Totally agree. Also, the best balance I've seen in mmos to date are on games who prioritized less options when it came to attack and movement control. This allows devs to to have a much more solid window of what you can and should do in different situations and not pso2's mess of "everyone should have movement PAs and around 10 PAs to choose from". Those who were around for early-ish time trials should remember that well.
Ranger and Force had just attacks since alpha 2. Hunter since the first one.
Game was always F2P. It pretty much inherited it from late PSU:AotI.
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Content on release was already stated in this thread (up to Tundra, Ragne city EQ, 3 classes and our old awful grind system that made Dudu particularly "loved", btw, we didn't have the other grind npc back then).
It wasn't much but I see a few important differences if compared to NGS.
1 - We had very frequent updates on what was coming so there wasn't a case of pretty much nothing but a class to look forward to like we have now (mines 2 weeks after launch, floating continent not to far after it, among other stuff that was added like time trials).
2 - While the progression felt slower than NGS, thanks in part to having no daily quests which is a positive to me, it wasn't as repetitive thanks to the randomly generated maps from preset tiles and the more meaningful variety. You weren't seeing 80% of the enemy types in all areas.
3 - The matterboard, while disliked by a good number of players, ended up adding some replayability to maps. Whether it was good or not is a can of worms I would rather not delve too deep into, though I think it is hard to deny that the abridged Oracle storyline we got post ep3 is a mess without the matterboard linking our encounters, so if one was interested in the story it ended up as a timewaster of sorts instead of just a burden.
Good work was done with NGS map terrain modeling and it is interesting to traverse on them but I don't think that they're currently large enough compared to how fast we move (size in absolute terms is meaningless alone, its relation to overall travel speed is what makes a world feel large or small) and I don't think it is particularly good content in terms of holding interest for too long by itself. I do think that what compares most negatively with regular PSO2 is how little we have in terms of what to expect to be added to the game in the short and mid term. I don't remember such voids being around during its time as we had somewhat constant previews of new content since cbt in it.