PSO2 Veterans who were there at the 2012 launch, please compare the NGS launch.

[SuKKrl]

There were so many redundant or weak PAs that were hyper specific in their usage. If anything I think having less PAs ADDS depth because you get to be more nuanced about how they're used.

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.

pso2 also started with no just atk, i cant remember when they finally put it in though.

Ranger and Force had just attacks since alpha 2. Hunter since the first one.

i started in the beginning of EP2 right when it became F2P

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.

[silo1991]

Game was always F2P. It pretty much inherited it from late PSU:AotI.

during EP1 you had to pay for play, well thats what i remember back in 2012

[ArcaneTechs]

during EP1 you had to pay for play, well thats what i remember back in 2012

PSO2 from the start was always F2P, at no point did they require you to pay to play and the devs specifically said during an interview around the games release that the plan had intended the F2P format since they started making the game. This is around the same time where the trend of F2P games were releasing. You're remembering wrong

[SuKKrl]

during EP1 you had to pay for play, well thats what i remember back in 2012

There were plenty of players in the group I was in at launch that weren't paying. To go even further, game had premium since beta (so no sub, only premium), and a lot of foreign daily players couldn't spend in it even if they wanted to due to the payment system not working properly with a lot of cards for a lot of countries (Amex was the overall safe bet until it was axed and the other option was marked-up prepaid webmoney cards).

Also, as ArcaneTechs mentioned, devs did announce it was f2p before launch and mentioned other games that were out at the time and PSU's late model as the reason for that.

[Dimate]

Optimal has little to do with all this though. Player choice can and will be incorrect or suboptimal yet still satisfying, because there's not a huge red FAIL message on the screen whenever that happens(wait, is that why people disliked JAs? Uh.), and these are fast games. Again the balancing was so bad at first that it kinda was that obvious, but yeah. Most PAs can be used out of the blue if you choose to; it's also not as bad as you say, some of them are setup dependent but it's definitely not the majority. And arguably, yes, NGS does the optimization for you, I agree. I disagree that it's a good thing.

I'm having a hard time picturing this scenario to be satisfying in any way. Pounding the ground for flavor when the enemy is not there, using slow attacks against a fast enemy, seeing the wrong numbers pop up because the damage notation for that PA is straight up inferior. At this point you're just pushing random lit up buttons looking for ... satisfaction, or perhaps variety. If PSO2 was a game where there are many interchangeable, equally potent attacks, you'd be right, but very few weapons had that luxury (and most of them were successors). The huge red FAIL message is real, because every Hatred pug that times out at Elementless Sodam surely has a few persons thinking they would be fine doing whatever. This person barely made floor 100 with 15 seconds to spare, I don't think they would have time to appreciate the satisfaction of not doing Vinto. And people frequently express disdain toward players who only show up to have their own fun with Million Storm and Shift Kugel as well.

I can only hope some Rangers DO find it satisfying to put Weak Bullet on enemies, at least. The amount of NGS Rangers who announce their presence halfway into the fight is a little disconcerting.

NGS does the optimization for you, but only for the plunge and dash attacks. Accel Drive, a gap closer that needs to be primed using another PA, is not as "optimized" as something like Raging Waltz which can be used whenever. Deadly Circle and Spiral Drive became trickier to use because they either have a long windup during which the target can back away, or no longer come with Quick Take, and require you to maintain and look out for a dim particle effect around your character. I'm sure a person who appreciates depth would notice these are less autopilot friendly than before where you just needed to tap a button or always have the nuke ready to use after landing a couple PAs.

Don't get me wrong, I also don't want a repeat of the game design where you have too few things to do, and even fewer right things to do, so that people end up just spamming the bestest thing all the time anyway. That's why it's necessary to alleviate some moves from being plain photon arts. Weapons now have room for bigger movesets while using the same number of buttons as before. It didn't fix the issue for every weapon - some of them still look downright idiotic - but it's as much of an important set up for what's to come as the jump from 2 button to 3 button.

You're going to have a really hard time to make me agree that something like Sword 5 is even close to versatile

Using two different PAs puts you at one attack away from the 5th hit, using two similar PAs puts you at two. If you're already in the middle of a normal combo (because of PP problems, etc.) you might as well get the whole thing out, but this is the less likely scenario. Using two PAs to skip to the big normal hit is just what many classes did in PSO2 in the first place, they just improved the reward here.

[the_importer_]

Great reading in general. In short, OG PSO2 had more in the beginning, but NGS has the better gameplay.

So far, the things I don't like about NGS:

-It's a bit soulless. What they are offering is very generic and repetitive. Hell, it's Sonic's 30th bday and only the OG PSO2 has a lobby for it.

-No My Room. At the minimum, they should have made a copy of you current layout of OG PSO2 in NGS

-They want to control the price of some of the AC stuff you win. On the Global version, I'm stuck with an item that can't be sold under 500K because there's like 250+ of them up for sale!! If this was OG PSO2, I would drop the price to 300K or something.

-We're sharing the Chat Shortcuts and Fashion with both games, this should be separate.

-Wish we could have more preferences in our storage like: The default box when you open and being able to hide things you can't use from the other game.

-We're able to see people chatting from miles away, this was not a problem in OG PSO2

-Speaking of which, the Global version has a serious bot spam issue. They should prevent people from sending public chats until they complete certain tasks in the game to keep these parasites out!

[Cyclon]

I'm not sure why you're stuck on gears. Most of them were non-mehcanics that you only interacted with if you messed up anyway.

I'd only put T.machineguns gear under that category. Arguably Knuckles as well, though it being unusable in the air was an additional thing to play around. And I'm stuck on them because they made melee more involved and individual weapons more unique. Granted Hunter gear boost simplified things quite a bit, though it wasn't around from the start.
Since I've been on the defense for a minute, tell me, would you be strictly against the idea of gears in NGS at the moment?

Deciding to commit to the 5 hit normal sword combo over doing something else is in and of itself a choice. Like, I'm not sure what player agency you're talking about. If the idea of something being optimal isn't the issue it's not like you can't play partisan without trying to aim for counters, and it's not like you don't have the choice of whether to only do the first half of a PA or not. You have choices and agency, I don't understand why tying it to mechanics other than gears (which, again, most of which were non-mechanics), and PAs is taking player agency away, it just means you have to push a different combination of buttons.

I don't really see what's so complicated about it. On one side, if you only have to take decisions every 3 seconds as opposed to every 1, there's less player agency. On the other, if everything is tied to a path or a stance of some kind, there's less flexibility, and thus ultimately less player agency. Which doesn't meant there's none. I'm saying there's less.

-----------------------

I'm having a hard time picturing this scenario to be satisfying in any way. Pounding the ground for flavor when the enemy is not there, using slow attacks against a fast enemy, seeing the wrong numbers pop up because the damage notation for that PA is straight up inferior. At this point you're just pushing random lit up buttons looking for ... satisfaction, or perhaps variety. If PSO2 was a game where there are many interchangeable, equally potent attacks, you'd be right, but very few weapons had that luxury (and most of them were successors). The huge red FAIL message is real, because every Hatred pug that times out at Elementless Sodam surely has a few persons thinking they would be fine doing whatever. This person barely made floor 100 with 15 seconds to spare, I don't think they would have time to appreciate the satisfaction of not doing Vinto. And people frequently express disdain toward players who only show up to have their own fun with Million Storm and Shift Kugel as well.

Now you're jumping to the extreme opposite for no reason, bad pugs are primarily a result of gear, which I never spoke of; equipment is cold hard numbers, there's very little meaningful player choice there, in either PSO2 or NGS. But that's neither here nor there, you're not really addressing the heart of my argument here. I will say that post-rebalancing(in 2016 I believe?), most PAs were viable to an extent(one merely needs to look at dps charts on the swiki to see that). Before that, it was a mess, no denying it.

NGS does the optimization for you, but only for the plunge and dash attacks. Accel Drive, a gap closer that needs to be primed using another PA, is not as "optimized" as something like Raging Waltz which can be used whenever. Deadly Circle and Spiral Drive became trickier to use because they either have a long windup during which the target can back away, or no longer come with Quick Take, and require you to maintain and look out for a dim particle effect around your character. I'm sure a person who appreciates depth would notice these are less autopilot friendly than before where you just needed to tap a button or always have the nuke ready to use after landing a couple PAs.

Well optimization is obviously distinct from one game to the other. The point was, you will use Accel Drive optimally more often than Raging Waltz back in PSO2, simply because there's less room for player input and thus mistakes. You're overselling Deadly circle and something tells me the hitbox is quite a bit wider(especially vs PSO2's uncharged), and Quick take I have nothing against(though come on, bringing up gap closing, when NGS has superdash? Really?), I wish there was more stuff like it. Double Saber is probably the most fun melee weapon in NGS currently, in my opinion.

Don't get me wrong, I also don't want a repeat of the game design where you have too few things to do, and even fewer right things to do, so that people end up just spamming the bestest thing all the time anyway. That's why it's necessary to alleviate some moves from being plain photon arts. Weapons now have room for bigger movesets while using the same number of buttons as before. It didn't fix the issue for every weapon - some of them still look downright idiotic - but it's as much of an important set up for what's to come as the jump from 2 button to 3 button.

Using two different PAs puts you at one attack away from the 5th hit, using two similar PAs puts you at two. If you're already in the middle of a normal combo (because of PP problems, etc.) you might as well get the whole thing out, but this is the less likely scenario. Using two PAs to skip to the big normal hit is just what many classes did in PSO2 in the first place, they just improved the reward here.

I don't necessarily disagree that introducing other direct sources of damage than our PP bar is bad, but not just any replacement will work, and I don't like what they picked.

And yes, the Arts skip talents are welcomed, but they're still really not that dynamic, especially with how few PAs we have, and a bit specific when so many weapons don't get a fifth normal, sometimes not even a fourth. Regardless, it's still restrictive design. You actually put it into words quite well, indirectly; in many places, they took what "everyone was doing" and made it "the one thing everyone can do". Yeah well that sucks. Maybe you lost nothing in the transition, but I didn't.

------------------

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).

Just a nod but, NGS having the Sonic problem(I mean, one of them) is... really weird.

[echofaith]

Great reading in general. In short, OG PSO2 had more in the beginning, but NGS has the better gameplay.

So far, the things I don't like about NGS:

-It's a bit soulless. What they are offering is very generic and repetitive. Hell, it's Sonic's 30th bday and only the OG PSO2 has a lobby for it.

-No My Room. At the minimum, they should have made a copy of you current layout of OG PSO2 in NGS

-They want to control the price of some of the AC stuff you win. On the Global version, I'm stuck with an item that can't be sold under 500K because there's like 250+ of them up for sale!! If this was OG PSO2, I would drop the price to 300K or something.

-We're sharing the Chat Shortcuts and Fashion with both games, this should be separate.

-Wish we could have more preferences in our storage like: The default box when you open and being able to hide things you can't use from the other game.

-We're able to see people chatting from miles away, this was not a problem in OG PSO2

-Speaking of which, the Global version has a serious bot spam issue. They should prevent people from sending public chats until they complete certain tasks in the game to keep these parasites out!

Well no wonder I saw like 3 pages of an item for 500k thinking that people were greedy and not wanting to lower the price. I think this is the scummiest stuff they have done since I started playing PSO2 /:

[Kondibon]

Since I've been on the defense for a minute, tell me, would you be strictly against the idea of gears in NGS at the moment?

No, but my point was kind of that those mechanics either got rolled into other aspects of the gameplay, or replaced with something more engaging. For a lot of the weapons, the gear was basically a binary, or was maintained by doing what you were doing anyway. I do think they need to add UI elements for a lot of stuff in NGS though.

Sword gear you either had it at max or sword was just bad, and you just maintained it by hitting things, which is what you wanted to be doing anyway.

Partisan gear added the aspect of needing to specifically wait out flourishes for it or hold the guard, but what it actually did was kinda boring to be tied to a resource, since, for most of the game it was just an AoE increase to your PAs.

WL Gear just meant you had to work a non-grab PAs into your rotation every once in a while, I really prefer the current implementation of using the PAs and weapon action to react to what's happening instead.

Knuckle gear was basically always on, even before the skill that doubled its gear gain. You didn't interact with it, it just made you attack faster for attacking... which is what you wanted to be doing. It didn't even take long to build.

Dagger gear were basically a damage bonus for being in the air, which, honestly doesn't even need to be a gear, but you wouldn't really notice it when it was there in terms of how you played other than brief moment you would build it up. Once it was up you didn't need to do anything to maintain it other than what the weapons were designed to encourage you to do already, stay in the air.

DS Gear was just a mess in general, needing to stop what you were doing constantly to maintain the tornado. They added some PAs that interacted with it, and the ring later that made it automatic, but it was more tedious than engaging in its original implementation. DS in NGS skips to the automatic tornado part and instead makes it something you build up to use for a pay out at your own leasure. It's functionally a gear in every way except the UI (which I do think is the biggest problem with them dropping gears as a concept entirely)

TMG Gear was another just doing more damage for doing damage. It had the gimmick of getting hit lowering it, and getting knocked down emptying it, but other classes had gimmicks like that too without it being tied to a weapon gear. Also, you know, not wanting to get hit being a universal thing. Again, the UI is the only thing important to it being a gear. Gunner in NGS maintains the desire to constantly be attacking by rewarding you for upkeeping chain for the attack speed buff. I have other issues with gunner though.

Wand gear was DoA. Granted Te was kind of a design mess from the start. It feels like it has a much more defined roll in NGS being a class that can buff people with the ability to build physical and elemental downs with the same weapon. But that's kinda beside the point.

Katana gear was good, since you actually interacted with it, but since we haven't seen braver yet, there's no reason it couldn't have a similar "build up to super mode" mechanic, they don't need to call it a gear.

Dual Blade Gear was one you used but it was basically just a currency for your rotation, you didn't really need to do anything complicated to maintain or use it.

JB gear was another good one, at least once Vinto came out and gave you a way to interact with it besides building it up. The current NGS DS is basically an elaboration on that to be honest.

Hero and phantom gears were basically just build ups to super modes with finishers, so I assume you wouldn't be counting them for this. I do wish we got something in that vein from from the talis and rifle skills though, they feel a little flaccid for how long they take to build up.

ET DS gear had a lot going on, but it seems like the general idea, minus the DR on getting hit, is built into what the current DS is anyway.

ET Wand and soaring blades were more super moves, which I like the idea of, but they didn't feel very gear like either.

Luster gear was also basically just a super move, however I do think something like voltage would be cool in NGS. Something like chain but instead of using it for burst you try to maintain it for as long as possible.
EDIT: Wait, no I'm dumb, Luster gear was actually one of my favorites because it was used for so many different things. There was actually something of a consideration about how and when you would use it sometimes. I forgot luster time was just an active skill, not tied to the gear.

I don't really see what's so complicated about it. On one side, if you only have to take decisions every 3 seconds as opposed to every 1, there's less player agency.

Well I just straight up disagree with that. All that means is the pacing is slower, which was a stated goal the devs have had from the start. Making decisions less often doesn't mean you're decisions are less impactful or meaningful.

On the other, if everything is tied to a path or a stance of some kind, there's less flexibility, and thus ultimately less player agency. Which doesn't meant there's none. I'm saying there's less.

I guess the thing is, I don't see how there's less flexibility when a lot of the things we're doing in NGS weren't even options in the original, especially if we're comparing them at launch. I guess if your point is just "there were more options, and more options = more player agency". But to me having more options is meaningless and shallow if those options aren't actually meaningful in and of themselves. I'm not saying I want less stuff, just that I don't want them giving us more for the sake of "variety", that could have just been tied to other mechanics or implemented into the gameplay styles of the classes and weapons.
The fact that not charging PAs and techs or only using the first half of PAs is even a valid strategic option is a step up from the "either you do the whole thing/charge it fully or it's not even worth doing" that a lot of stuff had. There was a lot of choices that didn't matter because one of the options was the right one and the other was just bad and added nothing. Outside of a few specific cases, I feel like every PA, Tech, and Skill in NGS has a use case, and I REALLY prefer that, especially as a baseline. I would rather them build up on a good baseline, and I feel NGS has a stronger baseline than the original PSO2 did.
The way subclasses and multi-weapons work also opens up a lot of options. Obviously there'll probably be meta stuff, but it feels a lot less strict in terms of doing weird combinations.

[Cyclon]

No, but my point was kind of that those mechanics either got rolled into other aspects of the gameplay, or replaced with something more engaging. For a lot of the weapons, the gear was basically a binary, or was maintained by doing what you were doing anyway. I do think they need to add UI elements for a lot of stuff in NGS though.

-Gear-

I'm not... going to address these one by one, this is not a rabbit hole we should get into imo. All I can say is that I disagree to some extent, in one way or another, with almost all of these. I don't really think there's anything in NGS that properly replaces those either, outside of Double Saber since it essentially still has its gear. Most weapons are exclusively about damage and PP management, with a few counters thrown in here and there. I disagree that this was the case in PSO2. I don't care for it to be named "gear", this is not the point. I want there to be more to the weapons, both in terms of how many things they can do, and how distinct they are from one another. I believe this was the point of the system, regardless on our disagreements on its success.

Well I just straight up disagree with that. All that means is the pacing is slower, which was a stated goal the devs have had from the start. Making decisions less often doesn't mean you're decisions are less impactful or meaningful.

True, but I think both games are relatively equal in terms of how meaningful individual decisions are, tbh. Which just leaves me with NGS having less of them.

I guess the thing is, I don't see how there's less flexibility when a lot of the things we're doing in NGS weren't even options in the original, especially if we're comparing them at launch. I guess if your point is just "there were more options, and more options = more player agency". But to me having more options is meaningless and shallow if those options aren't actually meaningful in and of themselves. I'm not saying I want less stuff, just that I don't want them giving us more for the sake of "variety", that could have just been tied to other mechanics or implemented into the gameplay styles of the classes and weapons.
The fact that not charging PAs and techs or only using the first half of PAs is even a valid strategic option is a step up from the "either you do the whole thing/charge it fully or it's not even worth doing" that a lot of stuff had. There was a lot of choices that didn't matter because one of the options was the right one and the other was just bad and added nothing. Outside of a few specific cases, I feel like every PA, Tech, and Skill in NGS has a use case, and I REALLY prefer that, especially as a baseline. I would rather them build up on a good baseline, and I feel NGS has a stronger baseline than the original PSO2 did.
The way subclasses and multi-weapons work also opens up a lot of options. Obviously there'll probably be meta stuff, but it feels a lot less strict in terms of doing weird combinations.

Options for options' sake is relatively pointless, yes, I don't think that's what OG PSO2 did though. The PA mechanical variety was honestly quite praiseworthy, to the point where you could probably delete half of them at random and still build something functional and interesting with whatever remained. Yes, they were originally very poorly balanced. But calling them shallow is honestly unfair, because it's not something they half-assed, and even from one weapon to every other, there were surprisingly few repeats considering the quantity.
I will agree that PSO2 at release, even without the balancing taken into account, had more worthless options than NGS does(mostly because of uncharged versions, but the point still stands). But it must be said that when you have very few of said options, meaningfulness isn't an accomplishment, it's a given. And I don't even think we should jump the gun on that one, as some tools in NGS do feel quite dominant to me, and others much less so.
My above point did imply some trimming of the fat in PSO2's case, but with it done, you're still left with a pretty large amount of, well, meaningful options, and unlike ~half of NGS', they could be used successfully in many situations.

There is more variety in class building in NGS at the moment, that much is true. If the past is anything to go by this won't stop people from all playing the same thing regardless nor someone to tell me it was "all worthless anyway" when I lament that it's gone in the next entry within the coming decade... but hey!