ArcheAge: The wait is almost over
In this Critique I’ll do my best to overview what I believe are the most important aspects of this game, however these are in no particular order. Like all MMOs there is a lot to cover so let’s get down to it!
The launch: ArcheAge is the newest free to play MMO by XLGames and is being localized in the west by Trion creators of Rift. Let’s get the biggest elephant out of the room before I begin. The launch of this game was by all means terrible. The wait time during the first week was over 8 hours. By the time you did get in, you were met with spammers clogging up the chat and bots. To top it off, server latency made the combat feel sluggish and unresponsive.
Now they have started taking steps to fix these issues by adding three new servers and lowering the amount of time players are afk. They also started performing daily restarts of the servers to flush out the spammers and what not.
As of the time of writing, I can say this has helped and wait times have significantly lowered to about an hour but in my opinion I believe they lost a lot of potential players and the game may suffer down the road because of such a botched launch.
Questing: This is probably ArcheAge’s weakest link. The questing is pretty generic and consists of a block of text followed by “collect 7 of these” or “kill 12 of those” with a cut scene peppered in every once in awhile, however that’s not to say they don’t do a few things differently.
They put in place an overachieve/underachieve system that helps make the questing bit more bearable. Basically if you hate a quest you can just do a bit of it and turn it in for a smaller reward conversely if you find one that tickles your fancy you can overachieve it by killing/collecting more than needed for bonus experience and currency.
Another thing they do right is giving you access to a mount pretty early on. Around level 5 you get a quest to raise your own mount and name it if you wish. Around level 11 you are given a glider ( a flying mount of sorts). These together help make the quest grind more enjoyable.
Labor Points: There are a few currencies in ArchAge but this one is by far the most important. LP, as it’s known in game, is needed to perform most actions such as mining and creating items even collecting items from the auction house. They are gained passively just by being online however patrons gain a small amount even while offline. This may seem like just a footnote but I believed it important enough to highlight.
Combat: Once again they use a tried and true method with combat. This is your classic tab target /hotkey but like questing. They change it up a bit to make it more enjoyable with the combo system.
Simply put, the combo system helps you chain your abilities together to make the combat more fluid and feel impactful. It’s great to try out different skill trees to see what can be chained together. You can get some interesting effects going such as lighting someone on fire then using a bubble trap to send them far into the air. Once they have reached the top, they are sent plummeting to the ground taking massive damage.
Classes: While this would have fit into the combat section of this critique, I feel this is deserving of its own little spot as it’s one of my favorite parts of this game because of how interesting the concept is.
Basically, the player chooses their first skill tree when making their character. Then the player gets the option to pick another skill tree at level 5 and again at level 10 creating their own class out of dozens of possibilities. This allows players to mix and match, creating a class that suits their play style (like a plate wearing rogue shooting magic missiles with the occasional arrow shots thrown in).
The game has a total of ten skill trees that fill most MMO class archetypes (although pet tamers seem to be missing). Each of which is fleshed out with no filler choices added leaving behind meaningful skill progression because the player only has so many points to put in making each one matter. This means even if two people are the same class, they can chose different skills and end up with two different setups making each encounter with a player unique.
The cherry on top is you can reset your skill points whenever you want and completely change your class simply by going to a certain statue and changing them out. This means you really only need one character.
Player vs. Player: This is what first drew me into the game. Unlike most MMOs, PVP seems to be out the forefront of this game driving awesome player interactions… well at least the open world portion of it.
While there is some structured PvP in the form of arena matches, I personally have not tried them but I believe it’s the standard one vs. one all the way up to five vs. five earning you HonorP (PvP currency) and titles. I personally don’t find that as interesting as fighting in the open world.
Now on to the good stuff: This game has two opposing factions with an optional pirate faction that anyone can join allowing for some pretty intense faction combat. What I really find interesting is the addition of same faction player killing (for example; I don’t like the guild someone is in I can go out of my way to kill them). This gives the game a DayZ type feel of distrusting people even on your own side, hell maybe even in your own guild.
The world PvP really starts around level 30 when the player is thrust into a conflict zone and from then on its gloves off. Although there are safe zones and peace times in zones, which does not always guarantee your safety. This makes guilds and alliances very valuable. There’s nothing like having few buddies get your back while making a trade run for some more gold.
While ganking same faction players is possible it’s not without consequences. If a player has high enough criminal points they are sent to jail on their next death by another player. Once teleported, players are given a choice to live out their sentence or be judged by a jury of their peers to plead their case in hopes to be found innocent. However, if they are not swayed, the player can get hit with a max sentence. The higher the crime points, the longer the jail time. Once in jail there are some activities to pass the time or you can try to escape from jail!
Player vs. Environment: Those interested in raiding, specifically dungeons and raids, might be disappointed. At the time of writing there are only a handful of dungeons and a couple of raids making the raiding scene pretty much nonexistent. There are some world bosses that may help fill the void but overall it’s seriously lacking.
If raiding isn’t your thing, try your hand at farming. Granted this is only for patrons but that doesn’t stop F2P players from creating illegal farms or work on some of the 21 professions (personally I love fishing).
Free to Play: The F2P model seems pretty fair overall having only a few features blocked out. These features include owning a house/farm ,not being able to sell on the auction house , and a reduced amount of labor points earned online. F2P players cannot earn labor points offline.
All of those negatives aside, free players can still reach max level PvP to their hearts content. F2P players also have access to the dungeons and crafting (though admittedly much tougher with the labor points given). Free players have the ability to build their own boat and sail the open seas to be the pirate/mercenary/merchant they always wanted to be.
The game does have a cash shop filled with the general costumes, pets, and trinkets you’d expect of a cash shop. However there is one item that caused some concern called workers compensation. Workers compensation can give you 1,000 labor points every 12 hours but to me it doesn’t give any combat advantage. While on the border of being bad it seems rather negligible given my next point.
Everything available in the cash shop can be bought with in game currency on the auction. This includes monthly subscription if the player who purchased it decides to sell it. This makes it rather easy to obtain patron status. Acquiring the gold needed only took me about a week (granted prices may change over the course of the game).
TL;DR: I can go on for quite some time and I’ve covered only the surface. This game is beautiful and great for anyone who loves open world PvP. This game is also great for players who enjoy exploration and crafters. While it may have its issues with servers, bots, and needs some quality of life changes, I feel overall I can see myself playing this for quite some time. ArcheAge has a lot of potential and is worth trying.
