Why is level grinding and progressing more fun in the original?

[Agitated_AT]

Whether you agree or not. What do you guys think?

Was it really more fun in pso or not?

I feel like it still is but i jus cant put my finger on what it exactly is. Maybe its a lot of things

[gigawuts]

Better pacing, and it not being strictly superior to play in a larger group. You could solo for just as much or even more experience. Boss fights rewarded you much better, and the emphasis on leveling went hand in hand with the emphasis on gear (it was arguably a lesser emphasis, even).

So yeah. Leveling happened as you played in PSO1. In PSO2, leveling is a requirement to make your character, due to skilltrees.

[Z-0]

Also, you didn't need to get lucky to make progress / have fun, since everything was there laid out for you.

[The Walrus]

What Giga and Z-0 said pretty much.

Pacing had a lot to do with it in the first. Leveling always felt kind of like an afterthought until the super high levels and even thought it gated your ability to do the different difficulties it didn't take long at all to hit ult which was awesome.

[Ezodagrom]

Whether you agree or not. What do you guys think?

Was it really more fun in pso or not?

I feel like it still is but i jus cant put my finger on what it exactly is. Maybe its a lot of things

For me leveling up/progressing in PSO was only fun in normal and maybe hard mode. In very hard it started becoming too much more of the same, and in ultimate, while interesting at first, the gap for the level required to do decently between each area is just way too big, it becomes dull very fast.
Overall, progressing in PSO2 is more fun for me.

[gigawuts]

The way the game handled its damage formula made leveling important as soon as you stepped into a new area, but not very important there after a little while. I didn't feel like it handled that very well at times (like your first forays into caves on normal). Reducing the def of monsters in a couple areas a bit would have been a good move. They'd take noticeably higher damage at first, but not noticeably higher damage later on since, I don't know, let's say an additional 10 damage on top of 50 is pretty big, but 10 on top of 200 isn't going to change much.

For much of the game I felt it handled it well, though. I don't know if they tweaked it over the different releases. If they didn't tweak the pacing, then I'm pretty impressed with how well they nailed it in the first go...but I do recall hearing horror stories of the damage formula in v2's ultimate so I'm pretty sure they tweaked it.

[Ezodagrom]

The way the game handled its damage formula made leveling important as soon as you stepped into a new area, but not very important there after a little while. I didn't feel like it handled that very well at times (like your first forays into caves on normal). Reducing the def of monsters in a couple areas a bit would have been a good move. They'd take noticeably higher damage at first, but not noticeably higher damage later on since, I don't know, let's say an additional 10 damage on top of 50 is pretty big, but 10 on top of 200 isn't going to change much.

For much of the game I felt it handled it well, though. I don't know if they tweaked it over the different releases. If they didn't tweak the pacing, then I'm pretty impressed with how well they nailed it in the first go...but I do recall hearing horror stories of the damage formula in v2's ultimate so I'm pretty sure they tweaked it.

Haha...v2 ultimate...
I only played it offline, and even in the forest, enemies defences were really high.
Though when I say that the gap was way too big, I was talking about the final itteration (Blue Burst), even after all the improvements to ultimate, it still got boring fast, in my opinion.

[ShinMaruku]

Because Sonic Team was not ass in 2000.
After 2004 all bets were off they went in the toilet.

[UnLucky]

You leveled as you progressed through the areas. If you couldn't beat an area, you kept trying or got better gear.

You could say it's a boring grind full of artificial difficulty, but it's not like every subsequent area was level locked. It's just a gear check. And gear was fun to hunt for.

See, new stuff was cool. What you already had was cool. You could keep both. When you got the opportunity to upgrade your gear, it happened. Doing that didn't invalidate everything else you could possibly have at the moment. Nor does failing that upgrade completely invalidate your otherwise best-in-slot gear.

So you played the game in high spirits. Even if you did a hundred runs looking for some rare gear, it's not like you'd be level 200 or anything, so nothing is wasted progress.

[Cyron Tanryoku]

You know you fucked up when you make grinding in old games seem fun