Post by Morreion on Oct 14, 2014 17:53:15 GMT -5
ArcheAge is an interesting game, an MMO that goes beyond the standard themepark mechanics, but not without flaws. I've played up to around level 15 and here's some thoughts.
The Good
The graphics and animations of ArcheAge are great. The game looks nice. The art direction can be somewhat odd, as the world looks like a Renaissance Steampunk world with Medieval elements. But cities, houses, and characters look solid. A standout in this area are mounts- horses gallop and move like real horses, when you stop the horse reins in like real horses do. And you get to jump on and off your mount in a neat animation. There is public transportation including wagons and airships. You can build ocean-going ships and have deep sea adventures. Players can sit in chairs and lay down on beds. There is even collision detection. The world is RP-friendly in looks and function.
The game is a quest-based level system, but you choose 3 different skill lines to create your character, customizing how you want to play. Once you choose a skill line, you can purchase individual skills within that line if you so wish. For instance, I am an archer and a warrior with some healing spells. This is a good 'mix and match' system for building a character. Combat animations are good, and you can get bonuses on quest rewards if you exceed your quest objectives. There are daily quests scattered over the world, too.
Sandbox elements of the game are great fun, including open-world housing, farming (minding your crops and livestock in a timely fashion, including feeding, watering, and harvesting), and trade missions, where you craft items that you've farmed and carry the merchandise to a far location for gold. Some of these missions take you into PvP territory (which becomes standard at level 30). These are much-needed mechanics going past the usual quest-based themepark that we are all so familiar with now. There is even a trial by jury system for players who do bad things. Kudos to XL Games for adding virtual world aspects to the game!
The Bad
There are three big problems with ArcheAge.
One is the amount of bots and gold spammers. The latter have been dealt with in a patch, but since this game has been out for a couple years in South Korea and Russia you'd think they'd have dealt with them earlier. The bots are plentiful and this is affecting the economy.
Secondly, there was a land rush at the release of the game. Considering there were hours-long queues to get in for a solid week, this meant that many people didn't get a chance to buy land who wanted it. Some players who managed to get in bought several land plots. Other players started building their houses situated to take up a lot of space for future expansion, locking others out. Since housing is limited, this has caused some discontent with the game- to have a house plot is key to building a farm and running trading missions, which are big parts of the game. Without land, players have a week-long public farm plot to fiddle around with, but that goes away. There is a huge amount of space for housing plots in the game, but artificial scarcity is apparently part of the game.
Finally and most seriously, there are plenty of hackers in the game. ArcheAge has a heavily client-side client, and even though it uses Hackshield Plus- a useless program that caused me horrid lag until I was told how to deal with it on Reddit- hackers are affecting the game in serious ways. They are teleporting to trade destinations, making instant big money that players cannot match. They are also immediately buying up land plots that come available, meaning that if you want a land plot (and I do), you have to pay inflated prices to gold sellers and there's no way I'm doing that. This is nearly wrecking the game for a good amount of players.
Overall, ArcheAge is a themepark with some great sandbox elements that is marred by hackers and bots, and a controversial land rush back when there were long queues to get in the game. I hope future games learn from this- that virtual worlds are fantastic, but land rushes at the release of your game are very problematic, and hacking will ruin your game long-term.
