Recent reviews by GameDevTosh

Still a better love story than twilight.

This review is an edit of my closed beta one. Now that I've had time with the game in early access, I've had to relook at my original review and add all the recent changes, good and bad.

First of all, the game is beautiful, and for any Ragnarok Online players, you'll notice a great similarity, since this is supposed to be its "spiritual successor". It feels, for the most part, like a 2d game set in a 3d world. I actually enjoyed the game, and it was pretty fun. However, with all games, there are always some points of discussion that will either make a game really good, or really bad, so I'll try to break it down with as much detail as possible.

Pros:
- Very easy to pick up for beginners
- Very easy to level early on via quests
- Character progression is customizable (stats and skills)
- Fast paced battles
- Easy to add members to your party
- Bosses are decently difficult
- Excellent market system (one of the best I've seen in an MMO aside from Guild Wars 2)
- In-game video recorder

Cons:
- Storage is small, and you have to pay real money to expand it
- (New) Trading is behind a paywall, and even then you can only trade 30 times per month
- Quests are too repetitive
- Too many quests; in the early game, the only ways to level efficiently is to do all the quests
- The sheer amount of quests makes the game too linear instead of being "open world", since you have to go to where the new quests are if you want to level at a steady pace.
- Without quests, the game becomes a bit grindy, much like Ragnarok Online (though not to that extent)
- The majority of bosses are very easy
- While there is character progression, most classes are forced to stick to repeating their same class (wizard -> wizard instead of wizard -> pyromancer for example) in order to achieve their maximum potential (DPS). If you switch too often, you miss out on a lot of skills, or reduce your DPS substantially in one skill just to obtain another.
- The game is very unforgiving about making mistakes when choosing classes. At this time, the only way to fix a mistake is to make a new character.
- In some cases, if you want to be a certain class, you're forced to stick to one single possible combination of classes in the skill tree in order to get to it.
- You have to research a lot online before choosing what you want to be.

Pre-release cons:
- The game is very laggy. Sometimes when you talk to NPC's, it wont register for 5 mins to half an hour. Sometimes all you can do is relog, and try again.
- There are lots of bugs from closed beta that still remain.
- Some quests are impossible to complete.
- Spam bots are rampant, mainly gold sellers.
- You are very limited in what you can sell on the market without a token. The cost of selling something on the market is 30% of its value vs 10% with a token. Essentially you're losing 1/3 of an items total value AND non-token users can only sell one item at a time. Token users can sell 5 at a time.
- Optimization is horrible.

In my honest opinion, the game handles more like a grid based RTS RPG, at least when skills are involved. As an example, cleric heals are squares that stay on the ground till an ally steps on it. Most of the cleric spells are squared.

Although there seem to be more cons than pros in my list, the game is still one of the best MMO's I've played in a very long time, and really fun to me, so I highly recommend at least trying it. However, the lag has pretty much killed the entire experience for me. The majority of the time in the afternoons (high traffic hours), I can't even play, and I just log off, despite wanting to get in some leveling. Its just impossible.

The game is not optimized at all, and your FPS can drop to as low as 5-10 if theres lots of people on screen (even on a high end PC). My advice is to add -dx11 in the steam launch options, to force the game to use all your available cores. Apparently, this game only uses a single core otherwise. Its also a good idea to disable all visual effects in-game.

I really do like this game, but I'll have to leave this as a negative review until the lag issues are resolved, and the horrible market and trading restrictions are changed. I'll change it if anything changes for the better.