Archeage is shrinking on me. The leveling curve has steepened right off and the fights have gotten to be a huge grind. I don't know if my problem is lowish DPS (battlerage/defense/auramancy) or too little tolerance for boredom. Hitting combos is pretty underwhelming now that they'll maybe do 10% altogether and I can run into debuff immunity. Does leveling speed up again when you hit Cindermoor for Nui Alliance players? I might switch to blighter or primeval, because clearing content has gotten slow and PvP seems like it's just a joke until you hit 50.
PVP just seems blobby. There also doesn't seem to be any point to PvP, other than dicking someone over or stealing trade packages. Death is free w/o trade packages; well, it can cost you a couple hundred meters of travel. Things were very slidey and syncing seemed to be an issue; it doesn't feel like skill is important enough for PvP to be satisfying. It seems like 80% of the builds I saw took shadowplay; hard to argue with invis, mobility, and synergy with ranged and melee builds, not to mention super-shank. Pretty unimpressed with PvP at L31, which I understand isn't the level it's designed for.
The concept for land ownership seems like it was based around having very low server populations. I say that, because why would you let it look so awful otherwise? The way houses and farms fit together make it inevitable that you'd get the hilariously ugly developments in high population/power gaming servers. Why would you let housing areas look like shanty towns and slums? I don't really like that the only way to lose your land, outside of auroria, is to not pay the money Sink. There doesn't seem to be much player influence in housing. You're restricted in where you can put your house. You're restricted in how you can remove someone else's house; I'm pretty sure the only thing to do would be to PK someone constantly, every time they're online.
The world is prettily rendered, but there really isn't much of it and the edges of zones are bad. Climb the mountains in White Arden. Get to the edge of Cindermoor and Two Crowns in the ocean and look at the texture seam. The sea travel is what brought me in and there's not much to it. You've only got a few islands in all the oceans, most of which have nothing interesting on them.
At Level 31, I feel like I'm gazing at the far shore of max level and seeing that there isn't very damn much to do, in between or once I'm there.
TLDR: meh.
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Topic: ArcheAge alpha, preparing for beta and release (Read 29640 times)