Friday, 22 January 2010

• R.I.P. North American Gurhal System

  

  So after a [comparitively] short run of existance, the North American/European servers for Phantasy Star Universe [on the PC and PS2] are officially being shut down in about 2 months. I'm kinda saddened to know this, considering how much I love PSU [and I do love PSU], but I almost feel as if it's the right thing to do, considering the lack of players on the game. I hope they don't actually believe the whole, "We're dropping the servers so we can pursue future titles in the series," bullshit, considering it's the our servers getting cut, and not the Japanese servers, where the games would be made? But whatever.

  As much as I will always see Phantasy Star Universe as one of my favourite games, there were a couple of problems with it; not so much with the gameplay itself, but with how the servers were handled by the company [and how the community had heavilty influenced what happened to them].

  1. Pipeline System of Content Delivery
  You know what Sonic Team? I don't think having, "Everything," right away is the way to go, atleast in the way fans of PSO wanted it. I mean, admittedly, PSO, the level cap was level 200 right away and all stages available from the get go, but let's be honest people [because it's hard for most people to be honest when it comes to feelings about the Phantasy Star series] there were only 8 stages in PSO, and having it all available from the get-go was very limiting [almost ironically, really]. I think Sonic Team had the right idea with PSU by releasing stages and, in the very early days, planets, and outfits and missions and new stuff in update form. Yeah, maybe it was like dragging out the lifespan of the game, but I think it was great. They'd release a new mission and everyones hotspot would be wherever that new mission was, for a small time atleast, and it always had a feeling of community. In PSO, it didn't work that way. And, the level caps... I mean, even if they never had the level cap reach level 200 at any point in the PC/PS2 servers lifespan, I never had enough time in the game to ever reach the current ingame cap. It seems like the people who complained the most about the level caps went out of their way to reach it, and when they released the next 10 levels, they'd take a whole weekend and do nothing but grind those 10 new levels, reach the new cap, and just bitch and moan about there being nothing to do. Of course there's going to be nothing to do when you do everything in the first 72 hours, not to mention by rushing it. The problem with this system was how slowly everything was delivered, especially on the North American side. At the point of cutting off the servers lifeline, I believe we are atleast a year behind the Japanese servers updates, and that is simply ridiculous. The idea wasn't wrong, but the way it was handled was.

  2. Balance
  
  In the beginning, there was only 3 classes; Hunters, Rangers and Forces. Now, everyone knew the advanced classes were coming, since their titles was in the game data and what have you, but originally it was just the 3 classes. At first, forces were seen as overpowered. They had the support, they had the, "Big numbers," while staying in the back, protecting their frail elven bodies, but they never really had the best DPS going. They had big numbers, but their most important role was support. Everybody played force terribly back then. They still do now! Anyways, at that point I don't think it was a matter of buffing the other 2 classes, but simply nerfing the force class horribly. With that, came the time of the rangers being the best in the game. Come the expansion, with a system that allowed you to force critical hits, and slicers, a, "Melee," weapon that was in all honesty a ranged weapon, hunters became the strongest and stayed there. I understand Sonic Team. Balance is a difficult thing. Especially with a fanbase bitching and moaning at every opportunity. Because every person wants balance; just not at the cost of whatever class they are playing losing their abilities. Everyone is selfish and it's hard to work under those conditions. So they essentially continued to just keep making each class stronger and stronger, and the enemies stayed where they were, making the game easier and easier. Which segues nicely into my next point...

  3. Game Difficulty [or lack thereof]
  At one point, there was a creature in the game most feared throughout the Gurhalian system, and continuesly besting it without suffering a KO was considered an accomplishment. I am talking about PSU v1s Jarba. It was melee resistant, bullet resistant, it had a weakness to the weakest type of technics in the game [ice] and would also throw back at you an ice technic if you were close to it, freezing you and allowing you to get clobbered, or if you were at a distance, a dark technic that could automatically kill you [if the damage caused by it didn't kill you outright]. I'm not quite sure at what point Jarbas lost their edge, either they stripped them of their melee and/or bullet resistances, or they suffered from what every enemy suffered from in problem #2 [in the, every class getting stronger while all enemies just stayed the same] but either way, Jarbas weren't so tough. And they never really made enemies that were all super powerful to counterbalance the powering up of the classes. You could still be ganged up on, and KOed/slaughtered in that way, but with Scape Dolls/Moon Atomizers readily available to revive you at no cost to your EXP or final mission rank, there was really no problem with dying. I don't really understand people saying the game is easy, however, but only on the basis of, what are we judging as difficulty in this type of game? Considering it's a strange mix between standard RPG and MMORPG [but definately not one or the other] what constitutes as hard? If you're overlevelled, everything is going to be easy. If you're underlevelled, you could partner up with someone overlevelled and get a free ride. Difficulty seems purely situation dependant, but I wish whenever anyone would say, "PSU is easy," would remember that they weren't always at the level cap [read problem #1].

  4. Reskins [Everything]
  This isn't really an issue with the online itself, but more how they modeled the games enemies; you'll be hard pressed to find a real time combat RPG that doesn't have, atleast somewhere, reskinned enemies. PSO was not innocent of this fact, in fact, I'm sure they may have been more guilty of it, as far as standard enemies goes. But not only were standard enemies reskinned. But so were bosses. And stages. It was kind of ridiculous.

  I'm not sure I have a singular problem with the gameplay itself, really. I loved the Photon Arts system, I really enjoyed levelling up essentially everything that was attached to your character [character level, job level, photon art level], gameplay was fast paced and... well. It's excellent, really. And although I know I'm playing the game now on the XBox 360 with a new gang of characters [well, I recreated Nevando anyways] I'm certainly going to miss the crazy antics that happened on the PC server. From January 29th, onward, anyone with an account, active or not, will be able to play the game for free, so even though I do have my 360 account, I do plan to log on, maybe take a couple snapshots and potentially get a group snapshot together with Jason, Kyle and Gaz before they cut the plug on the server in its entirety. For those interesting in knowing that other people still kinda acknowledge PSUs existance on Facebook, there is this group, but I created my own group that was more dedicated to the good times and hilarity that happened on the PC server of PSU.

  

  May the Holy Light Guide You!
  RIP NA PSU: October 24, 2006 - March 31, 2010

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