in this regard and definitely implemented a better multiclassing system than Istaria's. The fact that you can only effectively be one class at a time and that healing spells can't be cast on yourself provides simple and effective incentives to team up.
was also looking at your post, op, cuz i wanted to learn more about the game myself. But from the list you showed of the games you played, I don't think you mentioned FFXI. I havent played the game for a few years, but the one thing that stands out, even still, is that it was totally group oriented.
If you're going for a game that is all about grouping check FFXI out, not sure if the new expansions and classes changed things but I remember at around level 5 or 6 I was shouting LFG. Hope this helps
Which FF Character Are You?