wakfu, where art thou

Drukstylz

I'm really looking forward to this game. Namely because

1. Animal Eco system, killing to many might force a species into extinction. monsters have AI as well.

2. No quest NPC's, there are quests. but farmer bob will not ask you to slay 5 nasty wolfs and bring their pelts. Instead while walking in a field, you may be invaded by a swarm of Gobbels and everyone in the area bands together to fight them off.

3. Fighting system is tweaked. Rewarding faster turns, encouraging smarter playing. Map is dynamic, which means you can fight anywhere now.

4.  Players run it all, government, construction of houses, diplomacy, regulations, taxes you name it.

5.  New crafting system, including a mystery craft that uses finished products of other crafters.

6. Raiding, pvp (challenges), pve, factions wars.

7. Monsters have AI which gives them personalities.  They may go so far as to sacrifice one of their own if they think its rewarding enough.

There is so so much more.  You can see more of the features HERE .

What really hooked me is that WAKFU is built of its predecessor DOFU. So it has a strong solid build, while incorporating alot of new features that will make for great game play, and a living environment. Phew...

Trucidation

It's gonna be pay-to-play (p2p) @ ;subscription based, just like it's predecessor Dofus.

Frankly, having played dozens of online games, I've yet to find one that seriously merits a subscription. From uncaring developers, unfixed bugs, to missed deadlines and just plain flat-out broken promises, I'm never going to pay money for an online game until one shows that they really want to do business.

This means I mostly play f2p games... so what of it? All of them have pros and cons, and unfortunately all the cons are major enough to warrant not wasting money on them.

A subscription is basically saying "give them money and pray you like what you get". That's bullshit. The free-to-play, but-with-item-mall option already exists, and works for the most part. I mean, hell, just look at all the buggy unfinished games with lousy devs and publishers which do this, and yet they still make money don't they?

With the item mall option at least you can evaluate the game FOR REAL, and then support them by buying item mall stuff for however much you think they deserve. Subscription based games, nah, too much like russian roulette. Hell, you don't have to look beyond the very same company making this game for an example. Check out their previous game, Dofus. See the comments on it. Notice how people say it's real fun for the first few free areas, so they subscribe, and then it turns out to be another mindless grinder.

Bait and fucking switch. No way. I'm not falling for this crap. Give me f2p and item malls. At least you get to evaluate the FULL game before you decide how much you want to reward them. And don't say companies don't make money from f2p games. Typically buying a couple of fashion sets and leveling booster type items easily surpasses the cost of several months' subscription of pay games.

Ask anyone who played Flyff back when it wasn't a complete ripoff, how much people spend in US Dollars to upgrade a SINGLE ITEM to +10. That's not considering you need to upgrade 4 items for a complete armor set upgrade, nor weapons. It's pretty damn obvious item malls are practically money stamping machines for companies with half-decent games.

Players think f2p games suck and yes they do, but the companies still make money. Bear in mind those are mostly crap games, with shoddy translations and riddled with bugs. Now imagine if a serious company with a good game went f2p. They'd be making money hand over fist, easily.

Phoenix_Hawk

Don't get your hopes up too high. Ankama does good art but their ability in other areas tends to be weak plus they looove grind. Your ability to have a high lvl in this or that has more to do with how much time you can invest than your ability to play the char well, especially in the current form of Wakfu. The current spell XP system is also sloppy and the game is riddled with bugs which tend to just build up.

Going through your list.

1 & 7.
With the relatively small number of players in game now people already wiped out some mobs for the most part in the past so they bumped up spawning a lot a ways back. Now you can hunt to your hearts content and it makes no difference. Same with spawning of resources.

The AI is so good mobs will ram themselves into the boarder of the fight area till they suicide if you stand in the right spots and they were beside the boarder. At times they may get stuck in the boarder so rather than fixing it so they wouldn't ram into the boarder in the first place they just added the workaround of letting us attack things in the boarder.

2 & 4.
What's wrong with NPCs? NPCs never really controlled land ownership and so on in any game so where this concept of NPCs are inherently bad has come from is beyond me. If used poorly as they were in some cases in Dofus they can be annoying but that's it. The devs would limit where what could be done and so on then the players, not NPCs, would go from there. The value of NPCs would be to buy useless junk no one wants to help new players get going and sell common things so as to take money out of the economy to try to help limit inflation.

Take baking or alchemy in Dofus. I'd hate to have to collect water from wells all the time as they run out and you need lots of it but I can instead just go to a NPC and buy all I want. In Wakfu it seems we need to draw all our water from the few wells in lag town thus far, oh joy.

Anakama is putting in specific factions for you to join again, we don't control that. Land disputes in games is usually between player guilds or what not anyhow, nothing new there (not that it's been implemented yet). Tax usually comes through guild/org/whatever (not in game yet) taxes which has nothing to do with NPCs. Most of what you mentioned in 4 either has not been implemented or has not really even been discussed except maybe to supposedly sell this no NPCs is good idea.

3.
The fast turn buff is nice and all but while some could use one spell at a time and that's it others need to chain many. Add to that lag, unnecessarily lengthy animations, currently broken toolbar hot keys plus other problems and it's not a good combo. Short and simple isn't smarter and better, it's just short and simple.

You could fight anywhere in Dofus too, difference you knew about what to expect and start points could be mixed and all over. Here they just divided the field in half and hopefully you won't get stuck somewhere that has the mob out of reach. Leaving collectable resources on the battle field is also a pain as you can't see through them and some block your path.

5.
It's not all that different from the one in Dofus. It's just missing things like the ability to join two players so you don't have to trust the crafter to make it and return the actually completed product. Also it took a long time and lots of complaining to get the Dofus crafting system to that point. Originally you had to put in each crafting item for each craft each time. Eventually they added the touchy repeat button and were pretty resilient towards the idea of going past that. Grind is good and provides "difficulty" as far as they're concerned.

6.
If PvE were not available nothing else would be either. The PvP now is just simple and more about personal epeen or abusing bugs (unlimited dolls a while back). Raiding and faction wars are not in game, complimenting things not even available for review is foolhardy.