Well, five weeks in a row was pretty good. I’m going to have to take a break from this series until some time after the new year for reasons of not making my wife hate me over the holiday 
I plan on making my Florensia update some time next week and hope to resume regular posting for most of January.
Time was actually short this week. I spent a lot of time alternatively between work, a closed beta, and Borderlands. Lots of Borderlands. And some Dawn of War, come to think of it… but anyhow.
The game I had wanted to look at this week is Gatheryn. They’re nominally in “open” beta, but put testers under a clickthrough NDA. So… they go on the list with all of my other closed beta games of interest in stead.
After a lot of debate and consideration, I’ve decided to just go ahead and give Florensia a shot and be done with it.
Florensia looks like a pretty generic Asian sort of MMO. The Western publication of the game is handled by the same folks who’re publishing Ragnarok Online and Hello Kitty Online in english, so I figure it’s worth a look for that reason alone.
So I’ve actually got a game I want to report on this week. Holiday didn’t allow me to pick up a new F2P game and the first rule of Closed Beta is well, yeah. But Steam had an evil sale on like 300 games, so I buckled and snagged a few.
Fallen Earth is not free to play, and it is not in beta any more. But it was on sale for 50% off last week, so that – combined with the recent comments I’ve been reading on GamerDNA was good enough for me.
Well, that, and there were 15-day trial keys available from The Escapist last weekend. So… close enough 
I’d tried FE near the end of their beta cycle… and hated it. The controls were brittle and confusing. It was easy to inadvertently unwield your weapons, etc… and I died twice and never finished the intro. The experience was frustrating enough that I played the game for two hours before giving up on it entirely.
Thankfully, they’ve fixed a LOT since then. It’s playable. There are still some rough edges, but they’re manageable.
Unlike the previous games I’ve looked at, Fallen Earth is actually rated M (17+) for subject matter and language. I have not encountered anything overtly objectionable yet, and the violence is downright cartoonish for an M title these days, but it’s a harsh wilderness out there…
This might read a bit differently from my previous mmo-a-week reports because I didn’t actually take notes this time – I was too busy just playing the game Also, I played equally on two different machines, so my screenshots are in two different resolutions (some are full 1920×1080 HD behemoths), so be warned when you click.
Read the rest of this entry »
Sorry I was 9 minutes late according to blog clock, but I took my time sifting through and retaking screenshots. It’s still the Wednesday here in California though 
So this time around was rough picking a game. After a lot of internal debate, the deciding has been made.
Lunia Chronicles just launched this week and has some good things going for it, but it looks like another goofy footed wrist breaker in the vein of Dragonica and I’m still healing from week 1. But they have SLIME as an unlockable character class… No. I will resist. The lure of bashing heads as a baby slime is strong, but not strong enough. Maybe next month.
No, it had to be a traditional click-to-move Korean style MMO. After all, that’s what I said I’d be playing for this series and I’ve not done one yet. The strongest initial contender was Ether Saga Online in light of their recent parenting award. That’s enough news of interest to give the game a chance.
Other candidates were games I’d seen in banner ads this week… but after a bit of googling to see what gameplay looked like, this music video (to Usher’s “Yeah!”) was the deciding factor this time around. If the characters are that expressive in game, I can’t help but try. Ether Saga it is.
Well, there’s not much I really want to say here outside of a bit of an observation.
Since I stopped playing Alganon two weeks ago, they have sent me two emails.
They released a state-of-the-game article monday night to address a lot of their problems. To summarize it all as succinctly (and as snarkily) as possible:
Yeah, there are bugs, lots of bugs, but we’re actually actively patching things that should have been resolved before we declared open beta. We like crunch mode. Sleep is for mortals who plan ahead. We plan on “hitting” a magical launchable degree of quality before December, somehow.
We’ve finally fixed our billing system, so we can charge forners. Downloading the client works again.
We’re still in denial about our rip of WoW being a bad thing. We’re gamers writing a game for gamers, so clearly since we enjoy a bad copy of a polished product, all other “gamers” should too. We’re trying to copy as many features as humanly possible, regardless of the quality or ethics involved. People don’t complain about bugs, they complain about the “similarities” to “other games” they play. We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel or even compete with anything vaguely shaped like a wheel.
Our players who use the forums have drunk the kool-aid. We believe that they will brainwash others, but we don’t want to “steal” players from other games, honest. We’re not in it for the money. We’re all about the ART, man. Clearly we’re not rushing to market to start recouping some of our development costs.
We are totally the first “real” fantasy MMO to launch in two years. Warhammer and Conan don’t count. Runes of Magic and Aion don’t count either. Neither does anything else imported from Asia…
We love you, please don’t hate us for being derivative.
I wish Alganon well, the crazy fools. Really, I do. I just don’t envy the worker drones who’re tasked with making this pig up at the last minute. Surely the insanity isn’t rampant throughout the entire company… just the public facing elements, right? Right? Oh well.
p.s. This week’s report on Ether Saga Online is 2/3 finished. I’ll try to publish it before end of day.
When I was kicking off my research for this project, I read up a bit on Massively. One of the games they were talking about a good bit at the time was Alganon… and one item of particular interest was that they were launching open beta on Nov 11th. I figured that was sufficiently coincidental and added it to the calendar
I’m starting a day late (Nov 12th) because of aforementioned deadness on the 11th.