Initial Impressions from the Japanese release of the game.

[KingKrouch]

So here's my experience with the Japanese version of the game. The starting area with the cave seemed smooth, outside of some questionable shader compilation stutter (I'll get into this later, but UE4's DX12 mode with it's PSO caching system not really being fixed until a recent version of UE5 is part of the problem), but it becomes FAR worse later on. Any game with the Unreal Engine logo should be a warning sign on what's to come.

Real-time cutscenes are questionably locked at 30FPS, when I haven't seen any other MMO do this. Timings shouldn't be a problem with Unreal, so I chalk this down to a "creative" decision in the same way Todd Howard thinks of Starfield.

The combat is just okay, but feels like it lacks a ton of impact from an animation and effects standpoint. Interacting with characters and objects is incredibly janky as the D-Pad isn't used for targeting like in FF14, and you have to physically walk up to things and hope to god that selecting the thing you want works. But this game being a travesty should be enough to tell you that god isn't real and your praying remains unanswered.

The game is barely even cracking 60FPS in the starting inn area, and there's a ton of stutter that's not even fixed by switching the game to DX11 mode, a lot of which is exacerbated when you move into new areas. Considering even games with shader caching is facing this problem like Hogwarts Legacy (Which did get a patch that addressed the issue from what I've seen) and Returnal (Where the developers gave up and said it was an issue even on PS5), it's likely the engine's asset streaming system causing this problem, and UE5 on PC still hasn't been updated to support DirectStorage (Which is out already). There's quite a few areas where the game will dip to 10FPS, and this is at 1080p on an RX 6800XT, something which handles other games like a champ. Changing graphics options and resolution even to their lowest possible doesn't fix this at all. I'm using an NVME and fast RAM alongside a Ryzen 9 on top of that, why am I facing these weird performance problems? It also has black bars on 16:10 and ultrawide monitors just like the benchmark, and despite it being an MMO, because no Unreal developer can actually be bothered to optimize their games on PC lol. The benchmark runs WAY better and it's performance metrics is incredibly misleading compared to the actual game. Makes me wonder if 90% of the game was coded in Blueprints. The game's performance begins and ends at the title screen, and YandereDev has met his match. lol.

Now onto the game's controller support, while PlayStation prompts are supported via a dropdown box option in the settings menu, there is no native support for either PS4 or DualSense controllers, you have to use DSX to emulate an Xbox controller to even get it to work. A majority of UE games have this problem (in a way where it just works while also not conflicting with SteamInput) outside of Days Gone. And even then, the menu navigation is similar to Destiny where they didn't even bother optimizing it for a controller (But the mouse movement it emulates has stutter, dragging sliders for options is incredibly slow and tedious, and you cannot adjust certain settings using dropdown boxes using a controller for some reason). A and B are reversed even with the Xbox controller setting, so I better hope you have a PlayStation controller to play.

This game simply isn't good enough on either a gameplay or technical standpoint, and the time gap between the Japanese and worldwide version is going to cause a divide and delay on game content. Pair that with Amazon's censorship and constant screwing up of their MMOs (and even Twitch), and this is just 90's game localization tier nonsense all over again. Five years since the initial announcement, this game needed six more. Reeks of announcing too early or being stuck in development hell.

I'm so glad I don't get hyped for games anymore or go in with absolutely zero expectations of a working and coherent end product. I was initially hyped, but after hearing everything with Amazon, that was enough reason for the hype to die. Literal goyslop that's everything wrong with gaming nowadays, not even Japan is safe.

EDIT: Reducing the Player Count to 10 while improves performance a little bit, still has dips and stutter in areas. It's not exactly a silver bullet fix.

EDIT 2: Another thing worth mentioning, the game is NOT DPI aware like most Unreal Engine games. You have to manually adjust the compatibility settings for the game executable to "controlled by application" in order to have it appear with the correct resolution if you are playing on a TV, handheld, or on a monitor with a high DPI percentage. On another note, the framerate is higher on a 6900XT and i5-13600K desktop setup at 2560x1440, and with the suggested changes (NPC distance set to 2, and player count set to 10), I get around 80-100FPS in the hub area, but the stuttering and framedips are still an extremely noticeable issue. CPU utilization is only hitting 8% while GPU utilization is at 60%. There's clearly a game related bottleneck going on.

[女王ルナ]

NGS might actually fully revive itself to its pso2 glory days if bandai keeps this up and if Wokemazon keeps realising trash / banning people who dont play for a long period of time or destroying and butchering games.

[KingKrouch]

Originally posted by 女王ルナ:

NGS might actually fully revive itself to its pso2 glory days if bandai keeps this up and if Wokemazon keeps realising trash / banning people who dont play for a long period of time or destroying and butchering games.

SEGA is definitely guilty of some of those things, but at least they don't ban people for playing the Japanese version, and PSO2 NGS is getting some updates to add new content. Whether said content is actually good remains to be seen. I do think they need to add more upscaling options to the game and work towards optimizing things further though. Doing that and getting the game to work on Steam Deck would be nice.

Meanwhile, Amazon has absolutely ruined any chance they've got to break into the gaming industry. New World was mediocre and melted GPUs at launch, Lumberyard (their version of CryEngine) was a technical mess and they later handed it's code down to the Linux foundation to maintain, Most of their games were stuck in development hell, Lost Ark is Lost Ark (plus the changes they made to the game), Twitch is on fire right now, and now everything with this game. Apple, Amazon, and Google should frankly stay away from gaming, as they'd screw the already dying corpse.

[Tsunero]

The performance is jank for sure. I tested it on my old i5 4460 and 2060 at 1080p, I got a lot of stutters, mostly due to the ancient cpu but I was shocked that I am getting similar stutters on my 5800X3D and 3080 at 1440p. Something is clearly wrong with shader compilation and this looks like there is no pre-caching at all.

It's okayish once everything loads in properly but considering how often you need to change maps it's just and endless circle of stutters even on decent rigs.

[Alex Falkor.ttv]

I never noticed any stuttering on my end when I played and I'm using a 3070. So not high end or low end, right in the middle. Maybe the game wasn't optimized for your graphics card??? Cause otherwise I'm stumped why you suffered but I didn't.

Combat at the very least felt "fluid" despite the fact I was connecting to a VERY far away server.

[chicken jockey]

Tarisland gang

[SeiFeR]

People crying about "barely even cracking 60FPS in the starting inn area"

Oh, you mean the area with 200 players around you ? Yes thats scandalous, you should have at least 120 fps

In every mmo there are crappy/lower fps in the big hubs because there's a ton of people, npc and buildings.
Beyond that, you got 100+ fps in the outside areas and dungeons with RTX 3/4

BP is well optimized, especially for a young game that has just been released.

Actually the true problem of this game is its content which is very weak, quickly repetitive and lacking in depth.

[MekoNeet]

Originally posted by SeiFeR:

People crying about "barely even cracking 60FPS in the starting inn area"

Oh, you mean the area with 200 players around you ? Yes thats scandalous, you should have at least 120 fps :majinbuu:

In every mmo there are crappy/lower fps in the big hubs because there's a ton of people, npc and buildings.
Beyond that, you got 100+ fps in the outside areas and dungeons with RTX 3/4

BP is well optimized, especially for a young game that has just been released.

Actually the true problem of this game is its content which is very weak, quickly repetitive and lacking in depth.

Doesn't that just mean the engine can't handle 200 players and if that is the case then what is the point of allowing 200 players to be around you?

[KingKrouch]

Originally posted by SeiFeR:

People crying about "barely even cracking 60FPS in the starting inn area"

Oh, you mean the area with 200 players around you ? Yes thats scandalous, you should have at least 120 fps :majinbuu:

In every mmo there are crappy/lower fps in the big hubs because there's a ton of people, npc and buildings.
Beyond that, you got 100+ fps in the outside areas and dungeons with RTX 3/4

Going to have to respectfully disagree. Even with the 10 player option that hard caps the count and lowering the NPC distance options, as other people have suggested, alongside switching from the game's DX12 mode to DX11 (to eliminate PSO/shader caching related stuttering), it still has trouble and noticeable stuttering, especially when new things load in. This happens even with the lowest graphics options. I can give this a try on my other rigs to see if it's just something with the hardware, but that would be silly considering plenty of other games run smoothly on it.

Worth mentioning that gameplay logic at least in the context of UE's Blueprints system is single-threaded and there is a single thread for gameplay related stuff (unless you manually multithread), so it's entirely possible that the game is CPU limited, and other actions are being done on the same thread as everything else. This would ring true with what I've heard from others where they've reported that their CPU is barely getting any utilization, and that's more of a game optimization thing in general (that even affects consoles).

The benchmark results are incredibly misleading in this regard, as the later segments have a lot more that's going on compared to the main hub area, and still runs at a way higher framerate.

As for the second setup that I tested on:

Originally posted by KingKrouch:

The framerate is higher on a 6900XT and i5-13600K desktop setup at 2560x1440, and with the suggested changes (NPC distance set to 2, and player count set to 10), I get around 80-100FPS in the hub area, but the stuttering and framedips are still an extremely noticeable issue. CPU utilization is only hitting 8% while GPU utilization is at 60%. There's clearly a game related bottleneck going on.

[SeiFeR]

Originally posted by 유진:

Doesn't that just mean the engine can't handle 200 players and if that is the case then what is the point of allowing 200 players to be around you?

The point is give you the illusion of playing an mmo because you see tons of players around you so devs can tag the game as mmo and fanboys can call it an mmo too.
Which is obivously fake because outside the hubs the game is heavily instanced with mostly small groups content (besides raids).
Its more like a multiplayer a-RPG than a real mmo to be honest.

Also, the engine can handle it, T&L proves that.
But BP is not made for that purpose because devs chose another direction.

[TOTTO]

Originally posted by SeiFeR:

Originally posted by 유진:

Doesn't that just mean the engine can't handle 200 players and if that is the case then what is the point of allowing 200 players to be around you?

The point is give you the illusion of playing an mmo because you see tons of players around you so devs can tag the game as mmo and fanboys can call it an mmo too.
Which is obivously fake because outside the hubs the game is heavily instanced with mostly small groups content (besides raids).
Its more like a multiplayer a-RPG than a real mmo to be honest.

Also, the engine can handle it, T&L proves that.
But BP is not made for that purpose because devs chose another direction.

in fact i still don't understand why people still call Blue Protocol an MMO when bandai literally say everytime is an ARPG and not an MMORPG, some western people now day think if a game have a lot of player in a istance they can call it an MMO, so if they think this i can call battlefield an MMO because can take 128 player in the same map in only one istance.

why Ark is not considered an MMO if they can have 100 player in the same map or even more then 100 if editing some settings?

just to say if 30 player in the same open world is considered an MMO then cod with 32 player mode in an MMO.

[Hikari]

Originally posted by TOTTO:

Originally posted by SeiFeR:

The point is give you the illusion of playing an mmo because you see tons of players around you so devs can tag the game as mmo and fanboys can call it an mmo too.
Which is obivously fake because outside the hubs the game is heavily instanced with mostly small groups content (besides raids).
Its more like a multiplayer a-RPG than a real mmo to be honest.

Also, the engine can handle it, T&L proves that.
But BP is not made for that purpose because devs chose another direction.

in fact i still don't understand why people still call Blue Protocol an MMO when bandai literally say everytime is an ARPG and not an MMORPG, some western people now day think if a game have a lot of player in a istance they can call it an MMO, so if they think this i can call battlefield an MMO because can take 128 player in the same map in only one istance.

why Ark is not considered an MMO if they can have 100 player in the same map or even more then 100 if editing some settings?

just to say if 30 player in the same open world is considered an MMO then cod with 32 player mode in an MMO.

Well, game instancing has been around for quite some time, but all players share the same server. It's a persistent world, and there are no barriers except for zone changes and channels.

This is the same model used, for example, in Guild Wars 2 (although, with the remaining population, everything might fit on one channel now), Neverwinter, and probably others. However, these are still considered MMOs, or at least presented as such.

But yes, I can imagine that if we were to strictly define an MMO, not many games would fit into that category.

[TOTTO]

Originally posted by Hikari:

Originally posted by TOTTO:

in fact i still don't understand why people still call Blue Protocol an MMO when bandai literally say everytime is an ARPG and not an MMORPG, some western people now day think if a game have a lot of player in a istance they can call it an MMO, so if they think this i can call battlefield an MMO because can take 128 player in the same map in only one istance.

why Ark is not considered an MMO if they can have 100 player in the same map or even more then 100 if editing some settings?

just to say if 30 player in the same open world is considered an MMO then cod with 32 player mode in an MMO.

Well, game instancing has been around for quite some time, but all players share the same server. It's a persistent world, and there are no barriers except for zone changes and channels.

This is the same model used, for example, in Guild Wars 2 (although, with the remaining population, everything might fit on one channel now), Neverwinter, and probably others. However, these are still considered MMOs, or at least presented as such.

But yes, I can imagine that if we were to strictly define an MMO, not many games would fit into that category.

i couldn't have said it better, anyway how was Blue protocol for u until now?

[YuGames]

Originally posted by TOTTO:

Originally posted by SeiFeR:

The point is give you the illusion of playing an mmo because you see tons of players around you so devs can tag the game as mmo and fanboys can call it an mmo too.
Which is obivously fake because outside the hubs the game is heavily instanced with mostly small groups content (besides raids).
Its more like a multiplayer a-RPG than a real mmo to be honest.

Also, the engine can handle it, T&L proves that.
But BP is not made for that purpose because devs chose another direction.

in fact i still don't understand why people still call Blue Protocol an MMO when bandai literally say everytime is an ARPG and not an MMORPG, some western people now day think if a game have a lot of player in a istance they can call it an MMO, so if they think this i can call battlefield an MMO because can take 128 player in the same map in only one istance.

why Ark is not considered an MMO if they can have 100 player in the same map or even more then 100 if editing some settings?

just to say if 30 player in the same open world is considered an MMO then cod with 32 player mode in an MMO.

Dude, MMORPG literally stands for "Online rpg with a lot of people in it" so of course that a rpg that is online and has a lot of people in it is a MMORPG even by definition.

Bandai and Namco are famous for wanting to differentiate their games from other similar games by giving them some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ lateral denomination, does not mean it´s actually true.

I still remember when people started calling the "Tales of" series "Action Jrpg" to differentiate them from the turn based classics, and Namco was all:

No no, our game is "Bonds-of-friendship-teaching-RPG" and then continued giving weird titles to each tales of game after that, as if each tales game was it´s own genre.

Blue Protocol looks like a mmorpg, plays like a mmorpg, has all the social systems of a mmorpg, has a mmorpg progression system, and in every single way and facet of it´s content plays and behaves like a mmorpg down to the last details.

Action RPG and MMORPG are not mutually incompatible, both things can be true at once lmao, it does not matter if the devs want to call it a basketball game.

[TOTTO]

Originally posted by YuGames:

Originally posted by TOTTO:

in fact i still don't understand why people still call Blue Protocol an MMO when bandai literally say everytime is an ARPG and not an MMORPG, some western people now day think if a game have a lot of player in a istance they can call it an MMO, so if they think this i can call battlefield an MMO because can take 128 player in the same map in only one istance.

why Ark is not considered an MMO if they can have 100 player in the same map or even more then 100 if editing some settings?

just to say if 30 player in the same open world is considered an MMO then cod with 32 player mode in an MMO.

Dude, MMORPG literally stands for "Online rpg with a lot of people in it" so of course that a rpg that is online and has a lot of people in it is a MMORPG even by definition.

Bandai and Namco are famous for wanting to differentiate their games from other similar games by giving them some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ lateral denomination, does not mean it´s actually true.

I still remember when people started calling the "Tales of" series "Action Jrpg" to differentiate them from the turn based classics, and Namco was all:

No no, our game is "Bonds-of-friendship-teaching-RPG" and then continued giving weird titles to each tales of game after that, as if each tales game was it´s own genre.

Blue Protocol looks like a mmorpg, plays like a mmorpg, has all the social systems of a mmorpg, has a mmorpg progression system, and in every single way and facet of it´s content plays and behaves like a mmorpg down to the last details.

Action RPG and MMORPG are not mutually incompatible, both things can be true at once lmao, it does not matter if the devs want to call it a basketball game.

like i say up, if u consider an MMO a game with 30 player up on the same open world then cod is an MMO, ARPG action role play game, MMO massively multiplayer online, the only point where Blue Protocol is massively multiplayer online is the city/lobby.

i'm playing JP version and when i do a boss world i see at max 10 player and no more and also Blue Protocol don't have channel change so u are locked in the same istance/channel until u don't exit from the game or try to change it in some way,not like LA where u can change it every time u want.

people now day consider the name MMO with game where u grind and see some player around when the real representation of MMO is to see a lot of player in the same space/zone doing the same thing

[YuGames]

Originally posted by TOTTO:

Originally posted by YuGames:

Dude, MMORPG literally stands for "Online rpg with a lot of people in it" so of course that a rpg that is online and has a lot of people in it is a MMORPG even by definition.

Bandai and Namco are famous for wanting to differentiate their games from other similar games by giving them some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ lateral denomination, does not mean it´s actually true.

I still remember when people started calling the "Tales of" series "Action Jrpg" to differentiate them from the turn based classics, and Namco was all:

No no, our game is "Bonds-of-friendship-teaching-RPG" and then continued giving weird titles to each tales of game after that, as if each tales game was it´s own genre.

Blue Protocol looks like a mmorpg, plays like a mmorpg, has all the social systems of a mmorpg, has a mmorpg progression system, and in every single way and facet of it´s content plays and behaves like a mmorpg down to the last details.

Action RPG and MMORPG are not mutually incompatible, both things can be true at once lmao, it does not matter if the devs want to call it a basketball game.

like i say up, if u consider an MMO a game with 30 player up on the same open world then cod is an MMO, ARPG action role play game, MMO massively multiplayer online, the only point where Blue Protocol is massively multiplayer online is the city/lobby.

i'm playing JP version and when i do a boss world i see at max 10 player and no more and also Blue Protocol don't have channel change so u are locked in the same istance/channel until u don't exit from the game or try to change it in some way,not like LA where u can change it every time u want.

The first game considered a mmorpg, or the father of all MMORPG was 1985´s "Island of Kesmai" which only supported a total of 100 players ENTIRELY.

Neverwinter Nights, the first proper MMORPG with graphics, had a capacity of 50 PER SERVER.

Your understanding of the genre is laughable and so is your take on what words mean, but then again, unlike several of us, you were not actually there to experience it.