Warning; Mindless rant/impressions/feelings.
I played the beta with a friend most of the weekend. We reached around lvl 16 I think, and I levelled weapon crafting to level 12. We've tried many as a duo within the past few years, such as TOR, TERA, GW2, WoW, Aion with varying results, more often that not it ends with one or both of us getting bored fairly quickly, or just rampaging through the game mindlessly to endgame having done TERA, GW2, and TOR in a week (non-game time). My friend played 1.0 and it's the only game I think he ever capped in since he played vanilla WoW years before. We have messed around in the previous betas just rushing through.
We've been enjoying our time, and fell into a pace of just jollying along to get as far as we can, I mean we could fly through this game if we wanted to... but we didn't, and not because of any agreed decision. The game is different somehow, I mean sure you could generalise or be cynical enough to make the game seem like World Republic of Guild Realm, and I'm certain there'll be a usual wave of the guilds full of people with no attention span getting to max level in a week letting us know there isn't enough endgame for their special little pebbles before they jump to whatever dribble catches their eye next, but it's a genuinely fun game to be honest.
The game is just well crafted. Quite a number of times we noticed small details that improved on other MMORPGs with things as simple as starting with max bags, and no looting - basically Yoshida doesn't do bullshit manifestos telling us how good it is, he has clearly played these games and changed things he didn't like. Did I mention the humour? We've been skipping all the quest text and yet still have been taking our time to appreciate stuff, I mean actively want to read quest text in this game, so much so that I'm skipping it to avoid spoiling it - never happened before, and I'm not talking some sad TOR excuse to go kill 50 of these dudes, they make it funny, like 'Go kill some of these animals who are shitting in the water supply', and you'll only ever need a handful and you're done. I soloed TERA/TOR so I know how quickly 'kill X of these' escalates into mind numbing bullshit.
Crafting. We crafted. We enjoyed crafting.... which was new. It's straight forward simple but has enough quirks to make it fun, we could see ourselves levelling crafting when the full game releases - never ever thought that before.
Not sure what else to say really, we've had fun like sincerely enjoying piece by piece. Previous games more or less boiled down to 'we're gonna powerlevel this shit to endgame where we can start to have fun', more or less deluding ourselves to the fact we were chasing the carrot per usual in hope of there being something.
What makes this game different? We're suspecting that it's the controller, dem legacy controls... it's just so relaxing, and being in that state of mind fully allows you to appreciate the loveable world you're adventuring in, in other games I didn't give a shit to be honest, they were just hurdles you hopped over and never went back to. 'But you can't do that super 12 skill rotation on your controller bro!' - I don't give a flying fuck, nobody ever really enjoyed spamming those hotkeys all day. The slowish global cooldown may also play a major factor as you can you never get into a the steamroll of thoughts like 'DIS SKILL, DEN DAT, NOW DIS, AND DIS', you know how it goes.
PvP? I hope this game NEVER implements PvP. This genre is just not suited to it, you just cannot balance it, it's a waste of resources, attracts a mostly annoying noisy bunch, and only ends up getting a gear treadmill to cover the fact that it's not balanced. Every other MMORPG I ever played, I did so to reach endgame and kill some folks in some casual pvp, but not this one. The PvE has been enjoyable for me.
We've only touched the surface at this stage, but I feel pretty good about the game just from the overall approach they're taken, there's much more to this game for us than just zones with quest hubs to waste your time. Even if we did stop playing I think we would both agree that we sincerely enjoyed our time, which I really couldn't say about the other stuff, even from their betas.
Controller + Legacy Controls, do it. If you're not, then you're playing this game wrong. #realTalk
Translated by Soukyuu.
