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After one month play- My Impressions of Horizons.
Matt_UK
Member Posts: 420
Ok, i came to Horizons after getting fed up with DAoC and EQ, and after playing EQ for 3 years and DAoC since release. My machine can cope with everything turned up high, which makes a big difference to gameplay, and i don't suffer lag.
Good things about Horizons:
The combat system is fun with it's various stances, manouvres, and abilities, and the way you can cast in combat without interruption even when moving is a bonus.
Character system is good. You can advance in as many classes as you like and gain skills and spells from all of those classes, some of which combine really well in combat. At 20 you can choose a prestige class based on a combination of your current class levels (i went for paladin, a combo of warrior 21 and cleric 18, but i also had mage 7 for flame attacks). You can also gain training points per level to specialise in certain combat or spell areas. No two characters are the same as a result.
Combat system is very player centred. You cannot wander away from the keyboard and will be involved in casting and using different abilities and stances while you fight. If you don't versus equal opponents, you will die! This makes a change from EQ where you just press fight and watch while drinking your coffee (if you were a warrior).
Graphics aren't bad. Character models look a bit unfinished and armour rendering looks a little painted on, but races are well rendered and look interesting. Settings and landscapes are superb and this is where all the development time has been spent in my opinion. Vast icy mountains, deserts, forests, floating islands, lots of ruins, shrines etc.. It looks great and you'll spend a bit of time wandering around taking screenshots, especially if you turn up the graphics on your PC.
Music. Brilliant, best music in any MMORPG. Very atmospheric while wandering about, and great in-combat music.
BAD THINGS:
No npc vendors. Everything you buy in the game has been made by players and has been placed on the few vendors there are in each town. One problem with this is that there is very little stuff to buy, especially at high levels, and you'll have piles of money with nothing to spend it on. Sooner or later this will become a huge problem as less and less people decide to do crafting (which is already happening) and only if you are part of a big guild will you have access to the best equipment. This game needs npc vendors with ALL the available gear, and let the player crafters compete with them.
Very few mobs. The vast and wonderful landscapes i mentioned earlier are pretty empty at the moment, with very little to fight. One good thing about this is that you have to explore and walk around to find things, which is better than EQ where you just sat at a camp for 5 lvls before moving to the next one. The mobs do look cool and fight back with the same spells and abilties you have, which is pretty challenging but they need many many more everywhere.
Quests are boring. They have gone down the riciculous 'kill task' route from DAoC in Horizons, and being told to kill 10 of the thing you have been killing for the last 3 hours is NOT a quest. Some one off quests are good, but there need to be many more. The adventuring/questing part of this game has MASSIVE potential but as yet ignored by the developers.
Small community. Not many people playing at the moment. Just as well considering the amount of mobs available, but makes grouping impossible in some areas, and it would be nice to see some group/guild quests.
Level grind. The lack of anything to do means it can be a level grind, and the only thing stopping this is the ability to play lots of classes at the same time, more quests, mobs, a bigger community will stop this.
Housing. Although i don't care about housing, it's pretty obvious there are not enough plots to go around, even with such a tiny community.
Crafting. This was supposed to be a crafter's game, but crafting is a waste of time and fairly boring too. Crafting is very similar to UO, as you gather resources and use tools+equipment+resources to make things. It might be useful if it was profitable, but it's not since there are not enough people around to buy your stuff, and you can make just as much adventuring any way. Sooner or later there will be very few people crafting, and that will cause problems with availability of items for everyone else.
Just a few thoughts after one month's play. To sum up, this has the potential to be a great game, but it isn't there yet, and if the above problems aren't sorted it never will be .
Matt
Comments
I would like to comment a little on your comments
"No npc vendors. Everything you buy in the game has been made by players and has been placed on the few vendors there are in each town. One problem with this is that there is very little stuff to buy, especially at high levels, and you'll have piles of money with nothing to spend it on. Sooner or later this will become a huge problem as less and less people decide to do crafting (which is already happening) and only if you are part of a big guild will you have access to the best equipment. This game needs npc vendors with ALL the available gear, and let the player crafters compete with them."
You listed this in the bad section and I wanted to point out a few things:
1. Some people love a player run system (I know I do).
2. More and more people are crafting now, especially dragons as it is a req for the new RoP.
3. The game has a great tool called /who. You can find players based on crafting type, adventure type, guild and so on. Finding a crafter is very easy.
The fact is most of the great items, like double teched weapons and tools, take many parts to make and not worth sitting around making them for no reason. Most crafters expect people to msg them for goods, which happens all day long.
Next items------
Lack of Mobs: True, this is an issue for those of us in the higher tier of players. The new islands opening up feature a good deal of enemies for those 50-70 now and more is on the way. Still, we do need more mobs and less open space (tons of it now). They have said they are working on this for an soon to be update.
Quests: Yea, I too want more quests. They do serve a point when trying to level. It is nice to basically get a huge exp bonus while fighting as you normally do.
Community: It is smaller but growing. I talk to people all the time I play. Sometimes I wish there were a few less players and many of the crafting and good exp spots are busy most of the time.
Housing: There are more plots opening up but it is meant to be a bonus. Right now housing serves no purpose as silos are not working yet. I would expect there will be one plot per 3 people or so. Nice they limited it to one per account. Next they need to release plots held by accounts no longer active.
Crafting: My guess is you are a lower level crafter (30 or less). You can make more money crafting, if you know what you are doing, than adventuring. The number of crafters is on the rise. Depending on what craft class you are, making good money usually comes in the 40's to 50's and goes up from there. Once you can crank TII resources/items at optimal, it gets better.
The game does have a lot of potential. Today was another update. This company is very active on updating which is great. Players is on the rise and a MMORPG is a social event. Someone who just wants to play in their own world without talking to others won't like this game.
Me and my fellow crafters are always getting msgs to make stuff for profit and do the same when we need something.
On a plus site, they finally put in the RoP which will allow dragon chars to fly
Still, some will like it, some won't. Just like any other game.
If there can be only one, then I am that one.
If there can be only one, then I am that one.
In some ways, I do find the max listing of 5 items on the consigner (changed in the last patch to 5 items on a consigner per key on the account) a bit annoying. The only other MMORPG I've played to very high levels was Shadowbane, which only kept my interest because my guild let me run a fully stocked, fully upgraded vendor city. The reason I was told why in Horizons you can only list 5 items at a time, is that it gives the lower level people a chance to compete with the higher level people. Otherwise, someone at max efficiency could just flood the market, as they only require half as many resources as someone making items at min efficiency. Force does make an excellent point though, most higher level items are custom made. Particularly with tier3, which can be double teched, the range of options and preferences means that you can't simply keep a stock of items on hand.
As for players not finding people to craft them items, I think very often, they just don't ask the right people. I'm currently a tinkerer, arguably the most difficult crafting class in the game to level (though I have heard arguments for alchemist and confectioner). Additionally, I'm in the high 70s, the third highest tinkerer on my server. Tinkerers have make a lot of coin, but it takes a lot of work to balance all of the resources for cargo armor and disks (four different types of metal parts derived from metal bars, essence orbs, cloth spools, and stone bricks, or 8 items per each of the 4 tiers).
I can currently double tech a tier4 set (market value ranging between 200-400s, depending on teching components), but I still recieve numerous tells asking for tier1 sets or individual pieces of tier2 (a potential profit of 500c or 0.5s). A couple times, I've tried to be nice, agree to do a piece, quote a price, then had the person try to work me down lower, and then had the potential customer get mad when I wouldn't work that low. A friend of mine, a level 100 tinkerer, and one of only 2 lvl 100 crafters I've heard of across all shards, has the same issue and also gets tells for tier1 stuff. The reason why I bring this up is that is that people seem to think that simply because people can do something, that they're interested in doing it, and don't really pay attention to the level of those they ask. People between level 50-100 aren't going to be interested in doing the same jobs they were around level 10. But because they're still asked, a lot of higher levels just remain invisible, so they won't be bothered from such tells, and get business primarily through guild or by referral.
On a side note, I sometimes think that AE is intentially trying to show just how broken the game is. Earlier in the week, they introduced a new quest item, a silver whistle with an elm reed, which are used to increase your attack rating. If you use the whistle long enough and the reed breaks, so you can replace it with extra reeds, or at least that's how it's supposed to work in theory. In practice, when the person makes the whistle, it has 20 charges, and cannot be recharged. When the person trades the whistle, it goes down to 1 charge, regardless of how many charges it had before. They have had the same issues with other charge items since the game went live, but it seems rather careless to purposely introduce new items before fixing such bugs.
Actually though, my biggest gripe with Horizons (other than the various bugs and broken items), is something you listed as a plus, the character system. While I think the multiclassing system is rather nice, and a good idea, I hate how little specialization there is within each class. Every lvl 20 warrior has the same exact abilities, every lvl 20 weaponsmith has the same forms (they're cheap enough to buy them all) and skills. You can apply training points, but even if you put them all in one category, you're only affecting your base by around 20% and your current less than that.
Have to agree with the last poster. I played at the very tail end of the beta in Horizons and decided to buy the 3 month subscription just because I loved the graphics...
Huge mistake... I'm so glad my account has finally expired because I grew sick of the game after about the 1.5 month point. There's almost no point at all to adventuring, everyone is just basically killing to get to their next level. What's the point? There's no real reason to hunt, there's no loot, there's hardly any money in it (ok some mobs drop decent cash but there's only so much use for cash, especially if you craft most of your own gear like I do).
The grouping system is ok but combat sucks, most people just play a insane game of 'whack-a-mob' because few mobs actually BAF and it's just flat out easier to go murder hundreds of things the same level (or slightly lower) than the group than to take on real challenges. so most groups turn into "Pull as many as you can, kill them, rinse=repeat" rather than "Lets see what we can handle without dying!"
To me Horizons is a game that has a ton of potential but needs a great deal of work. First of all they need to balance the adventurer with the crafter. Right now you can earn FAR more money as a crafter than is anywhere near possible as an adventurer. Furthermore there's little to no incentive to adventure since nothing you get from adventuring directly benefits you. There are no +10 swords of vorpal slaying to be found... No "Helmets of ultimate defense" or anything like that. While I agree that it's no fun dealing with camp-fests for that '1 cool item' it's also boring as hell to go kill 1000000 of the same monster over and over just to hear a neat chiming sound effect and some funky graphics when you level occasionaly.
The game has tons of potential but that's all it is right now. The HOUSING system is an even bigger joke, but I won't go there right now.
Currently Playing: Dungeons and Dragons Online.
Sig image Pending
Still in: A couple Betas
The game can definitely a lot of potential, everything is more or less except few things but those are very inportant for any MMORPG around (especially placed into Fantasy world). Players miss LOOT and miss it badly, we miss transport (teleports are good but what about ships, some flying objects, except flying adult dragons) we miss things which are common in other MMORPG. You cn say, they didn't want to steal ideas, they wanted to create a new style, whatever..... But we still miss it.
(And if they don't create PvP system, the game will probably die soon...)
Another thing is an European languages trouble. We all speak different languages (we don' really like each other here in Europe, me to say i am European means to say i am German, NO WAY). So they created the shards without any lingual differentiation... If it will be like this, they can seriously consider a PvP system based on the native languages... Once we could move to play on the US shards, sorry my characters but i don't want you to bark in German, i would rathger sacrifice you...
Forever Young, Forever Drunk
I've been to many places, i've seen so many faces...
I understand the issue you have, justiechan, about high-level crafters. But at the same time, if not many other people are online at the time, or no one else has a good price either, people try to work their way higher up the ladder to find someone who can probably make it a lot more efficiently than someone else, and who might be willing to do it at a lower cost since it's a tier I item.
I'm a level 40 blacksmith, among other trades. I have no problems making lower-level items for people, and made almost a full set of bronze tools for someone the other night -- for no charge. I remember how difficult it was when I was a low-level adventurer and crafter, and how difficult it was to find things I needed. Even recently, before I hit level 40 and was unable to make a Slate Essence Structurer myself, I had difficulty finding anyone online in the right range who could make it. You should also consider the fact that perhaps the people who are sending you the tells might have been referred to you by someone else.
The other night, on my server, I contacted a very high level Tailor about making me a set of Feladan Fashion Wear (sans boots). I offered to supply all the necessary cotton myself. The cost was still going to be 8s even with me supplying everything and going to the location of the crafter in question (who was not doing anything else at the moment but was actually crafting). Personally, I find 8s to be a very unreasonable price for something I would be supplying all materials and traveling for. I would have tipped her exceptionally well, but honestly, sometimes it's just not worth paying the high costs. I was informed that I would be paying for her "time and expertise". Now, I understand that everyone puts a lot of work into their characters, but in reality, the time involves standing in front of a machine that is probably in town, and the expertise means this person was able to level extremely quickly and scribed a formula. 8s for a two-piece set of clothing is not justifiable to me, even at the cotton level, when I got a full set of Kenaf Cargo Armor for around 12s from someone who spent the time to get the materials and tech pieces.
The main problem that I have seen in Horizons is the fact that high-level crafters sometimes get greedy and set the prices for their wares on the consigners insanely high. Only recently did the price for hardened leather backpacks on my server plummet from the standing 15s to a very reasonable 6s, and this only happened because other people finally leveled and came into the market and recognized a need for lower-priced goods. The same will happen for other wares -- it's only a matter of time. And while I have enough silver on me to pay for such expenditures, it becomes a matter of simply not wanting to do so. Of course I will charge people for items at high levels, but I've often found that when I quote a very reasonable -- or low -- or free price to people -- they tip me very, very well. I had someone tip me 2s the other day to make a bronze fitting mallet, and someone else gave me well over 1s for two bronze tools. Within minutes, that very person had also referred someone else to me, and that person also tipped me well -- with ALL the money he had to his character. You'll keep more people happy if you're reasonable with your prices and your attitudes about your crafting. I can make plenty of money while leveling my respective crafting schools and pawning the wares to keep myself far more than self-sufficient, and adventuring only makes that easier.
Lastly, I've gone confectioner for 20 levels. This school is by far one of the most difficult to level, not in terms of length of time but in terms of the necessary resource requirements for doing so. To cook anything at Tier I you first need adobe clay, and water, in order to make clay cooking bowls, or pans, or the like. Then, you must gather the necessary resource -- fish, meat, or the like. And then, if you're making something like jerky -- you guessed it, there really *is* a use for salt rock. Then you have to combine all of these things together. It takes getting used to, but can go quickly once you find a quick way to do it. Sslanis is pretty much the only city that has many of the confectioner needs in abundance within a reasonable cargo disk walking distance. This is fine if you're the only confectioner trying to level at a time, but horrible if there are multiple low-level confectioners competing for resources. Looking at the skills for tinkerer -- I will eventually be trying this class, probably -- I think I'd use a combination of transmutation and tool-making to get the job done. I'll find out when I give it a try, I guess.
Rain
So,
To sum up:
Only the crafters are getting rich. And mostly the only ones who can afford such items are other crafters. For you, as you said, the money isn't the issue. For those of us who choose not to craft and prefer to adventure the money IS the issue. While a crafter can make 8 silver in a few minutes (I know, I've done it) an adventurer may be hunting for several hours to make that much.
The game has serious balance issues. Both in combat abilities and in money gathering. The game also has a major flaw in that crafters are the ONLY source of goods and items. You can't find them. You cant fix the broken stuff that mobs drop and you can't quest for very many either.
The game has multiple issues on multiple levels. The biggest fix would be to put in dropped items that aren't quite as good as what you'd get from a crafter. Perhaps even get rid of the techs and patterns that crafters have to learn from and make them have to dissasemble a dropped item to learn how it's made instead. This would then give the adventurers something that the crafters need. The original items so that they can learn to make them.
At any rate, currently the game is too heavily tilted towards crafters with little to no incentive for the adventurers to bother.
Horizons is broken, currently, hopefully AE will fix it,. But even if they do it's too late for me. I've moved back to UO and am awaiting MEO or WOW to come out.
Currently Playing: Dungeons and Dragons Online.
Sig image Pending
Still in: A couple Betas
There are plenty of adventurer-crafters out there. In fact, I don't see many people running around who have a zero crafter level and high adventure, or vise versa. There are a few, but I just don't see that many. I think that's overall how I would describe myself, an adventurer-crafter, although I find crafting to be more fun right now. Not lucrative, necessarily, unless you're willing to overprice your wares -- but fun. I like the challenge of leveling up everything I can.
The majority of my money truly has come from adventuring, mainly in the Tier II and now (sort of) Tier III goelm areas. Golem fragments sell extremely well, and in Tier II I would bring in 40 or 50 at a time, plus all the tier II resources, which also sold well. In addition, I would go around to each town and consign all duplicate formulas and techniques at reasonable prices, selling most of those in the process. That is, essentially, how I earned the silver to buy my plot of land.
Those who are solely crafters will find themselves in trouble when they start to go for higher-tier resources. And adventurers could easily charge those people to provide protection in dangerous areas. 5s per hour, or more, depending on the area and Tier. In addition to this, adventurers can provide crafters with highly-needed lore tokens and bounty markers that drop from mobs. As a crafter, I would gladly accept payment of either a requested technique or product in exchange for the free or very low-priced crafting of said item, or I would gladly accept lore tokens or markers in exchange as well. Some crafters are very willing to do this -- the person who made me my steel platemail took 30 journeyman lore tokens and steel bars and made my entire set for free. As a crafter, I really don't want to have to spend extra time deconstructing items and the like in order to learn how to do things. I personally like the formula and technique method a lot, and would probably have a lot more money right now if not for my penchant for buying every new technique I see and new formula that I can use. In addition, techniques and formulas used to be quite common as drops on certain mobs, and adventurers had that advantage. I don't see that as being much different from having to deconstruct a dropped item, it would just be more of a hassle because of level requirements and storage issues. I can store tons of formulas in my vault, but I wouldn't be able to store as many dropped items that I couldn't yet deconstruct and learn from.
My goals for Horizons have been two-fold: to be a high-level adventurer who can take care of myself in dangerous areas within the game, and a crafter who can craft like mad to provide low-priced goods to the community of my server. In addition to that goal, I also like the ability to provide myself with my own tools and items in certain realms -- I absolutely hate being at the whim of crafters or adventurers, and enjoy being moderately self-sufficient. I'm currently a level 20 or higher crafter in seven different schools, plus a level 40 blacksmith. I found adventuring and crafting to be about equal for me, at least, because of the fact that I don't usually consign my wares, and because if someone does ask me to make something, I do it for cheap prices. In addition, most of my adventuring is solo, and I therefore get all the loot for myself. Almost every Tier III golem that I killed the other night when I was out adventuring dropped between 175c and 270c. That adds up quickly. Yes, one full load of iron and silver tools will net me about 9s, but it takes me almost as long to do those loads as it does for me to kill that many golems, come back to town, and sell all my loot. In the end, the earning difference was negligible.
That being said, of course, there are plenty of crafters who try to take advantage of the market. But, there are also other adventurers who take advantage of crafters by charging extremely high prices for items like blighted glowing essence. For a long time, this was selling for 3s or a little under on my server, and the market was set by one adventurer. These same people who were selling also refused to divulge where they were hunting the mobs that were dropping these items, holding both crafters and fellow adventurers in a noose. At the time this was going on, blighted glowing essence was not something that could actually be harvested, and my boyfriend needed 30+ of them for a teched set of armor. He never did find enough at reasonable prices to make it worthwhile, and gave up on getting that technique put on his armor. Take a look at the other resources that are for sale. Many of them are marked up in a similar fashion. While this might be in response to high prices for crafted items, many of the people I saw doing this were in guilds who were known for their policies of not charging fellow guild members for crafted items.
While I do understand the points you made, I also feel it places too much of a distinction between the two classes, simply because so many people multi-class in adventuring and crafting.
Rain
Elnator - I've known L60+ crafters without so much as 10s to their name. I've also been asked by a pure adventurer to hold 200s to hand to his alt. While crafters, in general, might have more money in the end game, getting up in levels and formulas is a costly matter. There are threads on the tazoon.com forums about how to level in certain crafts without going completely broke. This is less of an issue now, but for those of us who hit tier3 early, techs were 30 Imp. Bounty Markers, and IBMs went for 400-500c.
AE just added blessings, boons, and bounties into the game, which are techniques that are only dropped, and cannot be bought. For the next few weeks, until the market stabilizes, crafters are going to have to pay through the nose in order to get them. Dana also mentioned 3s for BGE on her server, which is painful at 5 a tech. On my server, granite frags go between 5s and 7s, when you can find them.
Also, crafters tend to need money more. Right now I'm putting up a few industrials buildings up on my property. They're going to run me around 1g each, assuming I do the bulk of the work myself (essence structuring, weaving, and carpentry while outsourcing masonry and fitting). Granted, they will make later levelling easier, but if I were an adventurer, I could ignore it altogether. Adventurers might have to pay for weapons and armor, but crafters have to worry about tools, cargo armor, disks, backpacks, sacks, and porting back and forth continuously when they get to higher tiers (upwards of around 25s in porting fees during an active day).
Dana - Thanks for the comments. I understand the position that you're coming from, and understand when people just start going through the who list in order to find what they're looking for. While I don't really mind them asking, many times there are numerous other people on in the appropriate level range, and on numberous other occassions I've sent a tell to them asking if they wanted a referral (usually they graciously accept) before sending the customer their way. Other times, I'll log in at 3 at night or 7 in the morning and yes, I'll be one of only a handful of people on, but even then can't seem to grasp the desperation people seem to project about getting their items immediately, and even when I oblige them and their urgent order, I'm generally left standing in front of a machine for 10-15 minutes waiting them to show up to drop off the teching parts or to pick up their order.
Yes, people might seek someone at optimal efficiency to create an item for them, but I was quite literal when I mentioned a level 100 crafter being asked to craft a level 10 item. It's been my experience that unless you're doing the work for a friend or guildmate, most people are unwilling to take on work if there is no XP in it. Finding builders to do tier1 work is oftentimes more difficult than finding someone to do tier2 work, simply because the window for good XP in tier1 is rather small, and most simply level past it using the skills from a previous class. You mentioned making someone bronze tools, but at level 40, especially blacksmith, whose metalworking progresses relatively slowly, you're at least still getting XP from that. And if you were working out of the Kion field, jumping over to the bronze is just a 45 second run. That is my main concern: time. If I broke what I was doing everytime someone asked me to make something, I wouldn't have been able to level high enough to help provide people with higher level items.