My ideas for PSO2

[MechDan]

Here's my opinion, as someone who's never played other Phantasy Star games...

I'd like PSO2 to be basically a different game, with a new class system and somewhat different gameplay. No characters from PSO should be transferable to PSO2, but ideally Guild card files will be compatable.

SERVER/GAMESAVE DETAILS:

To prevent cheating, PSO2 should have gamesaves on the server side. On the VMU, a copyable backup of the the character is stored for offline mode, but the data only goes one way--from server to DC. Any experience or items acquired while playing in offline mode never gets transfered to an online playable character gamesave. While this is regrettable, it will eliminate cheating and BSoD tragedies while still maintaining some ability to play offline.

Perhaps there can also be a "Munchkin-verse" server which allows playing characters online which come from VMU gamesaves. Naturally, the Munchkin-verse would be rampant with duped items and gamesharked characters. It would be fun for people who like that sort of thing, I guess.

GAMEPLAY DETAILS:

The biggest change in gameplay I'd like to see is the ability to play multiple characters on a single DC. Players on a single DC would be a "squad", forced to stay relatively close together like in Gauntlet Legends. They'd pop through telepipes and transporters together at all times. Different squads in the same team should telepipe and transport together also, but within a floor separate squads may split up.

The camera angle will be higher up like in Gauntlet Legends, and will automatically rotate ala GL. In addition, the camera may be rotated up/down/left/right by pressing on the D-pad. Typically, this feature will not be used because multiple players will be playing on the same screen. This frees up the L button to trigger customization shortcuts. There are a total of 16 shortcuts:

A, B, X, Y, (default is Attack, Special, Heavy, Chat)
R + A, R + B, R + X, R + Y, (default is monofluid, monomate, moon atomizer, telepipe)
L + A, L + B, L + X, L + Y, (no default)
L+R+A, L+R+B, L+R+X, L+R+Y (no default; these are also Photon Blast)

Quick customization: If you hold a button down and then press on the D-pad, it will pop up a small
menu of actions, letting you change the action of a button while you have the button held down.
For example, if X is set to Heavy attack, pressing X with D-pad right will set it to Special attack.

CHARACTER CLASSES:

Characters are randomly generated. You can choose race, gender, hairstyle, and clothes, but starting stats, body proportions, skin and hair color are randomly generated. You may repeatedly press the "generate" button as many times as you want until you are satisfied with the results. Note that the initial stats and body proportion will be related. The races are:

Humans: tend to have medium stats
Newmen: tend to have more magic power but less attack/defense power
Androids: tend to have much more attack/defense and may equip two weapons at a time.

Male: tends to have more physical power
Female: tends to have more dexterity

The big new ability Androids get is the be ability to equip two different one-handed weapons. They can switch freely between them in combos. This gives Androids greater flexibility with weapon attacks to make up for the complete lack of techniques.

The next step in character creation is choosing a character type:

Hunter (Human and Android): high max on attack, defense, and hit points; attacks with melee weapons faster
Ranger (Newman and Android): high max on attack, accuracy; shoots with guns faster
Force (Human and Newman): high max on mind and TP; casts techniques faster

This gives a total of 12 classes each of which may be either male or female. To keep the amount of memory required to store the appearance data of many characters (i.e. in a lobby), the speciality has no effect on appearance. In a lobby, all that's distinguishable is the race and gender--6 main possibilities. In addition, the character models for Human and Newman are identical except for the heads, so only 4 base models are essentially required.

SPECIALIZATION

Each character type can further specialize in the following fields:

Hunter: sabres, daggers, swords, partisans
Ranger: handgun, mechgun, rifle, shotgun
Force: fire, ice, lightning, support

This set of 4 stats start off equal at 25-25-25-25. As the player uses weapons (or techniques) of a particular type, it slowly increases the stat for that type at the expense of the other three. This stat gives a bonus for use of that type of weapon/technique in a nonlinear way. It reduces attack/casting speed as well as increasing ATP (or support spell capability). Therefore, it makes most sense to specialize with one or two sorts of weapon/technique.

Anyway, thanks for anyone who actually read this rambling post...

[myau1]

Hey i like some of those ideas, but server saving is out of the question for me! That presents more hassles than its worth. We've all seen how theier servers behave! LOL Granted they are getting much better.

I say, save your game the old fashioned way. The way we did in other Phantasy Stars! You can read my post on pso 2 here

http://boards.ign.com/message.asp?to...4666&replies=0

[MechDan]

Thanks! I never played other PS games, so I'm not familiar with some of your ideas in that thread.

Anyway, more ramblings...


PLACES TO GO, PEOPLE TO SEE...

Set 1000 years after PSO, ships in PSO2 travel from planet to planet relatively frequently. Your base ship is under the command of the team leader, who may choose to travel from one planetary system to another (limitted by the coordinates of known systems according to story progress). This ship is small and has little more than a bank and a hospital. Shops are now exclusively planet-side, in mid-stage ala old style shooters. (Hitting a shop pauses the game like in old style shooters also). You'll have to hunt around for shops which sell particularly good items.

Instead of the Hunter's Guild, your ship will be able to receive transmissions from the planet it's above from people requesting help. You can accept or cancel quests from the ship's main communications console. When you accept a job, the location of the client (somewhere on the planet) is accessable in the ship's main transporter (remember that all players transport together even if members of different squads). The same quests are accessable in either offline or online mode.

The storyline in PSO2 is driven by the quests, not killing bosses in "questless" mode. This leads to a somewhat non-linear story progress, with some quests leading to others dependent upon the quest's outcome. When playing in a team, the only quests available are the ones currently available to ALL players in the team. The exception is that a player may replay a quest if it's available to another player. In particular, this allows a player to join a team which is playing a quest he's already played. A player may also join a team which is in the middle of a quest available to him (this allows a player to rejoin a team if he gets disconnected).

Some quests will only be unlocked by first meeting someone or finding something on a planet. Thus, there will be a lot of exploring to do!

GETTING TOGETHER ONLINE...

Because of the nonlinear branching nature of story progress, the "player matching" system will attempt to find other players who have similar quests available. Two characters have a "distance" rating which is calculated based on which quests they've already played and which quests they haven't already played. Any quest which one has played but the other has not adds +1 to this rating. The closest "distance" possible is 0; the farthest "distance" possible is the total number of quests.

When you start up a character in online mode, a listing of all the "closest" online characters is given--you may choose to try and organize a team with some of them, but you're not restricted to it. The Ship/Block/Lobby system of PSO is retained as well, but you can see the "distance rating" of each character in addition to their name and level.

[myau1]

hey! I like that second idea very much! Not bad at all. Just remember PSO 2 is already in development and PSO 2 may only be what didnt make it into PSO so cross your fingers.

[MechDan]

Thanks! The more I think about it, the more I really hope for something like the quest-based story progress system I describe. The only concern is with "branching". By "branching", I mean a situation where the storyline splits (i.e. whether or not a particular NPC dies during a particular quest). If there are many branches, then it will be hard for friends who took different branches to get together for more than vanilla monster slaying. Thus, there should only be a small number of true "branches"--major events in the story.


and yet more ramblings...

EXPERIENCE AND DEATH

When a character dies, any experience points gained since the last quest was finished are lost. There is no "return to the ship" type option unless ALL characters have died or the party returns to the ship. Gaining experience for most monsters is the same as in PSO--100% for the final blow, 80% for anyone else who does damage. Gaining experience for bosses is different, however--you gain experience as you do damage, proportional to the amount of damage done. This will make death a very serious thing, and strongly encourage advancing through the story! When a character dies, none of his weapons or money is dropped.

Also, this will encourage high level players to play in lower level games in quests they've already completed simply to finish an easy quest to save their experience point gains.

Note that because all players in a team must be on the same stage, a new player entering an existing game will appear near the others rather than up at the ship. For this reason, a player's health, TP, and whether or not he is "dead" is saved whenever the character quits a game. Otherwise, a player could simply quit and rejoin a game at any time to heal up and revive. You can still start another team, heal up, quit, and then rejoin the original team, but this takes time and won't work if multiple players are playing on the same DC.

CONNECTING TO THE NET

Besides BBA support, the default for modem connections should be to stay connected unless explicitely told to disconnect. In other words, you don't have to start a game to connect and quitting the game doesn't disconnect.

VARIABLE POWER ATTACKS, TECHNIQUES

There are two basic types of weapon/technique--"bilevel" and "charge".

A bilevel weapon or technique starts immediately when the button is pressed and has two power levels--quick and strong. Both have the same starting animation, but the strength/speed of the attack is determined by whether the button is tapped or held (like in Virtua Fighter). Bilevel weapons and techniques can be comboed ala Virtua Fighter.

A charge weapon or technique only charges up while the button is pressed and actually attacks when the button is released. During this charge-up period, TP and/or HP is consumed to build up the strength of the attack. Charge weapons/techniques can only finish a combo. Pressing or releasing L or R will cancel the move (but not return the consumed TP/HP).

Normal weapons only have one attack button, but weapons with a special ability have two--standard attack and special attack. Weapon types are:

Unarmed, sabre, dagger, handgun: bilevel

sword, partisan: (Hunter only) bilevel
spear, axe: (Hunter only) charge

rifle, machinegun: (Ranger only) bilevel
shotgun, grenader: (Ranger only) charge

cane, wand: (Force only) bilevel
magic sceptre, magic book: (Force only) charge

New weapon descriptions:

Spear: A thrusting weapon for Hunters (includes pikes, tridents, etc)
Axe: A powerful weapon which can slice through many enemies at once

machinegun: Looks like a submachinegun (only one of them)
grenader: launches a single large photon ball which explodes for an area effect on impact.

magic sceptre: A weapon capable of casting a technique beyond level 15 (simple, normal techniques)
magic book: A spell book capable of casting a technique beyond level 15 (hard, special techniques)

Note that humans and numans will wield weapons two-handed, while androids will wield most weapons one-handed. If equipped with two weapons from the same family, androids have the unique ability to perform a "double-attack" with both weapons at the same time. ATA is halved, but at high ATA levels the extra hitting power will make up for their lack of techniques.

Techniques types:

Foie, Barta, Zonde: charge
Gifoie, Gibarta, Gizonde: bilevel (quick has short range; strong has long range)
Rafoie, Rabarta, Razonde: charge
Grant, Megid: charge
Resta, Anti, Reverser: bilevel (quick heals self; strong heals area)
other support spells: bilevel (quick affects self/target; stron affects area)

[Fubuki]

KICKING / BANNING

That is really what PSO is missing. I used to hate locking rooms cause it walls you off... but having someone enter your team just repeating "You got a Holy Ray 4 trade!" or hitting his macro of "I ogt all your grilz last night" over and over and over is plain annoying and trite. hence perhaps a warning system like AIM has or op'ing rooms... that would be a great change.

[MechDan]

Re: kicking/banning, how about a 4 tier category security system for teams:

1. Open - no password is needed to enter nor can anyone kick out anyone. Simple mail to players is available from lobby.

2. Moderated - no password needed to enter, but the team creator (not team leader) may kick out unwanted players. Simple mail to players is available from lobby.

3. Password protected - a password is needed to enter and the team creator may kick out unwanted players. Simple mail to players is available from lobby.

4. Private - a password is needed to enter and the team creator may kick out unwanted players. Simple mail to players is NOT available from lobby (but Guild Card Simple mail still works).