PSO2 vs PSO

[Shinnomura]

What got me addicted to PSO was a combination of the difficulty, gameplay, and the equipment and how everything you acquired was useful, you had to think long and hard about changing equipment because even if you had a big stat boost in one area you normally lost something in return.

So far PSO2 feels like it progresses really fast, my character went straight from 1 star equipment to 4 star, and then straight to 7 from there. I always have equipment before I can use it and "rare" items don't seem rare at all, it just means high level.

In PSO items that were considered rare were actually rare and very few people had them. When you first got to go up a difficulty it was harder with the best available equipment than it was when you originally played through as a level 1 with basic equipment.

This isn't really a rant, just an observation of how it seems to compare in my opinion.
Does it feel this way for everyone or is it just me?

[otakun]

The MMO audience from back then has vastly changed since now. If you are looking for an old school MMO experience you aint going to find it in anything outside the "hardcore sandbox" style MMO which always keeps to a niche audience cause despite what people say they want its not what they actually play.

Back in PSO days the MMO audience was fine grinding one spot for days on end to get 1 piece of equipment and a level or two but the majority of the audience doesn't have the time to invest that in just one game anyone since there are so many in the market. People have jobs, family, and other hobbies they need to invest their time into and thus you get this more modern casual experience which I feel was popularized by WoW.

The Emergency Quest system that PSO2 has is the epitome of the casual MMO experience. Be here at this time, spend a half an hour or an hour a day and progress rapidly in that time. Get to late levels to get to the equipment progression states. So, a person can hop on for a half an hour then leave to go do other things they need to. Pretty simple and effective for the modern MMO audience.

Of course, there are exceptions and of course people have individual tastes but when your aim is to have millions of players in your game then you have to be open for a greater audience approval, not the minority of people who are looking for the more dedicated old school style of play which while can be more rewarding isn't really worth much when it comes to a company trying to make money and promote a game.

[Keilyn]

The MMO audience from back then has vastly changed since now. If you are looking for an old school MMO experience you aint going to find it in anything outside the "hardcore sandbox" style MMO which always keeps to a niche audience cause despite what people say they want its not what they actually play.

Back in PSO days the MMO audience was fine grinding one spot for days on end to get 1 piece of equipment and a level or two but the majority of the audience doesn't have the time to invest that in just one game anyone since there are so many in the market. People have jobs, family, and other hobbies they need to invest their time into and thus you get this more modern casual experience which I feel was popularized by WoW.

The Emergency Quest system that PSO2 has is the epitome of the casual MMO experience. Be here at this time, spend a half an hour or an hour a day and progress rapidly in that time. Get to late levels to get to the equipment progression states. So, a person can hop on for a half an hour then leave to go do other things they need to. Pretty simple and effective for the modern MMO audience.

Of course, there are exceptions and of course people have individual tastes but when your aim is to have millions of players in your game then you have to be open for a greater audience approval, not the minority of people who are looking for the more dedicated old school style of play which while can be more rewarding isn't really worth much when it comes to a company trying to make money and promote a game.

Great Argument,
that is until you realize that SoJ has never advertised PSO or PSO-2 as an MMORPG, but as an Online RPG...because with Korea nearby...SEGA would not dare to incur the wrath of true MMORPG nuts by making such idiotic declarations.

So the question is...
Why is it that PSO and PSO2 are not MMORPGs, but people think they are MMORPGs? An example comes from this site:

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/g...-Online-2.html

Where MMORPG.COM declares PSO-2 to be an MMORPG, even though SEGA does not say MMORPG in their advertisements. In short, laziness of people to not have to read, do research, or learn the way things work.

Now with that out of the way...
What is true hardcore MMORPG fan like?

Well for starters, you forgot to mention that the more things change, the more they stay the same...

True Hardcore players were PvP-Oriented Players, which is why the heavy PvP Oriented MMORPGs and their playerbases are the ones that truly survived. Only people who are clueless about MMORPGs dare to mention anything Hardcore without speaking about PvP.

Its true that not everyone plays PvP in games, and I also respect when Carebears talk about their issues as well....but at the very end of the day a lot of the grinders out there in MMOs do it because they want to have their killer gear in order to do as best as possible in their guilds in PvP or in the one meaningful thing to PvE... Guild Based Raid Content!!!

Which brings us to the EQs...
Really? Like.... Really Really Really!?

EQs are Scheduled Events, NOTHING MORE....
Guild Wars 2 and many Modern Day MMORPGs handle Events a lot better than PSO-2.

In old MMORPGs, we would spend hours waiting for getting a good 20 - 30 man Raid Group together to traverse a PvP Zone and be able to still stand and fight the RAID while also destroying enemy players. Those days were Glorious and Priceless. In PSO-2s So-called EVENT SYSTEM....

People wait for HOURS to get the Event that they WANT so they can run it for 30 minutes on Luck of the DRAW (if they pug) to be able to actually run and get something out of it, and then deal with RNG giving the player nothing. Half of the frustration of this game is that in order for the player to TRULY SUCCEED in PSO2, he or she has to REVOLVE HIS LIFE around the EQ schedules of the game...

Sorry, but that is FAR MORE INTRUSIVE than any REAL MMORPG out there...which I might add to make more CASUAL usually SPLIT PvE and PvP into their own servers and zones...

Finally,
What do MMORPG fans truly despise?

They hate it when Carebears try to define Hardcore like some crazy PvE experience in a non-MMORPG populated by Carebears who fail at Carebearing, which more than half the posts in PSO-W revolve around carebears failing to carebear.

A Definite Hatred would be Carebears attempting to prove that puny instanced 12-man boss fights are more thrilling than open-world 50 - 100 man World Boss Fights. ^_^

[otakun]

snip

Well, 90% of your whole argument here is semantics and pointless term defining that has nothing to do with the comparison of PSO to PSO2. Hope you had fun wasting your time on it though cause it was barely worth the skim over to see if you even had a proper point, which you didn't.

[Zysets]

Great Argument,
that is until you realize that SoJ has never advertised PSO or PSO-2 as an MMORPG, but as an Online RPG...because with Korea nearby...SEGA would not dare to incur the wrath of true MMORPG nuts by making such idiotic declarations.

Yeah, they don't call it an MMORPG because it's NOT an MMO, and never was, I don't get how Korea's MMO market would have any influence on what terms they would use to talk about their game.

[otakun]

Yeah, they don't call it an MMORPG because it's NOT an MMO, and never was, I don't get how Korea's MMO market would have any influence on what terms they would use to talk about their game.

Actually, it doesn't matter what they call it. Just because they say it's only an Online RPG doesn't make it not an MMO. People of the online community have flip flopped around for years about what makes a game an MMO or not but by the most popular modern definition of an MMORPG PSO2 would be considered an MMORPG. The now popular term for the kind of MMORPG you are thinking of fits that term is more commonly referred to as just being an Open World MMORPG. This change accord around the time of the popularization of Guild Wars 1. Where originally GW1 was releases as an Online RPG but then later was rebranded as an MMORPG.

[Keilyn]

Actually, it doesn't matter what they call it. Just because they say it's only an Online RPG doesn't make it not an MMO. People of the online community have flip flopped around for years about what makes a game an MMO or not but by the most popular modern definition of an MMORPG PSO2 would be considered an MMORPG. The now popular term for the kind of MMORPG you are thinking of fits that term is more commonly referred to as just being an Open World MMORPG. This change accord around the time of the popularization of Guild Wars 1. Where originally GW1 was releases as an Online RPG but then later was rebranded as an MMORPG.

Actually, that is exactly what it means...
Its the very same thing as saying that FF XIV and PSO-2 fall under the same category of games, which clearly they do not....

You are also wrong about Guild Wars 1.

When Guild Wars 1 came out, a lot of people did not know what to call it and so many defaulted to calling any Online RPG an MMORPG. However, Guild Wars launched and people were pissed about the instanced, non-persistent world. ArenaNet then claimed that they drew inspirations from many games in designing the game... One of them was a game called Phantasy Star Online. Maybe you've heard of it?

They proceeded to create their own genre, CORPG meaning Cooperative Online Role Playing Game, which was marked by blending Action Game elements with RPG elements into a game. The focus of the game would be for smaller groups of players to work together in instanced environments....sound familiar?

Guild Wars 1 also had the same Variable Gear System that PSO had where the same weapon can drop, with different stats and players would look for the weapons with the right prefix and suffix in its name.

In fact I used to Joke saying

"I am wielding a Giant Middle Finger of Fortitude" when entering PvP areas when everyone would flash their equipment....


Related to the Genre Declaration:
From Wikipedia (which has a reference to Arenanet on the bottom)

Guild Wars is the first in a series of Guild Wars, a game that merges the Action RPG and the role-playing video game genres into one, with competition in both the player versus player (in random matches, teams, tournaments, or guild battles), and player versus environment (in missions, quests, or area exploration) forms. The developers call this blend a CORPG, short for competitive online role-playing game. Important goals of the game are both to minimize the amount of repetitive actions a player has to perform to become a respectable force in the gaming world (called grind), and also to minimize a player's dependency on game items to stay competitive. These are two goals that set the game apart from most MMORPG's, where one hardcore player will gain major advantages when competing against another more casual gamer simply from having played the game more and found better items. In Guild Wars, the advantages in battle will instead come from how well a player picks and uses the character's 8 skills (from a library of hundreds), an art that is hard to master. The game is different from most MMORPG's in that it did not have any additional recurring fees, but bases revenue on standalone game expansions, or "campaigns" (in addition to microtransactions). This structure was discontinued with Eye of the North, which was a traditional expansion pack that required one of the three standalone campaigns. ArenaNet stated that this was because they felt that this format was restricting their ability to add new game mechanics and balance the overwhelming number of skills introduced with each title, and decided to begin work on Guild Wars 2 to address these issues (with Eye of the North bridging the gap between Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2).

[Shinnomura]

I see, that makes sense.
I would absolutely love the emergency quest system of it wasn't so easy.

Even games that have boasted about being super hard do their best to make it easy for everyone. There was a game I was excited about because it said it had permadeath. Turns out you can pay for your revival with your inventory and even if you do die and lose the character you don't lose your levels for what your new character can equip.

[TheLadyRena]

PSO1 worked very hard for all 'rare' weapons to feel unique - or at least like, not trashy and thrown together - whereas PSO2 plays more along the lines of PSU - several "rare" weapons are just upgrades to nonrare weapons. Like ALL rare weapons are just upgrades, but in PSU and PSO2 it is sometimes literally the same weapon with more sparkles or some shit.

However, to say that in PSO, rare meant rare and few people had them...that's just not true.

Certain very rare weapons might've been something "few people had" when you looked at the size of the playerbase - TJS comes to mind - but overall, that same size of playerbase led to plenty of people obtaining those. While it wasn't necessarily likely you'd party with one of them, it's not like you never saw them around.

In PSO2, we have the option of viewing the equipment of total strangers in the lob, which makes rare weapons seem...less rare. Because regardless of whether or not you party up with someone, you can check out their gear.

PSO1 vs PSO2 difficulty scaling is just a matter of different standards. In PSO1, it was designed so that it was a bad idea to solo because it would be very difficult to overcome the HP and attack stats of the monsters you'd face. Playing the game Forest-to-Falz style was something you did after grinding, and preferably with a party. Simply starting in Forest and expecting to even reach Caves on your first go from lv1 was difficult, simply due to Dragon's stats.

PSO2 doesn't have that. You're free to solo your way through all the Free Explore unlocks.

However, I defy you to find a way to make it so that every class we currently have had PSO1-style difficulty in advancing from Forest to Vol Caves to Desert and so on.

PSO1 had a bunch of classes that early on fell in to the same style of gameplay: Hit things with a Saber and shoot them with a Handgun. Hunters did this by default, and would equip a Sword asap; Rangers too, but with Rifles; and Forces who tried to rely on magic to kill swiftly found themselves running out of TP.

In PSO2, you regen PP just by waiting around, and you can do it faster by smacking something. The combat mechanics in play do not allow for PSO1-style difficulty advancement.

PSO2 is an overall easier game than PSO1, I think, but to paint that as purely a bad thing is to just flat ignore why it's easier, which are just the demands of the present day.

PSO2 in general shares a lot more with PSU than it does with PSO1. If you're wondering why X thing is the way it is, try looking at PSU first.

[Shinnomura]

I'm not meaning to state t as a purely negative thing, but as you said since psu it has been that way and I personally disliked that change. I'm saying that I alone didn't find it as fun, not that it's a worse game, since other people like it that way.