any game where I hit a wall where I can’t progress further without paying more is p2w for me, even if not pvp. This game does that. call it what you want, but progress is gated by continuous purchases and to me that falls under p2w.
If you care nothing at all about hitting a wall, or being behind other people, then sure it doesn’t matter to you. That doesn’t make the game not p2w, it just means you personally don’t care whether it is or is not. Those are not the same concept at all. Also not having some of the purchases does actually prevent you from completing some content in LA, or at least makes you wait through artificial time gates to do the content if you don’t pay.
I’m just glad that pvp itself largely makes all the p2w stuff not matter, that is a huge step in the right way. Marvel Future Rev screws that part up horribly unfortunately.
As someone who dives into a game and plays it a ton and wants to progress as far as my time and skill can take me, it matter a great deal to me that someone who throws $10k at the game can do things I can’t. This goes well beyond looking pretty or sounding different. These are not cosmetic differences at all.
I do agree that a lot of people claim p2w on things that aren’t, I often defend games as not being p2w despite them being perceived as such. But I can’t do that here.
Progress is gated only in the sense that it takes longer, correct? Everyone arrives at the same place eventually (despite what that post implied). Seems more like paying to not play the game than paying to “win”. Am I missing something?
Those things can be purchased with gold at the broker, correct?
Goes live at noon EDT today. One note if you do not read the article: for the first few hours they are forcing everyone onto the same server to do some load testing.
So far, my impressions are that… It’s sort of weird. I feel like I’ve been dropped into episode 3 of a 10 part miniseries. There’s a lot going on but I don’t understand much of it.
You first choose a base class. You are told you have to pick an advanced class at level 10. They make you try out at least one of the advanced classes in an arena. Once you exit that trial, you are all of a sudden level 10 and have to take an advanced class.
you start the game with six skills of various types. I have no clear idea still what they do except they all damage enemies. And I don’t know of a strategy aside from spam an ability when it is off cool down.
there is a story, which makes about as much sense as they all do in these types of games. Some Cut scenes cannot be skipped. There are different chapters of the story but for some reason I’m in chapter 20 or 30 early in the game. It’s hard to tell because you can’t exactly find out where you are (or at least I haven’t been able to find it).
being a F2P game there are of course multiple types of currencies that are used for different things. There are also login rewards that award you multiple types of things that seem similar… Like three or four different types of health potions.
movement is by clicking the right mouse button. There is a default attack on the left click button. I do not think those can be re-mapped. The interact button is G (and I think there is a secondary interact on H). Those cannot be re-mapped either. As for the rest, the default UI uses the top two rows of character keys (starting Q and A) for your skills, four keys per row. I guess you will eventually have eight active skills. There are also five hot keys for potions and the like (these default to F1 and then 1 thru 4). There are also five more hot keys for I have no idea what. Oh yeah, there is also an ultimate ability which you activate with the Z key. You can change the type of that ability with X.
there are also around 15 different windows that show different things… Your character, inventory, social status, guild related stuff, mailbox, skill tree, collectibles, adventurers journal… It goes on and on. The nice part is you do get little red badges indicating something new is in one of your windows so you can always pop it open and see what’s going on.
I have briefly tried a couple of classes, and I’m still feeling a bit unsettled. It is disappointing to me that the summoner does not have a persistent pet (at least not that I can tell). It might be me adjusting to all these changes however. And they do give you a mount pretty early on which is a plus over a New World!
I have not encountered any bugs. Performance seems pretty good.
If you’re on the fence, and like these kinds of games, it’s definitely worth a try. I don’t feel constrained by not having spent money on it right now. Perhaps that changes at higher levels.
It can. Or at least I was prompted at the start which control scheme I wanted to use. The default selection for me was LMB to move like is standard for the genre.
I went into this blind, not really knowing anything except for 15 seconds of video which told me it was an ARPG. Because of that, I was caught off guard by the MMOness of it. The MMO stuff reminded me a lot of Black Desert Online, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. A long chain of generic MMO quest stuff which really isn’t my bad. I’d much rather just be out killing stuff, not killing 5 things and then having to go back to talk to an NPC so he can tell me to kill 5 slightly different things. It wasn’t a game-killer for me but I sure do hope I can spend more time in typical ARPG action instead of this sort of crap later in the game.
I only tried the Summoner, it seemed okay. I’m with @Charlatan, I was pretty lost at first. It was kind of confusing exactly as he described. You’re level 1 but you choose an advanced class at L10 but you need to try an advanced class now but now the trial is over and you’re L10 and you are your advanced class. What? Maybe this was fast-forwarded a bit in service of the beta? I felt like I had a bunch (8) of abilities dumped on me with no idea how to use them. I figured them out, none of them were particularly complicated, it just seems like it would have been a lot more natural to introduce them one at a time. Like, say, while leveling up from 1 to 10?
The combat action felt fine. I liked the look of customizing skills, investing skill points into them definitely made a substantial difference to the base effectiveness of the ability in addition to the perks you start adding to the skill. I only made it to L13 but by that point I had access to 2 summons (a fire elemental guy and a pair of plant things that shot thorns). My hotbar is now full but I see there’s tons of new abilities to come, so I’m guessing if I wanted to later I could kit out my Summoner to be more of a pet-focused class?
In any case, I was kind of put off by a lot of the MMOy-ness to it, despite liking MMOs. I’m just not a fan of low-effort MMO quest spam, it just detracts from the gameplay. Also, unskippable cutscenes are a crime against humanity and any developer who implements them should be banned from ever touching a keyboard again.
Still looking forward to diving back in over the weekend but definitely some mixed feelings right now.
Okay, after a really bad first impression with the game (see MMO quest spam above), things started to pick up around L20. It took maybe a couple hours or so to get there, so not talking about massive amounts of grinding or anything. Basically, right around the time I hit the dungeon Morai. That is just a story instance you play through once, but it was a big step up from the dungeons leading up to that point. More entertaining and was a cool environment. At that point I was playing because I wanted to play rather than poking around to see if the game got more enjoyable. For me, it did.
Things got to a pretty cinematic climax once you get to Lutera, which appears to be the main hub. The game really opened up there in directions I wasn’t expecting, especially considering I had thought this was just an online ARPG along the lines of Path of Exile. Before I logged off, I was establishing myself on an island, queuing up research, built a ship and crewed it, and sent them off on missions. Was really not expecting any of that stuff. No idea how deep it all is, but it seemed pretty cool.
Anyway, not going to play any more of the beta but I answered my question on if this was going to be something I would enjoy at release. Looking forward to the launch this spring. I’m honestly a little surprised the release date is that far out, it felt quite polished. Maybe they’re still working on the localization for the later parts of the game or something?
Appreciate the impressions. Looking forward to watching some video when I can. At one point, I was considering buying one of the big preorder packages, and I still might, but there’s every chance I will not play at launch because I will still be playing New World
I had a very strange reaction to the technical Beta. I liked the game OK but I wasn’t super enthusiastic about it. Nevertheless, I am looking forward to playing it when it launches for real. And I’m even going to buy a founders pack so I can get in on the Headstart.
Still having issues picking a class to play though. I want to do Paladin as a main I suppose but I also want a pure DPS class. Right now I am leaning toward berserker. Was interested in Summoner but that’s not in the launch.
The Wanderers will have a presence in Lost Ark. I’m sure more details will be posted as we get closer to launch. Here is a very good, if somewhat long, review of the classes.
