When it comes to recent MMO releases and playtests, I could say I’ve been in a bit of a dry spell. It’s not to say I haven’t tried any new games or that there haven’t been any interesting ones that caught my attention! In fact, I’ve played dozens of new games this year. From those that merely dipped a toe into the pool of MMO to those that were full-on MMOs with all the bells and whistles.
Yet, the quality of those games has been wanting. Many of them were Asian imports that were also mobile first titles which simply lacked any real substance. Though I’m not the only one with some thoughts on mobile titles. Still though, both Raven2 and RF Online Next were completely offensive. Not purely from the gratuitous animations but also from the lack of real gameplay. They had features out the wazoo, but they trampled over those with far too many autoplay features.
I’m not here to rehash all of that biz though, I just wanted to use it to say that I had fairly low confidence going into the demo for ArcheAge Chronicles. Partly due to my lack of faith in so many of these new games, but also partly due to the ending experience I had in ArcheAge Unchained. But let me be frank, I had a blast playing ArcheAge Chronicles this past week. It was beautiful, combat was tight and crisp, and the classes were interesting too.
First and foremost, ArcheAge Chronicles is far and away a vast change in design and gameplay from the ArcheAge of old. It’s leaps and bounds beyond it in terms of graphics and animations but also the gameplay is entirely different. I’d say the difference is even more stark of a change than the original Guild Wars to Guild Wars 2. It’s that different. And to keep this all a bit more succinct rather than constantly spelling them out, let’s mark AA as the previous incarnation — specifically Unchained since that was the version I played most and Chronicles as this new beast.
First off, the classes are rigid. In AA, classes were more flexible in that you could choose a starting class but once you unlocked the ability to have a second class, suddenly a whole world of options was available. You could pair up the classes to create something extremely unique and interesting. This was perhaps my very favorite thing about AA.
In Chronicles, you don’t get that at all – unless they add on to the system in the future. Rather, you choose from a class archetype, from Warrior, Mage, Ranger, or Berserker. That’s it. Now, depending on your equipped weapon you’ll get a different series of skills and attacks but that’s no different than GW2 or it’s ilk. The initial creation screen gives the impression that you’ll be a different class based on your chosen weapon but you can swap weapons in combat.
Also, and I hope this is just for the demo, but the classes are gender locked. Surely we’ll get a full character creator before release because that’d be a real tragedy if not. At least you still get to customize your character so we haven’t fallen to the depths of playing the game’s designed heroes, but I really hate gender locking classes.
From there the demo begins with a nice tutorial where you quickly realize that we’re not in AA anymore. I cared so very little for the story in AA that I don’t actually know if Chronicles takes place in the same world or even universe. It sure did not feel like it at least. And it really doesn’t even matter to me.
In fact, I’ll tell you what it actually felt like – New World. Yes, the visuals and even the combat to a lesser degree, really gave me some New World vibes. It really felt a bit like playing a successor to New World. Maybe it’s due to the animations and the camera angle being placed much lower behind the character more like a single player RPG does. Hell, even the intro story was like someone copied off of New World’s homework. Your hero wakes up kind of lost in unfamiliar lands with these ghostly knights. After fighting and dispelling them, you row off into the sunset and end up at a little starter town. It’s weird.
Now, we’re already running a bit short on time (my editor is a beast, you know) and I absolutely need to talk about combat – because honestly that’s what really makes or breaks an MMO for me. But before that I want to touch on all the features that I can (even those that weren’t present).
There’s no housing to try out. Whether it exists or not later on, we’ll see. For now, it is absent. Gliders are still alive and well, which is really nice. You have to assign them to your skill bar, which I kind of hated. Honestly the feature in GW2 works beautifully. If you jump while you’re in the air your glider comes out – jump again (I think) and you drop out of it. It should be that simple. Here it’s a skill bar item which just throws me off.
Gathering, hunting, and crafting are all alive and well. Right now they’re very basic. Hopefully it gets built out much more. I’m not much of a crafter, but the way it’s functioning in the game right now really left me feeling hollow about it. I really miss the way Crowfall did gathering and crafting. It had a little bit of a minigame to it that at least kept you engaged. Chronicles is just a basic click to grab feature. Though I did like snagging those rock crabs.
Speaking of, there’s full underwater swimming and diving, another standard that feels a little clunky here. Rather than giving you a proper air meter, while underwater you’ll just work from your stamina. I like the concept that it’s a single bar to watch rather than some new one to maintain, but when you come up for air if you’re still swimming then your stamina continues to fall. So swimming above the water is just as deadly as swimming beneath it. You won’t die instantly, instead you’ll just get a 1 HP DOT that keeps ticking off if you don’t get your buns to stand on something.
Exploring and adventuring is lacking too. What I mean by that is that there are a bunch of invisible walls preventing you from moving into different areas. While swimming I saw and had plenty of ruins to swim around and archways I wanted to swim under. I could swim over or around them just as well, but there’s a perfectly good giant hole here that the game simply wouldn’t let me traverse. That’s not great and a bit annoying.
Also, since the game was giving me so many New World vibes, I really wanted to also be able to explore like I could in New World. There, I don’t recall but I don’t think we had pure wall climbing. But if you went to a wall that was close to your height, if you jump around it enough you’d be able to climb up it. In Chronicles, you’ll just be jumping like a fool. They really should add in some minor climbing functionality at least. The explorer and jumping puzzler in me demands it!
And being an MMO as it is, there’s plenty of mobs that players can tag and fight together with others around you. Now, I’m not sure if I want to call it straight up World Event level team work as in GW2, but certainly you can work together with an informal group of players who happen to be around each other to take down a boss. Which brings me to one feature I really kind of enjoyed about the game and that is how quests were generated.
There were some formal NPCs with little floating icons indicating you needed to talk to them to get a quest going. But, a lot of times, you can just talk to seemingly random NPCs. Then, suddenly you’ll get a request from them to go questing. Kind of like in old school RPGs where you would talk to all the NPCs just in case they had something important to say. It felt really natural and smooth.
And, even more natural, a lot of times while I was exploring a ruin or area a quest would suddenly notify me that it has begun. I loved that. It was so much better than finding your NPC quest giver, taking the quest, completing it, and then running back to them. This was smooth and simple and just worked brilliantly.
Now, I promised you combat. And I shall deliver! Next time. Oooh, I know, that’s pretty awful of me. Really, it’s terrible I know. But again, the editor demands ink! Or digital ink? Font? I don’t know. But check back in soon for a review on ArcheAge Chronicles‘ combat and PvP. You won’t want to miss it!
