PSO2 vs PSU, quick questions

[Loopy]

So I just recently logged back into PSO-World after a significant hiatus from anything Phantasy Star related. So bear with me on some quick questions I have about the new PSO2 because I haven't done a lot of homework yet. I realize some of my questions have more-than-likely been asked and answered in other threads, but rather than perusing through countless pages of old stuff (call me lazy) , I wanted to go ahead and ask anyway.

Just a tidbit about myself and my PSO experience: I am big Sega fan, played PSO on Dreamcast from day 1, moved onto PSO Ep 1&2 on Xbox and played that for a while, and also played PSU on the 360 as well. (And yes, I picked up a copy of Phantasy Star back in the day for the Sega Master System, because I am that old.)

So, PSO2: Is the weapon creating, and grinding and breaking just like PSU? Do you get to raise a mag like in PSO, or is it a partner machine like PSU? Is the party limit still 6 people? Red boxes? I haven't seen any beast characters, are they not in PSO2? I see there is jumping, any other significant gameplay changes?

Ok, that's all I can think of for now, I appreciate it. And, I am looking forward to the western release sometime this year, just like everyone else!

[Bellion]

You cannot create weapons at all. Everything is dropped by some enemy.
Grinding is different from PSU; breaking cannot happen, although weapons can downgrade. For example, with a 10* at +8, you have a slight chance of success and should you fail, there's a risk of -3 downgrade. It can go to +9(success) or somewhere between+8,+7,+6, or +5.(Failure)
You'll always be able to +10 if you go on a lucky streak, though. There are items that will help with the grinding process.
Party limit is 4, however, there can be 12 players in places known as multiparty areas. You can have 3 parties of 4 in these multiparty areas.
Red boxes are implemented.
No beasts.
Dodge commands and guarding with certain weapons.

That's about all I can answer.

[Z-0]

Weapon creation does not exist. You find items whole.
Grinding is different, as you don't lose maximum potential upon failing, and weapons cannot break. Grinding is simply trying to bring it up to +10, with chances to fail and lose grind levels. It's not a nice system considering what it costs and the success rates, but it's better than PSU.

You raise a mag like in PSO, although levelling one is far slower in this than PSO, although you can feed it pretty much anything.

Party is limited to 4 people, but can expand to 12 in Multi-Party areas. Red boxes also exist (I wish they didn't, hated that even in PSO1), although weapons can drop tekked. Beast characters aren't in PSO2, although there is a new race in summer.

Gameplay is pretty much the same as PSO and PSU, except you can jump, dodge and block. PP is also a static bar on the character instead of the weapons, which regenerates quickly and can be restored with normal attacks (think: PSP2/I). A weapon can have up to 3 PAs, either in a combo or used freely as well. Although, unlike PSP2, everything is paced a lot faster.

Everything in PSO2 is randomly generated (not sure what you think of this...). There are no set quests, except story and Time Attack quests, so the game is either super fun or super boring most of the time for most people.

PSO2 is a double-edged sword. You'll love it or hate it.

[Kondibon]

So, PSO2: Is the weapon creating, and grinding and breaking just like PSU? Do you get to raise a mag like in PSO, or is it a partner machine like PSU? Is the party limit still 6 people? Red boxes? I haven't seen any beast characters, are they not in PSO2? I see there is jumping, any other significant gameplay changes?

Ok, that's all I can think of for now, I appreciate it. And, I am looking forward to the western release sometime this year, just like everyone else!

Whoo... here we go...

There's no weapon crafting, it's all drops, weapons don't break when grinded, but they can loose grind levels.

There are mags but getting more costs real money.

The party limit is 4 people, but there are multi party areas that can accommodate up to 12 people so 3 parties.

Rares can either drop normally or as red boxes.

There aren't any beasts.


I see there is jumping, any other significant gameplay changes?
*deep breath*

Stationary Aiming was replaced by a TPS mode.

Dodging and blocking are things.

There are skill trees.

You can link multiple PAs or Techs to a weapon.

And a bunch of other stuff I can't be arsed to remember. Do you have any other specific questions? ;;

[Loopy]

Awesome, thanks for the quick response guys & gals.

It's interesting that they've changed the grinding, sounds like it's an improvement. Nothing was more frustrating to have a 9/10 only to have it fail and turn into a 0/9.

Dodging and blocking sound neat, makes it sound more like an action game. I am curious about the skill trees you mentioned. So there are no partner machines? I preferred the old mag styles from PSO, I thought they looked cooler then the creepy-doll looking partner machines. Can you give a level 1 character a level 200 mag, like back in the day? I never much cared for this, but people always did it.
Duel machine guns back? Are the character classes the same as PSU, along with the hybrid classes, protranser and all that?

[Kondibon]

Awesome, thanks for the quick response guys & gals.

It's interesting that they've changed the grinding, sounds like it's an improvement. Nothing was more frustrating to have a 9/10 only to have it fail and turn into a 0/9.

Dodging and blocking sound neat, makes it sound more like an action game. I am curious about the skill trees you mentioned. So there are no partner machines? I preferred the old mag styles from PSO, I thought they looked cooler then the creepy-doll looking partner machines. Can you give a level 1 character a level 200 mag, like back in the day? I never much cared for this, but people always did it.
Duel machine guns back? Are the character classes the same as PSU, along with the hybrid classes, protranser and all that?Trust me, while there won't be any permenant damage you're still gonna end up yelling at the RNG if you try to grind anything higher than a 6* weapon past +7.

This is a skill calculator (http://ryuhiroshi.funpic.de/pso2/skillcalc.php) it's still in aprill fools mode though so some of the skill names are rappyfied. You get 1 skill point per level and there are two client orders that give +5 each. It costs real money to reset your skill trees or get new ones though.

Mags aren't items anymore so they're locked to characters. You only get 1 per character unless you buy one with real money so be careful with the stats.

Dual mech guns are gunner weapons. And on the same topic, there are 6 classes 3 starting classes, and 3 that you unlock by getting another class to level 30 and doing a couple of client orders. The classes are Hunter, Fighter, Ranger, Gunner, Force, and Techer. Instead of hybrid classes like in PSU there's subclassing. When you choose a subclass you get 20% of it's stats up to it's level or your mainclass's level, whichever is lower. You also get it's skills and PAs but you can't use all their weapons only certain weapons of each type can be used by every class. There's more info about all that here (http://www.pso-world.com/forums/showthread.php?t=205010).

EDIT: I forgot to mention that while there aren't partner machinery there are "Friend Partners" which are basically npc versions of people on your friends list.

[Reia]

Stats scaling related, Whatever class you play, you do way more DPS than in PSU. But in exchange you're much more vulnerable to enemy damage than the PSU class counterparts because of the much lower HP (Unless you play a Tank build, that you can make tanks in PSO2, but that's just silly).

Stat scales get different for each class play.

ATP is no longer a universal physical stat. Its now Strike Attack and Range Attack, Same for defense and DFP, Strike Defense and Range Defense, Tech still has their own stat, renamed as Technique attack and defense. We have the PP gauge concept of PSPo2 but re-scaled to 100 whatever class you play, it can't be increased with level ups but it can be increased with set bonuses and max PP tuning your gear. ATA and EVP and minimal weapon variance gets put into all into a single stat, Dexterity, so you won't miss but if your Dexterity is low your minimun damage will be bad against higher level enemies.

Character LV is no longer universal, it's more like Final Fantasy XI, that each class has its specific level, you can be a LV40 ranger but if you switch to force and never played that class you're back in LV1, but you can go back being a LV40 ranger. That also means no MP, read Time attack later to get to know better.

Client Orders are back from PSPo2. Your old quest system from any MMO, instead of items you are rewarded with XP and Meseta for doing them, some are daily repeatable. Like FF11 you can abuse taking one, switch class and take the reward XP to level up a class without even playing it, but there's also a penalty if your class is low LV.

Weapons status equipping requirement are unique on each, in example, not all Hunter weapons require S-atk stat to equip, some require defense or dexterity to be equippable.

Photon Arts drops like PSO, in disks with a certain level, you need to meet its status requirement to learn those. So you don't have to spam every PA to level it up. Passing LV11 this disks are untradable, that is the downside so this proves harder to complete than just the PSU method. Since it purely relies on drop rate.

There's a new tuning system called Affixes which is some sort of variant from tekk'd weapons from PSO, this means the weapons you find as drops even the most common ones come with certain affixes, can be anything, From a status boost to a status effect (Freeze, Shock, Burn, Poison, Panic, etc). The difference is that there's an option which is expensive in meseta but it allows you to move this affixes to the weapons you use. Also there's special affixes called Monster Souls, which gives major status bonuses but you can only put up 1! The soul depends on the monster you kill, in example Rappies will drop Rappy Souls and boost dexterity and PP, dragons will drop souls that boost your S-atk, etc. Most meche enemies drop souls that are Ranger related stats.

There's back a guild system from PSO1 called team, which gives status bonuses by gathering TPs and other features too. Althought this is an excuse so people form big teams to improve the teamwork gameplay to prevent like PSU having our top players be just a bunch of antisocial people.

Free zones from PSO are back, meaning you don't have to take specific quests and the maps are randomized, now not only the spawns are randomized but also the map layouts, being impossible to memorize just 3 patterns and know how to speedrun it. Team gameplay is important in this mode, unlike PSU, is more like the .hack games, where just standing next to anyone commiting a kill grants you XP. Not only more party members will kill faster but also trigger larger spawns of enemies and bigger chances of events. To prevent Leeching, there's an XP LV difference rule that greatly reduce your XP points gain if the enemies are 5 levels or more than you, the more the level difference the lower the rates even up you will gain no points.


Item farming, you can't speedrun. Bosses have breakable points or weak spots that grants bonus loot if you hit them there, they are specific parts and dont have any damage bonus hitting there or their defense stat is high. Like the events of PSU, ignoring enemies for the sake of skipping to reach the boss faster or just hit where the boss is weak to kill it faster will trigger smaller amount of drops, there are unique drops that only have a chance of dropping if you break all the boss's parts before killing it. So it plays a bit more strategy than just speedrunning.

Events are replaced by interrupt quests for the sake of not farming them like happened in PSU and still make people run the normal zones and become something extremely repetitive. Interrupt events means that every 2-3 hours there will be a special event mission that is harder but also means more risk = more reward. It can be from huge spawns of enemies of hard difficulty to simply directly go into a boss fight like Dark Falz a la Towards The Future. This quests only last from 15-30 minutes available to take them. By completing all of those in all difficulties will unlock more events for the free zone farming to add more variety and faster leveling up to it.

Speedrunning sports related. There are 2 things that are speedrun related. Interrupt Ranking, Like interrupt events this is a more rare event where players will compete on who speedruns fastest. It gets announced 2 hours before happening so players prepare themselves and it lasts 30 minutes to 1 hour. Its not judged by a single run but how many runs you can do a mission in 1 hour or How many enemies of certain LV+ gets skilled. When the time meets, the navigator will tell you which is the objective to speedrun and the clock start ticking. There's no huge reward than showing off yourself into a ranking list that can be seen anywhere in the game, this are not single player based rankings but 4-player teams based, so it depends on more than just having your own super character. Just as a proof that you're the best speedrunner in PSO2. The second is time attack, this replaces party missions because of the MP dissappearing. Same as Emergency it's reward is based on some client orders that you can only take once a day, to prevent to be farmed, you can do this all you want in the same day but you'll only get the reward once a day. It will ask you to do the Time attacks completing it with certain ranks, by doing so the NPC giving you will awards you huge amounts of meseta! Which in PSO2 Meseta has more market value because you can even store more than billions in your character and instead of asking rare items, item boosting will just ask some regular dropping items and a huge cost of meseta. Time attacks can be done solo, its not party obligatory but you'll need skill if you think you can do it alone, its advised to make teaming up with one or more players.

Final fact, PSO2 is no longer pay 2 play by subscription, It's free 2 play with a premiun player service by using AC, which it price is scaled in the Japanese Yen, but most likely the EN version will have it as 100 AC = 1 US Dollar, As a free player you're restricted onto not having My rooms (Which without synthing is just a fashionable thing) and selling your stuff by simple trade window or putting it in your sale market unless you go Premiun player for the cost of 1400 AC each month. You can buy items from the market but you'll have to farm your own meseta and drops. This is no problems for those "I don't trade, I get the items by myself and I'm proud of it!" type of guys. There's a cash shop which sells you, additional mags to grow and possess, More skill tree variants in order to play multiple builds on the same character instead of creating another character and level it whole up for making variety, i.e. Fire Force and Lightning Force or a DPS hunter and a Tank Hunter. There's finally a Gatchapon, the concept is like most MMOs, you put 200 yen and you get a random gatchapon exclusive item, this items are fashion items, be clothes, head accesories, character hair styles or voices, Getting 14 of this items can be traded for a ticket that allows you to fully customize the clothes colors which you couldn't do in PSU and CAST frame colors (4 layers, Main color, Sub color, Photon Lights color and Skin color, yup now you can make tan or black skinned casts too, but even more mutant like colors like Green, Purple, whatever). Character customization is really much more advanced than most MMOs out there, way superior than PSU's but the downside is that if you feel like changing, you'll have to put real money for everytime you do a change, so think wisely how your character is going to look before creating. Anything else than clothes, gets stick with the character, you lose them if you delete them or don't carry over a new created character (Which is one character per account, then pay real money to create Alts!). There are rare gatchapon outfits, which the rate to get them is low, this consumes real money again said. Rolling Gatchapon costs 200 AC, 500 AC a golden version that only drops you outfits instead of any random item it has. To prevent people thinking this is a real money sink like most japanese Gatchapon related system games, you can trade this items with other players, even the most rare ones which are insanely expensive in meseta.


Lastly Story mode, you can't just have to run story specific missions it's replaced by a new system called the Matter Board, which gets explained better in the game's lore. Sorry for being brief but this is to prevent story spoilers. You must do the matters to unlock story mode episodes, it will ask you to run in multiplayer zones and get certain unique drops from the target monster said, which will shine in gold or look for golden tablets that appears in the Single party areas. The Event tablets contain story related events or just some game tips talking about how you should play (game tips like tutorial, and specific enemy beating strategies can also be found in the message capsules like in PSO). By completing matters you unlock things like exclusive client orders and story missions. Story missions are much shorter, it's more maze based, knowing the right path can make them lot faster and your rank is purely based on how least damage you take, you always get S rank if your damage received is below 500 in the whole run. And gladly you can now skip cutscenes by hitting escape or right click then hitting Yes in the skip cutscene window. With all this features story missions can be totally cleared in just a matter of 5-15 minutes rather than 20-40 minutes.

Well with that and all the things people above said this summarize all the differences of PSO2 and PSU, disregarding PSO2 has better gameplay and features than PSU, there are things that dissappear that makes PSU be missed a bit.

[Midori Oku]

Whatever class you play, you do way more DPS than in PSU.

That's debatable. It really just depends on what you're talking about.

Edit: Remember, in PSU you can hit multiple hitboxes on single target, PSO2 you can't.

[Reia]

That's debatable. It really just depends on what you're talking about.

Edit: Remember, in PSU you can hit multiple hitboxes on single target, PSO2 you can't.

You still do more damage! You're just forgetting the level scale, you did big numbers past LV80-140. Try to think if we did that lot damage back in PSU in the LV40-50 range and with our old PA damage boosters and lower weapon damage. Unlike we have in PSO2 with our insanely high % PAs, Skill trees, etc. i.e. A weak spot hit Over End/Deadly Archer in LV55 hurts as same as a LV140 Anga Jabroga/Dus Majarra on a boss hitbox and their activation frames are waaaay faster. And our characters move and attack twice or three times faster than in PSU and we can start the strongblows right from the start, not waiting for a combo part to reach that phase. DPS is never scaled in a single hit damage but damage per second. Even force is doing more AoE damage than its PSU counterpart Masterforce.

Even bosses have way more HP than they are before. Very hard bosses (LV 40-50) take a lot of damage while in PSU I could kill S2 rank bosses (LV130-145) with just 2-3 Jabrogas. I can imagine in 2-3 years the LV130+ PSO2 bosses will have over 2 millions HP and can 3-4 hit kill you even while being a Hunter wearing decent armor.

If we take a content and time comparison, PSO2 barely has an year passing the Closed Beta now. If this was PSU, we're still in vanilla. Were our damage was pretty low excepting for Dus Majarra during the 14th month release which was the most broken PA in Vanilla PSU ever aside of Jabroga on last month and still held title for more than 5 years of most broken PAs.

[SociableTyrannosaur]

You can't really compare stuff like that across games.

[Reia]

You can't really compare stuff like that across games.

Well it is. Its a difficulty comparison, tl:dr you kill faster but you also die faster. Which was PSU's largest flaw, the game felt like Easy mode all the time with strong HP and defense stats and enemies have a very bad AI.

[Shadowth117]

You still do more damage! You're just forgetting the level scale, you did big numbers past LV80-140. Try to think if we did that lot damage back in PSU in the LV40-50 range and with our old PA damage boosters and lower weapon damage. Unlike we have in PSO2 with our insanely high % PAs, Skill trees, etc. i.e. A weak spot hit Over End/Deadly Archer in LV55 hurts as same as a LV140 Anga Jabroga/Dus Majarra on a boss hitbox and their activation frames are waaaay faster. And our characters move and attack twice or three times faster than in PSU and we can start the strongblows right from the start, not waiting for a combo part to reach that phase. DPS is never scaled in a single hit damage but damage per second. Even force is doing more AoE damage than its PSU counterpart Masterforce.

Even bosses have way more HP than they are before. Very hard bosses (LV 40-50) take a lot of damage while in PSU I could kill S2 rank bosses (LV130-145) with just 2-3 Jabrogas. I can imagine in 2-3 years the LV130+ PSO2 bosses will have over 2 millions HP and can 3-4 hit kill you even while being a Hunter wearing decent armor.

If we take a content and time comparison, PSO2 barely has an year passing the Closed Beta now. If this was PSU, we're still in vanilla. Were our damage was pretty low excepting for Dus Majarra during the 14th month release which was the most broken PA in Vanilla PSU ever aside of Jabroga on last month and still held title for more than 5 years of most broken PAs.

Just gonna put this here:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDpnE7fP2UQ

I'm sorry, we're not doing that yet lol.

[Reia]

Just gonna put this here:

JP PSU SEED Express S3 MF?? [ 5:39 ] post LB/TECH mastery - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDpnE7fP2UQ)

I'm sorry, we're not doing that yet lol.


You still do more damage! You're just forgetting the level scale, you did big numbers past LV80-140.

>LV180 MF 20
>6 years updated PSU
>PSO2 barely has 1 year past Beta and our LV cap is 55

Yeah right!

[Z-0]

Not like it really matters, they are different games.

Also, Interrupt Rankings are judged by a "single run". Your fastest run within the hour (which is announced 15 minutes before, not 2 hours), is put on the rankings.

[Shadowth117]

>LV180 MF 20
>6 years updated PSU

Yeah right!

I thought the point was right now we were supposedly doing more? No, in PSO2 we're not doing as much as in PSU yet. We will out damage those characters, but not for a little while longer. I could see it happening around lv70-80 though.

[Reia]

Well the guy wants a comparison to find that is if PSO2 is really worth, which really is, then again PSU is dead, you can't log in servers unless you're playing the PSP edition.

PS: Which gladly PSP edition overcame the flaws PC PSU had.

[Midori Oku]

It's still more DPS, but it's true that it will change in the future. As for difficulty, PSU's S4 did a very good job at showing how difficult it could actually be.

But as stated by someone else above, it's really hard to compare two different games.

[Reia]

It's still more DPS, but it's true that it will change in the future. As for difficulty, PSU's S4 did a very good job at showing how difficult it could actually be.

But as stated by someone else above, it's really hard to compare two different games.

If Egoraptor's Sequelatis was a real show, it would be proven different xD.


I thought the point was right now we were supposedly doing more? No, in PSO2 we're not doing as much as in PSU yet. We will out damage those characters, but not for a little while longer. I could see it happening around lv70-80 though.

Got a LV100 Force with high level Techs in Vanilla PSU. The damage wasn't even a 25% close. People is forgetting how weak was the force before the MF and the Suplemental Patch. Even the day Ambition of the Illuminus came All Ra- Gi- Techs were heavily Buffed.

[Shadowth117]

If Egoraptor's Sequelatis was a real show, it would be proven different xD.



Got a LV100 Force with high level Techs in Vanilla PSU. The damage wasn't even a 25% close. People is forgetting how weak was the force before the MF and the Suplemental Patch. Even the day Ambition of the Illuminus came All Ra- Gi- Techs were heavily Buffed.

Pretty sure we meant current pso2 cap vs psu endgame, but okay.

[Midori Oku]

Pretty sure we meant current pso2 cap vs psu endgame, but okay.

Exactly, it's obvious that pre AOTI would have stood no chance. That is why I said "it depends on what you're talking about." >_____________>


But then again. Level 50 Masterforce on PSU, with no armor.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwVZCIjabGc

[SociableTyrannosaur]

the simple fact is you can't compare numbers across two games like that. "more dps" as in the numbers are bigger? Ok but since you're not fighting those same enemies anymore, it doesn't matter if lvl 15 zonde can do 70k under the right conditions because you're not not dealing 70k in PSU and you can't transition between the two.

You're comparing two different RPGs that just happen to be related, but when you start saying "you do more DPS" like that you may as well compare it to final fantasy because they're just not the same game.

Now if you wanted to say the game is more offense oriented, that's a different discussion, but using sheer numbers is asinine.

[UnLucky]

Well you can definitely compare numbers proportional to max HP, but Reia said the bosses have more HP in PSO2 to make up for it... Can you down appropriate level bosses in 5 seconds in PSU, though?

Definitely more players getting oneshotted, but that's to make up for the better mobility and damage avoidance.

[SociableTyrannosaur]

Well that's kinda my point. you can say the game is faster paced and is more focused on big damage than PSU, but to say the DPS is higher is like...

DPS is literally damage per second so by all rights DPS was higher in PSU than it was in PSO. I wouldn't put the two games side by side and make that claim as a comparison between the two games. It's like...max damage in FF1 was 999. in FFIV it was 9999. when someone asks you what the difference between the two games are would anyone really say "oh man, you do so much more damage now!"? Or would they say as a side note "damage scaling is really different and the damage cap interestingly enough is 9999"?

[Reia]

Ah okay people seem to get it wrong, What I mean is that you can kill enemies way faster than PSU. But at same time you can also get killed fast. So its more of an enjoyable difficulty than PSU ever had. Meaning that if you're skilled to dodge all attacks which Im safe to say that this attacks are much harder to dodge than the ones from PSU (Until the 300% enemy speedboost maps which I await PSO2 will do it as well as they did with their previous games). It's a bit more challenging in the start but more rewarding when you get it to play good.

Also the whole force argument made me remember the PSU history of balance, as Gunner was fine itself, Fighter was OP and Force were bit weak. I cant run short on how many buff patches they did to forces to keep it balanced until 5 years later they were like, "Screw it! Let's nerf Hunters!" It's a rare ocassion to see SEGA apply nerfs.

[SociableTyrannosaur]

yes the game is certainly faster paced than its predecessors.

[Midori Oku]

Well you can definitely compare numbers proportional to max HP, but Reia said the bosses have more HP in PSO2 to make up for it... Can you down appropriate level bosses in 5 seconds in PSU, though?


De Ragan was by far the easiest boss in PSU. This should give you an idea of how fast you could take him down by yourself. Skip to 6:45 to get to the boss.

Also note that I'm not using The Eternal Psychodirve in this video. Each number would be about 1000 points higher if I was. It would shave off some time, but not too much. Other bosses like Dulk Fakis, and Dark Falz would take longer to kill than this on S4.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WrOi7avsNo

[SociableTyrannosaur]

interesting...I never played on the JP servers, but I dont remember gibarta hitting multiple parts of a boss. Anyway not bad, but Gu/Ra has that beat.

[Bellion]

Limit Break Ra(FT only?) and Gi techs were released on JP PSU. A shame I couldn't get my MF to 180 and GAS out. ;_;

[Midori Oku]

interesting...I never played on the JP servers, but I dont remember gibarta hitting multiple parts of a boss. Anyway not bad, but Gu/Ra has that beat.

Maybe so, but I was comparing them to their PSO2 counterparts. As shown in one of my previous posts.

Force = Masterforce etc..........

By the end of the JP server Masterforce had all kinds of Limit Breaks

-LB Diga
-LB Foie
-LB Barta
-LB Zonde
-LB Megid
-LB Gidiga
-LB Gifoie
-LB Gibarta
-LB Gizonde
-LB Noszonde
-LB Nosdiga
-LB Nosmegid
-LB Grants
-LB Nagrats

Edit: In the end it does not matter anyways. The two games scale differently. I just saw something about PSO2 DPS vs PSU DPS, and I had to post. I'm still a PSU elitist at heart. :3

As for all of the Japanese content. It is being added to the offline AOTI version of PSU. You will actually have the weapons, armors, clothes, hairstyles, missions, and items from JP PSU. Even though PSU no longer has online servers, the game is still not "dead."

[Alisha]

That's debatable. It really just depends on what you're talking about.

Edit: Remember, in PSU you can hit multiple hitboxes on single target, PSO2 you can't.

this is not true. i know for a fact i can hit multiple hit boxes on the cats with slide shaker.

[Bellion]

Each hit of Slide Shaker can hit a different part of a boss. Slide Shaker cannot hit 2 parts of a boss at the same time with one hit.

[blace]

Nothing in this game hit's more than 1 hit box on at any given time on any enemy/boss.

[Syklo]

Nothing in this game hit's more than 1 hit box on at any given time on any enemy/boss.
Heck if it did, zan would kill big vardha more than 10x faster.

[Loopy]

Read through everyone's post. I have definitely learned a ton about PSO2 from everyone's input, thanks again. Are most of you playing the Japanese version, or waiting for the western version to come out?

I'm glad that PSO2 doesn't have that monthly fee like PSU did, I think it'll be easier to convince some of my friends who used to play the Dreamcast PSO and Original Xbox PSO to come check it out. But, I'm more curious about the pay-content, like the extra mags and what-not.
I'm not sure how I feel about this just yet. So if I want an additional mag, or more items for my "room", I'll have to fork out real money to get things that I don't particularly need to play the main part of the game, correct? I sure hope Sega doesn't shamelessly put all of the best weapons/armor and stuff like that up for sale, so anyone who is willing to fork out the extra cash can have the best stuff. (rather than taking the time an effort to go hunt it down from drops) If there is no longer weapon-creating like in PSU, I'm sure people will be frantic to trade or buy with meseta the good stuff.
Sounds fun, glad to see that PSO2 isn't just PSU2. Looking forward to playing it. I just hope the PC and Vita version come out at the same time.

[Reia]

All the content aside of the team room and the specifical AC shop items that are most likely tickets to boost experience, and add extra trees and mags and alts are 100% obtainable as a Free to play player.

You may not be as fast progressing as the premiun due to the lack of trade. But if you're a PSO player from DC just like me, I'm pretty sure you grown used on the pride of hunting everything by yourself.

For me this model is great, my nation is in economical crisis and I can't do international transactions because my national banks do not allow me anymore due to the crisis fact. I never traded for 11 years and proud of it and I always stick to one character and to only 1 mag (There are mag cells too to change mag appearance disregarding it's stats).

There's no English version and it's delayed as the front page says, Me and my guild will plan to move since many members will have easier ways to get AC. Doesn't affect me much but I'm more of a team player.

Not saying this because I'm a freeloader, just saying that I'm totally glad I can play PSO2 disregarding I can't pay anymore for the game like I did with PSO and PSU thanks to local lolpolitics and bureaucracy from the European major banks that banned argentina to do international transactions with credit cards.

If you're curious about footage, youtube has plenty of it. If you want something like livestream there's also twitch.tv (if you are looking for video quality gameplay) and justin.tv (If you are looking for pro player footage).

I also host my own stream but I apologyse the res, is the best my ISP can afford with the upstream.

http://www.justin.tv/reia01

[SociableTyrannosaur]

justin.tv=twitch.tv. All justin tv links now redirect to twitch.

Anyway the simple version of what reia is saying is that the core game as in real content is not restricted at all. the things you miss out on are extras like extra mags, extra skill trees and extra characters. Premium users also get access to extra storage, trading, get a room and can sell items on the player shops.

Rooms and selling can be gained for free at random, so you don't have to pay for them but since you have to play the FUN scratch to get it and you never know when you'll get a shop pass...it's not something you can guarantee as a free user. Premium users can also trade for 10* item passes which you need to buy 10*s from the player shops. basically it lets you buy a 10* item from someone else, it's not buying a 10* from sega.

Premium users get a whole bunch of other things as well but none of it keeps you from enjoying the game and none of it is anything like buying weapons, it's all stuff to enhance your experience.

but yeah there's tons of game play footage out there. or you could just download and play the game. almost the entire game is being translated to english so englsih speakers will be able to play the JP version without missing a beat.

[Reia]

justin.tv=twitch.tv. All justin tv links now redirect to twitch.

Well That only applies to streamers in the US. Still too many nations that ISPs are hell of expensive and don't meet the neccesary bandwidth requirement for Twitch (2000 kb/s upstream minimun) and are still staying in justin.tv. Me for example lol.

[SociableTyrannosaur]

I can't even connect to justin.tv. it literally just takes me to twitch, but ok.

[UnLucky]

I've streamed before on twitch.tv with 600-1000kbps

It's literally justin.tv, but they use the twitch domain for gaming channels for some reason possibly related to their search function

My channel has actually been switched from jtv to ttv and back. First time was because it was a gaming channel from before they made twitch. Then one time an admin saw me streaming youtube videos and said "this is not gaming, I'm moving you over to justin" and then I switched it back in the channel settings later.

[Syklo]

Well That only applies to streamers in the US. Still too many nations that ISPs are hell of expensive and don't meet the neccesary bandwidth requirement for Twitch (2000 kb/s upstream minimun) and are still staying in justin.tv. Me for example lol.
Tell me about it...
Highest upload I can reach (or have reached) is ~60KB/s.
:|

[Reia]

Also a friend managed to get the bandwidth minimun to stream on twitch. But Can't get included in the library of PSO2 because his framerate is below 60. Twitch has very high standards for non-US streamers. I plan to start twitch after I get a computer, and do my LP again of PSO2, but in HD playing the new race. I will surely get the new PC and internet connection I have been planning before that update happens in 3 months.