PSU is amazing!

[hoppimike]

Seriously?

Yeah it's my second favourite Sonic game ever after the Dreamcast version of Sonic Adventure 2!

Sure it's buggy and unfinished, but underneath is a stylish, exciting, ambitious, imaginative and well-designed game

[Lumpen Thingy]

Yeah it's my second favourite Sonic game ever after the Dreamcast version of Sonic Adventure 2!

Sure it's buggy and unfinished, but underneath is a stylish, exciting, ambitious, imaginative and well-designed game

I played the game for 5 years only because of the people I knew on it. If it wasn't for the AP system towards the end I would have just quit it at year 3 since that was the only "amazing thing" about it

[hoppimike]

So erm, does anyone here play on that private server? Is it still up?

[Tyreek]

Production for that server has been discontinued. Essen no longer has interest in it, nor motivation. He's moved on. If you need the official statement from him, here it is:

Spoiler!

Hello,

I'm sure some people already guessed, but the EGS development will not resume. I'm not saying it's on hiatus, I'm saying the project is dropped. Nothing else will come of it.

*Why?*

The reasons for not picking up the project again are pretty simple.

First, the project is way too complex for the benefits it would give. Like I said time and again, generally on IRC, it would take a lot less efforts to do a game from scratch than making PSU work and adapting it to our greatest desires. There's just too many limitations for it to be interesting anymore. All the bigger puzzles have been solved, and the interest is gone and has been for a while. I got more interesting puzzles to solve elsewhere.

Second, I don't have the time. I have a lot of projects now, many of them being a lot more useful to people than the server would ever be. I have been spending a lot of time on them this year and it feels great because it helps thousands of people to build awesome stuff. And most of you have already used a service where my software is used and has been chosen because it makes a difference, so I'm not too sad about focusing on these projects because I know it still benefits most people here.

Third, life happens. I am little by little moving away from being the genius but also modest computer programmer who does nothing else, and am now enjoying other great things from the outside world, and with many more to come. My interest in anything SEGA is pretty much gone, with of course the little bits of PSU nostalgia here and there, but far from enough to continue the project.

There's no chance this project would be picked up again even if SEGA were to release the source or protocol specifications or anything. I, personally, moved on.

*However:*

I will be pushing to Github everything that I did so far. This includes a mess of notes. This will not include any data packet from the original servers. Many people in the team will most likely decide to archive them however. It's up to them.

I would like to think everyone for their continuous support. The times we spent on the EGS server was really awesome thanks to you guys. Nobody will forget about the stairs I am sure. Great episode of our lives. I'm sorry this project did not get anywhere, we really meant to get it back but life decided otherwise. I hope you can understand.

Feel free to use the lounge if you have any questions, I will answer them as soon as possible. Do not PM me about anything at this time, however, I will not answer private questions for now.

*What now?*

Well many of the team are still working hard on bringing the online content to the offline game. Please look forward to that from now on. The PSUmods forums will of course stay up for this project, and the PSO2 patch, and random dumbfaggotry you have come to love.

Thanks for everything.

[Zorafim]

For me, the social aspect WAS part of the game. So saying "the social part of the game was great but the game was terrible" makes no sense to me, because the social part of the game was a PART of the game.

A disagreement on definitions, then. I take everything I see as a series of parts, so that if one thing I do is lacking in one part I need, I can make up for it by doing something else which has that one part in abundance. This is why I play both WoW and PSO2. WoW's community is lacking, as is its action. But its world, story telling (weird, right?), and RPG elements are pretty great. PSO2 has almost no world, no story to speak of (it's getting better), and terrible RPG elements. But it has a wonderful community and communication environment, and its core gameplay elements are fantastic.
They fit together perfectly. So when I get enough of one, I switch to another. I can't get all of what I need from just the one game.

Why? Because I loved hanging out on there. I loved chatting to my new friends, working on my room, buying cool stuff, developing my shop, messing around at the casino... and then when aaaaall that messing around was done... we'd go blast through a level or 2.

surely you see that there are different ways to enjoy the same game?

I understand this completely. That's why I said PSU was a fantastic chat group. It almost makes me wish there was no combat at all, so that more focus would be put into the the social aspects.
The shame is that you missed PSU in its most active. There were fan made events going on almost every week, with tons of participation. These things are why I kept on playing despite there being no core game design going on. I wonder if I shouldn't finds some fan videos. I participated in more than a few of those...

PSU is trash.

Thank you for contributing to this conversation.

[Akaimizu]

PA leveling was tiresome. It also took extremely long to get to PA levels, for some, in order to really get the true benefits from it. The thousands of hours doing PA levels, and only seeing an upgrade after each 10 slow levels. While certain weapons were easier, many took forever in PSU. The Portable version was way more kind. Not to mention, many gun classes had the long haul to have to get their PA levels to the highest level of all elements before they actually get the class-specific benefit of using them on many of the high-health mobs in the game. Otherwise your stuff doesn't proc or help with damage enough that someone with straight damage could just run in with.

That and swords were totally messed up, doing way less damage for much slower performance and high risk, while they could use Slicers and do way more damage for little risk at all.

The early social game was pretty awesome, I'll say. It also showed a lot of promise given the way combat was speedier and smoother than PSO. You could immediately run around the battlefield, and attacks could happen more frequent. Though, PSO's walk-then-run did have 1 main advantage, it made things easier to aim given that it also meant that your initial movements were fine tuned before they accelerated.

[The Walrus]

Yeah it's my second favourite Sonic game ever after the Dreamcast version of Sonic Adventure 2!

Sure it's buggy and unfinished, but underneath is a stylish, exciting, ambitious, imaginative and well-designed game

Ok. I'd argue with you but ya know I'm not in the mood for it and this isn't the thread for it. I'm glad you enjoy it.

[SecretAether]

I have a problem, could someone help?

[ThePendragon]

I played this game for 5 years and no PSO was a much better over all game

This is factually incorrect.

[DeathDragon2332]

I also loved PSU there was so much to do between the leveling PAs, hunting gear, leveling characters, the frequent events that added more to the game, etc (JP servers) It's funny how people complain that the game sucks when they put in hundreds or thousands of hours and play it for years.

They are clearly doing something right because you people kept coming back or stayed playing it. I personally never understood the the appeal of PSO. It is grindy as hell, boring combat, and repetitive. Let's run this one mission or spawn 300 times to get a single drop over and over and over. No PSU was nothing like that if you wanted to farm something. I have never had to spend more than maybe 50 runs for a single weapon/unit/item/armor/board that I was looking for. Also PA/Bullets/Techs leveling was easy and took maybe a few days to get 41+ if that. Even without a PA boost I was able to get within a week all 36 of my PAs half of my Bullets and all my techs to 41+. While gaining AP at the same time.

This is all of course my opinion so no I am not attacking anyone's opinion.