Nerdy And Loving It

I’ve played the two Archeage beta events before the launch and now that the game has officially launched, I wanted to give my impressions.

Archeage is an mmo that tries to do something new with the genre by making the core of the game about being a sandbox. The problem is that it’s so boring, that you probably won’t reach the end game, which is where the sandbox elements really are.

You start out in the game like many other mmos. You get to watch a video on the back-story of the race and then you begin your questing. There are two factions in the game and they each, in turn, occupy the two major continents. The faction on the continent of Nuia is inhabited by the Nuians, a race of humans, and the Elves. The eastern continent of Haranya is inhabited by the Firrians, a race of cat people, and by the Harani, a southeast Asian looking race of people who are said to never fight a battle they cannot win.

The back-stories are as follows. A woman who became a goddess, sacrificed herself to save everyone. That’s the Nuians. They all worship her and there are some groups vying for power and trying to usurp the throne. The elves had one of their leaders die, so now they’re super pissed and out for vengeance. The Harani and Firrians have a history that’s tied together. The Harani were just doing whatever they pleased and the Firrians couldn’t do much to stop them, being a scattered bunch of nomadic tribes, so a Firrian leader decided to gather all of the tribes and build a big city. They form a strong military and then fight the Harani. They beat the Harani and then start leading lives of indulgence. They get complacent and the Harani come back and beat the Firrians. The Firrians then decide to go back to their nomadic existence and return to who they really are. Kind of goofy if you ask me. The thing about the way the game describes the Harani that’s weird to me is how they “only fight battles they can win.” That doesn’t really say anything. I mean, if they aren’t super sure, do they just give up and leave? Doesn’t everyone not fight battles they can’t win? They’re meant to sound like they’re a race of survivors who’d do anything to not die, but it just comes off and sounding like a nothing statement.

So, that’s the back-story. What about the professions? Once you choose your race, you next choose your starting profession. Basically, the way the skill trees work in the game is that you get three skill trees and they combine together to create a specific class. The classes are just names they’ve made up for every combination. You can change your skill trees whenever you want, but they all level up separately. Changing skill trees doesn’t matter very much at low levels, but at higher levels, if you pick a new skill tree it will always be behind the other two in levels. If you have a lot of time on your hands, you can level all of the skill trees. It is nice to have a lot of options for builds to mess around with, though most likely there will only be a handful of “best” builds that almost everyone will use.

So let’s get to combat. Combat is boring. I’m just going to state that right from the start. It’s the same overdone, tab target, stand there and attack, kind of mmo fighting that we’ve seen since World of Warcaft. In the days when action based mmos are starting to become prominent in the market (i.e. Tera and Blade & Soul), this old style of combat is straight up boring. You just sit there and watch your cooldowns. You follow your rotation. That’s it. There isn’t much thinking that you have to do while in combat. And, yes, I know that you have to kite if you are a ranged class, but you don’t have to be aware of your surroundings in the same way as an action mmo. You just run to the side (since running backwards is purposefully slowed).

And that leads me to the questing. It is also the same old, tired, uninspired formula. Go to quest giver, skip what they have to say because it’s just a block of text, and figure out what to do from the quest list UI on the side of your screen. I won’t try to argue that questing in Tera, for instance, is much better, but at least there are bams (big ass monsters) to spice things up. Questing is mindless, linear, and boring. And for a game that’s supposed to be a sandbox game where you can do whatever you want, the linear questing seems entirely out of place. I also wish that quest dialogs were voice acted, but I imagine that they deemed it too expensive to be worth it. I should note that they have one nice thing when questing. For some quests, there are options as to what you have to do. In one quest I had the option to kill bees or to sheer sheep. While this is a nice touch, it doesn’t make up for the questing being boring. They also allow you to “overachieve” or “underachieve” quests. This means that if you have to kill say, five enemies, killing several more will give you fifty percent more experience. Underachieving is the opposite; it allows you to stop quests early that you really don’t like. The problem is that you basically should just try to overachieve everything. This makes the whole thing pointless, since you are going to do it anyway.

Let’s move onto mounts. Each race has their own mount, similar to wow, and you can also earn the other races’ mounts. You can even go to the opposing faction’s continent and buy their racial mounts. That’s a nice touch. Speaking of going to the other continent, by default you can’t communicate with people from the opposing faction. You can however, learn their language and then can speak with them once you’ve done so. One thing I really don’t like about mounts is how they all have different speeds. If you want the fastest mount, you also have to choose the most boring one: a horse. Why can’t our mounts move at the speed of our fastest mount? That way we can choose the look we want without having to sacrifice performance. It’s also nice that mounts have skills, but it’s annoying that you can’t bind keys for the mount that you’ve bound to your normal skill bar. I can’t use my skill bar when I’m mounted so why can’t I double bind them? Oh, I should also point out that the polar bear mount is hilarious.

If you do plan on playing the game despite what I’ve said, I have a few recommendations for you. In terms of skill trees, I’ve tried occultism, sorcery, vitalism, defense, and brutalism. If you are fine with the quest grinding in the game, I’d recommend going with brutalism, then defense, then vitalism. This will basically allow you to face tank everything while you’re leveling up. Get a one handed sword and shield. Vitalism will give you some health boosts. You’ll be pretty tanky and you’ll get multiple stuns and knockdowns. You can basically just chain cc the enemy. You can, alternatively, choose a ranged class, but just be prepared to run, a lot. Also, as I’ve noted above, you run slower when you go backwards, so have fun constantly running to the side while turning your camera all of the time. Another thing you should know, is that you can use any armor. From what I’ve read, stick to plate versus everything except casters. Use cloth armor versus casters. I mostly used plate (once I had access to it) during my play time.

Now, let’s talk about character customization. One thing I’ll say right off the bat, is that I really like that you can store templates of the characters you create. These templates are stored as files, making them easy to share with others. Also, there are absolutely no body customization options. I really wish there were. That seems to be a pretty common trend among mmos. When it comes to customizing the face, the default is very young looking. I wanted to make a 25-30 year old looking character, but it’s next to impossible to do so. You can only adjust the age through the age lines option and all of the age lines make your character look really old. So, those are your options: childlike faces or old faces. Anything in between looks really odd.

Alright, so last but not least, my list of random bugs and annoyances. First is the fact that when you talk to an NPC, people can walk into your line of vision. One time when I was talking to a quest giver, someone walked in front of him while mounted and I got to stare at a Harani mount’s butt while I received my quests. Most games hide other players while talking to an NPC. Another problem is that there is constant fighting over mobs and bosses. Once someone has attacked a mob or a boss, you can’t get credit for it. This is slightly annoying during normal quests, but extremely annoying on boss quests. When you are doing a quest that tells you to kill a boss, you show up and see a massive number of people waiting around where the boss spawns. The boss spawns, and one party out of many gets credit for hitting it first and the boss is killed. That team gets to leave this giant waiting room, while the rest (including you) keep trying to get the first hit in so that they can finish their quest. To be fair, this was also a big problem in the ESO beta. Why can’t other companies take a cue from ArenaNet and implement bosses like Guild Wars 2 does? Their approach is, the more the merrier. The bosses simply scale up according to the number of people that are there.

Another annoyance is how loot is shared in the party. Loot is shared sequentially rather than following what a lot of other games have taken to: loot streams. Why aren’t loot streams standard by now? If you don’t know what a loot stream is, it is where you can only see the items on the ground that are intended for you. Your teammates also can only see the items that are intended for them. Another problem this causes is quest items. If you join up with another player or players, you each have to pick up quest items separately. It doesn’t count them for everyone like most other games.

There are two other things that I find extremely annoying and probably wouldn’t have been able to play the game if I hadn’t found a fix. The first is that there is no option for full screen window. This is important because it allows you to tab out of the game instantly to refer to your browser while you are playing and looking things up. The second is that there is no option for inverted mouse. There are a lot of people, myself included, that have learned to play games using an inverted mouse. It’s what we’re used to and it’s almost impossible to play without the option. Luckily someone has made a mod for the game that give these two options back. I’ve done my research on it, and the devs are fine with it. You can find the mod here. You just drop a single dll file into the game directory. You don’t have to directly modify any game files. Using this to get the full screen windowed mode also prevents other program’s pop-ups from minimizing your game. I use digsby as an instant messenger client and whenever I got a pop-up notification, it forced the game to minimize.

The last two things on my list are relatively minor. One is that attacks resolve at the same time. This means that if I’m using a charge attack to stun someone and he starts his stun attack, we both get stunned at the same time. I feel like if I’m charging a guy and barreling into him, he shouldn’t be able to raise his weapon and do some sort of smash move to stun me at the exact same time. The second thing is that I noticed that people are allowed to plant trees in Konbann castle. Kind of goofy.

This brings me to my final point. While you are leveling you get quests that tell you to start a farm. The only problem is, if you don’t pay the fifteen bucks a month, you can’t have a farm. This is one aspect to the open world part of the game that’s supposed to draw people into the game. So, you want players to join your game on the premise that they can own houses, land, and even castles, but then you tell them that they can’t have those unless they pay you. What’s their reason for staying?

I know a lot of people have said, “but you can get everything with gold!” Perhaps once you are max level and spend time grinding out money. Until then, you can’t.

And that’s exactly the whole problem with Archeage. It may have a fun open world that you can explore in the end game, but it’s so god damn boring, that you won’t want to take the time to get there.

If you want a fun mmo, I’d go for Tera instead. Or perhaps Blade and Soul if it ever comes out in the U.S.