Lots of new information 12/15/11

[SnowfoxZero]

Its bad because of how badly done it was in PSU. It wasn't a terrible idea, but forcing EVERY weapon to use the system was.


It was terribly implemented. Forcing 99% of the enemies in the game to be Elemented pretty much insured you were going to be shifting through weapons more than you needed to. This wouldn't be an issue if there were only 3, but that wasn't the case. Fire Ice Lightning Earth Light and Dark. This makes equipping armor a tedious, inventory filling wreck, and makes playing Force the equilivent of playing single mommy to newborn sextuplets.

Force was its own trainwreck of fail, but 6 elements to choose from was just ridiculous especially when there were usually no fewer than 5 techniques (with their own fucking PA EXP) to deal with, and only 4 assigned per weapon, meaning if you had one good weapon you were screwed because you could only bind 4 to one, and mixing them impacted your damage.






blah blah blah, simple fact is, everything worked better when Hunters
exploited attributes and Forces and a few rangers exploited elements. Forcing EVERYTHING around elements made using them tedious and made exploiting them nigh-impossible, hence force being a pretty shitty class until you're like, level 130 or something.


For defense, in Phantasy Star Online had "elemented" armors, but it had a separate attribute for all of them...you didn't have to only use one. Barriers also could have been used for specific element defense (complete with a neat block effect). But no matter what the case you never were penalized for using the wrong armor. DEF was badly implemented in PSO too (10 HP points were greater than like 600 DEF points), but the CONCEPT was far superior.


And finally, PSO also had elemented Weapons but you could CHOOSE to use them, with the Extra button. They wern't very useful to hunters, but it immensely helped Rangers cope with bad damage at lower levels. Forces didn't need them; they had techniques.





tl;dr PSO's concept system had all the same traits of PSU's, it was just far more in-depth, with alot more control and way less stupid drawbacks for FAKE complexity like in PSU. It's like PSU said "OH HEY LOOK cool bloom effect, LETS USE IT FOR ELEMENTS!" and then ran with it, completely forgetting that the ideas were stupid.

Completely agree, and weapons in PSO could also have multiple attributes, like dark and a.beast, not just one, and some even had negative stats, which increased the range of weapon value and use quite a bit.

[Angelo]

Completely agree, and weapons in PSO could also have multiple attributes, like dark and a.beast, not just one, and some even had negative stats, which increased the range of weapon value and use quite a bit.

Well I didn't like PSO's system either, but a least you weren't penalized for using the wrong weapon type, and eventually you could add more % to multiple types with photon spheres iirc.

[r00tabaga]

Yes, I understand everything that was terrible about PSU.

But just because it has elemental attributes on weapons doesn't mean that they're gonna handle it the terrible way that they did in PSU. Maybe they will, maybe they won't.

Point is, nobody knows if it's bad yet. So far, most of the information released about PSO2 has been relatively 'good', and they've even fixed most of the big problems that the fans had. So I'm gonna give it the benefit of the doubt that it won't be as terribly broken as it was in PSU, until I see more information on it.

It's just ridiculous that someone would say they're not going to get the game simply because of the mention of elemental attributes.

What is funny about that? I was not not a fan of PSU and I don't have a gaming PC. Yeah, I'll pass and wait for a console PS game. I hate carrying a million line shields and weapons b/c of this element crap. Bring back SPECIAL WEAPONS and maybe I'd buy.

[Malachite]

...You're basing your decision on a phrase. Nobody has any real details about how it's going to work. You don't know whether or not it works like it did in PSU, and it probably doesn't.

If you don't have a gaming PC, or if you really don't care, fine. But because it has the phrase 'elemental attributes' in it? That's kinda silly.

[Ark22]

Pso was balance, because No one used elements except for forces pretty much :P

[•Col•]

Pso was balance, because No one used elements except for forces pretty much :P

PSO.

Balance.



HA, good one.

Also elements wut. Are you talking about Fire/Ice/Lightning/Light/Dark? Because many weapons had elemental attacks.... And even the ones that didn't still had basically the equivalent in the form of percentages for extra damage against certain enemies.

[Angelo]

Pso was balance

Are we talking about the same PSO? Phantasy Star Online?

[RemiusTA]

I personally think PSO was balanced far better than PSU was. They're both broken ass videogames, but it required more to become a broken asshole in PSO than in PSU.


The moment you obtained the high-tier PA in PSU, you were kung-fu jesus. The nature of both of them makes it pretty easy to be OP, though.



On second thought, there's really no reason comparing the two in levels of broken. I DO, however, respect the nature of the "broken" qualities of PSO, though.


I think for the drop rate of some of the weapons on that game, being able to expend the PB gauge to annihilate a boss, or sacrificing HP to shoot death waves, or spending 200 meseta a shot to drop rooms in seconds...doesn't really bother me all that much. It was annoying, but so is PA spam.


One was just more satisfying. LoL. Hell, i WISH i could do that stuff with PSU's rares. It would have been epic.

[r00tabaga]

...You're basing your decision on a phrase. Nobody has any real details about how it's going to work. You don't know whether or not it works like it did in PSU, and it probably doesn't.

If you don't have a gaming PC, or if you really don't care, fine. But because it has the phrase 'elemental attributes' in it? That's kinda silly.

I don't enjoy elemental gameplay. What is silly is that they are going to make you farm 6 different of your favorite weapon and over encumber your inventory. I won't enjoy swapping out armors every five minutes either.
I wouldn't mind weapon and armor FORGING though. So if I had a certain ice saber, then find a matching fire and dark one, I could forge the 3 into 1. So it could be capable of having multiple elements while only taking up 1 spot in my inventory. It would visually look the same just with a different hue depending on what you were facing. Same thing with armor.

I much rather prefer PSO's broken system over PSU's. All day.

[RemiusTA]

Shougai posted minor info about grinding from this week’s Dengeki Playstation. The grind’s (+value) goes down and you’ll have to pay again to strengthen the weapon.

Why?


Why is there even a failure system? It's so stupid. At the worst, just lose your items and start again, why does every game today have to try its hardest to ruin your shit when you try to improve it? Is it not enough to just raise the rarity of grinders and let the market limit how difficult it is to grind things?


I thought one of the developers was going on about fake complexity in game systems. Upgrade fails are just annoying, it's like the cheapest thing ever. I don't even bother with upgrade systems that fail.


inb4 "+9 to +10 == 1/lol success rate" and "YOU CAN PAY TO MAKE IT NOT SO BAD".