@DMKano I would never review a game under 4 unless it was completely unplayable. Astellia is largely playable, and it even has some good points to it. No doubt it could inevitably go free to play at some point, and in that way, it could be considered a cash grab, sure. Most of these "conversion" of eastern titles to the west are "cash grabs" in a way, and I find it interesting many of them start with a Buy to Play model, likely in hopes to break the stigma of launching a Free to Play title.
Keep in mind, my Bless review score was 5.5, and this is only marginally better than that, primarily due to the way combat is presented. It just didn't make sense in Bless.
As for end game, you're right, it's largely rehashed dungeons, most of which you've already worked your way through. Can't really fault them too much for that, there are a lot of games that don't even really have that in place, and this is essentially the same as what games like GW2 launched with. There are an ample number of dungeons though, and the community, as of right now, is pretty active in completing them.
@VicusEQ you're correct on some points, I didn't expand much on the combat, because it's largely the same as every other MMO on the market. The story, I will disagree with you on. Yes they have some cutscenes, most of them centered around dungeons. The vast majority of the story is delivered in quasi-cinematic story text. You're watching your characters, who have short voiceovers, as you scroll through text after text to obtain the quest. The story just isn't woven particularly well, and the only heroic feel you really get is when you're doing dungeon quests. Who doesn't like being the "hero that will save everything" but you're still fixing wagons and collecting feathers from the same kind of creatures from the first zone, when you're near the end of your journey.
@Jensyn ; Don't let the review sway you too much, try and enjoy it for what it is. In all honesty, the combat didn't pick up for me until the mid 20s on my mage. It seems the archer and warrior have a much easier go of things. Looking forward to your opinions!
The clarification is of course appreciated, but when almost half of the grading scale is reserved for games that are literally unplayable, how does that even work for those games? What defines a game as a 3 out of 10 as opposed to a 2 out of 10? Does a game have to be Big Rigs to get a 1? What makes one literally unplayable game worse than another literally unplayable game?
Also keep in mind Avalon hasnt launched yet and it is their version of GW2 world pvp. If Avalon is a success than i can see this game going for awhile.
Im playing it casually at level 44, most hardcore players hit max within 3 to 5 days it is easy to level. It is understandable now that some are idle because theyve gone through most of the content, but guess what all WoW classics content has been cleared aswell so i find that agruement of No Content hard to make.
One concern of mine is what DMKano brought up, that the content in Korea is stagnant.
All in all tho i cant take this game serious it is a good filler but its just that a filler.
I would never review a game under 4 unless it was completely unplayable. Astellia is largely playable, and it even has some good points to it. No doubt it could inevitably go free to play at some point, and in that way, it could be considered a cash grab, sure. Most of these "conversion" of eastern titles to the west are "cash grabs" in a way, and I find it interesting many of them start with a Buy to Play model, likely in hopes to break the stigma of launching a Free to Play title.
Keep in mind, my Bless review score was 5.5, and this is only marginally better than that, primarily due to the way combat is presented. It just didn't make sense in Bless.
As for end game, you're right, it's largely rehashed dungeons, most of which you've already worked your way through. Can't really fault them too much for that, there are a lot of games that don't even really have that in place, and this is essentially the same as what games like GW2 launched with. There are an ample number of dungeons though, and the community, as of right now, is pretty active in completing them.
The clarification is of course appreciated, but when almost half of the grading scale is reserved for games that are literally unplayable, how does that even work for those games? What defines a game as a 3 out of 10 as opposed to a 2 out of 10? Does a game have to be Big Rigs to get a 1? What makes one literally unplayable game worse than another literally unplayable game?
That's a fair question, but I believe there's still a good amount of wiggle room on that spectrum. Some games are unplayable in the sense that there are too many bugs to even get into the game. Some are games that are victims of poor planning. I had one particular title to review that revolved around a player lobby. The gameplay wasn't terrible, but because the game wasn't popular, I literally could not play it. I would sit in matchmaking for hours, never getting a game, and there was nothing apart from that single, simple arena.
There's a wide spectrum. I feel it's important to give every game a chance, in Astellia it just happens there is quite a bit of good. It's just... not great, and there are a lot of issues that prevent it from really capitalizing on the few things they actually do well.
Great write-up! I actually thought the game was beautiful as well, and have had a lot of moments where I had to stop and take a screenshot because of how lovely the lighting and scenery was. I just...wish the game itself was better. It's kind of underwhelming and I didn't find myself enjoying the combat at all. It's not an absolutely terrible game, but it's not a great one either. Just not my cup of tea!
It is a terrible game once you start end game dungeon grind - I guess you never made it to that point (which is a good thing)
If an MMORPG is good until the endgame, and then abruptly becomes terrible at the endgame, then that's a good game, unless the path to the endgame is very short. The entire notion of an endgame is that of course it's going to be awful.
Great write-up! I actually thought the game was beautiful as well, and have had a lot of moments where I had to stop and take a screenshot because of how lovely the lighting and scenery was. I just...wish the game itself was better. It's kind of underwhelming and I didn't find myself enjoying the combat at all. It's not an absolutely terrible game, but it's not a great one either. Just not my cup of tea!
It is a terrible game once you start end game dungeon grind - I guess you never made it to that point (which is a good thing)
If an MMORPG is good until the endgame, and then abruptly becomes terrible at the endgame, then that's a good game, unless the path to the endgame is very short. The entire notion of an endgame is that of course it's going to be awful.
You'd have a good point there except, in this case, there's nothing special about it during levelling either. It is a straight forward linear quest grind and the story is pretty terrible.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
I think that there was a lot of candy coating in this review. I wouldn't say the game was beautiful but I would good looking. Comparing the combat to Bless and saying Astellia is better is a real stretch. I think you are saying that because it use conventional key bindings which Bless did not use. The Mage in Bless was a far better play the the Mage in Astellia.
I try all games and I will play them with and open mind but after playing Astellia for a few night I really could play it anymore. The Story is well unforgettable becasue it's really not a story it's disjointed and it's so bad it gets lost in the side quests. One of the big problem with Astellia like most of these game are the to cutesy nature of the game. Sure I like cute but the "I think we should kill these bad people,,,, aaaaa Pisces is sorry I shouldn't have said anything" it just annoying!
The game does have some really nice things going for it but all in all it ends up being more annoying then fun for me. I know there are a lot people that will have fun in this game and that great but for me,,, well I will just have to put it in the beer money category (meaning I pissed my money away).
Am I the only person that doesn't even pay attention to the story in an mmorpg? I play for the gameplay, mechanics, systems, and fun content. What's an mmorpg with a good story? I haven't seen that one yet. They've all been awful. Even LotRO beat the story to death so bad they made a good story bad and annoying.
Oh the grind argument....i have never seen an MMO where you dont have to grind or rerun dungeons over and over. So please, stop using this argument or show me an MMO without repetitive quests, grind, dungeon reruns. If you are interessted invest 10 Euros for 30 days, enjoy, or dont do it and go to the grind MMO you like.
I love playing summoners, minion masters, or animal tamers. But I don't love having to pay cash-over-time to keep multiple pets out at once. Might as well just enjoy my army in various other MMOs that don't have a mini-subscription cash-pay system to keep multiple pets out.
Great write-up! I actually thought the game was beautiful as well, and have had a lot of moments where I had to stop and take a screenshot because of how lovely the lighting and scenery was. I just...wish the game itself was better. It's kind of underwhelming and I didn't find myself enjoying the combat at all. It's not an absolutely terrible game, but it's not a great one either. Just not my cup of tea!
It is a terrible game once you start end game dungeon grind - I guess you never made it to that point (which is a good thing)
If an MMORPG is good until the endgame, and then abruptly becomes terrible at the endgame, then that's a good game, unless the path to the endgame is very short. The entire notion of an endgame is that of course it's going to be awful.
You'd have a good point there except, in this case, there's nothing special about it during levelling either. It is a straight forward linear quest grind and the story is pretty terrible.
You might be correct about that. But if so, then the reason for the game to be bad isn't the the endgame. It's because the lower level content isn't good, either, and there's no need to bring up the endgame.
Great write-up! I actually thought the game was beautiful as well, and have had a lot of moments where I had to stop and take a screenshot because of how lovely the lighting and scenery was. I just...wish the game itself was better. It's kind of underwhelming and I didn't find myself enjoying the combat at all. It's not an absolutely terrible game, but it's not a great one either. Just not my cup of tea!
It is a terrible game once you start end game dungeon grind - I guess you never made it to that point (which is a good thing)
If an MMORPG is good until the endgame, and then abruptly becomes terrible at the endgame, then that's a good game, unless the path to the endgame is very short. The entire notion of an endgame is that of course it's going to be awful.
You'd have a good point there except, in this case, there's nothing special about it during levelling either. It is a straight forward linear quest grind and the story is pretty terrible.
You might be correct about that. But if so, then the reason for the game to be bad isn't the the endgame. It's because the lower level content isn't good, either, and there's no need to bring up the endgame.
Not true this is about the game being bad in general and it all bad including endgame. For some people they are more focused on endgame and for some on pvp , for other the leveling process for some all of it etc etc.
It's all relevant.
Here's some facts, you didn't try the game and are arguing for the sake of arguing with people that have actually played and tried the game and are talking from first hand knowledge and you are trying to logic away why they are wrong.
I know you dislike admitting you are wrong but Quiz...You. Are. Wrong.
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
So i spent 10 hours over the weekend playing this and i have one word for it - Abysmal. The leveling is super slow, skill animation is horrible, translation is super poor. Yea not worth $30.
Now that I've played the game a little, I'm mystified as to what all of the hatred for it is about. It's not a bad game. I'm not arguing against the review so much as the forum posters who seem to think that the game is unusually bad.
The translation isn't bad in itself, but there are two significant problems. One is that the translation of voiceovers for story quests is completely independent of the text displayed on the screen. Neither are necessarily bad translations, but the mismatch is definitely a mistake. The other problem is that quest text while talking to an NPC occasionally goes past the end of the window and gets cut off, as if the translator just put it into a text file and didn't try running it on the screen in the game.
As for sexualized content, some of the females in the game certainly are, such as Sion, Euria, and the female player options for the archer, scholar, and warrior classes. But sexualized children? I don't see it, unless your idea of sexual is a crank sticking out of your back or a fish on your head. The astels aren't children, anyway, as Rota crankily reminds some NPCs.
The astels addressing the player as "master" is somewhat weird, though there is actually a good reason for it. They can't say your name in a voiceover, so they have to either come up with something generic instead or never use any direct address. In Champions Online, for example, many cut scenes will refer to the player as "the champion" for precisely this reason. I'd have preferred something like "star caller" instead, but they chose what they did for lore reasons.
And the game has some substantial good points, too. Rather than fighting against the skill rotations that dominate combat in most MMORPGs, they just accepted it and made it part of the interface. That makes the game a lot more controller-friendly than most MMORPGs with a comparable number of skills for players to use. You might not care about whether the game is playable with a controller, but I sure do.
The game graphically looks good, and also runs very smoothly. I play at 4320x2560, and maxed all of the graphical settings that I care about (while turning off a handful that I don't think make games look better), and the game runs very smoothly--not just high average frame rates, but virtually no hitching at all. It's not just looks good in the screenshot sense, but makes it clear what is what, at least apart from the invisible walls at zone edges.
The game world isn't too big for its content, but lets you move around quickly. You get a mount at level 1, and the distances to travel typically aren't long. While the game has the auto-pathing that some people vocally hate, it's easy enough to ignore it. I rarely use it, as the distances are short enough that I don't see a need for it. The notable exception is when I can't find where to go.
The game also asks you to look around the world and grab things that you see. Some quests basically tell you, go find such and such, and we're not going to tell you where it is. You can look it up online if you wish, but it's less hand-holding than seems to be the norm in a lot of games these days. Yes, many quests tell you exactly where to go on your map, but not all. You don't actually need to finish any of the quests that don't tell you where to go, so you won't get stuck and unable to progress, but having them is a nice touch.
The astels change combat dramatically. It's not at all similar to pets in most MMORPGs in which, even if pets matter, the difference between one pet and another scarcely does. Timing when to have one astel out or two, and exactly which ones, is a major decision. I'm not sure why DMKano insists that the astel system is so awful; I can't think of a better pet system in any other MMORPG ever.
The game gives you a ton of inventory space, rather than crippling you there and requiring you to pay a bunch of money to have a reasonable inventory. You get eight independent inventory tabs for different types of goods, with 30 slots each. The nearest comparable that comes to mind is how Maple Story 2 handles inventory. You also start with 100 storage slots per character, and those aren't restricted by item type.
And the game is emphatically not pay to win, which is unfortunately rare these days. If you're a whale determined to buy whatever you can, you can get cosmetic stuff, the ability to resurrect locally rather than having to run back, an extra 20% experience gain, teleport for free instead of a nominal fee in asper (the common currency that is dropped by nearly everything), 15% faster zender gain, a modest increase in dungeon tickets that look sufficiently plentiful by default that I don't expect to ever run out, more storage space, extra character slots, and a bunch of cosmetic stuff. As part of the initial purchase, if you buy the most expensive package, you can get an auto-loot functionality on one character (not account wide!) that isn't yet in the zender store (daily login rewards, among others), but will be put there in the future.
If you dislike quest-based leveling or pet classes, then Astellia definitely won't be your game. That doesn't mean it's bad; it only means that it doesn't fit your preferences. I don't like first person shooters, but that doesn't mean that every first person shooter ever made is a bad game.
I'll concede that I'm not far into the game yet. Currently, I'm at level 12. But so far, the game has been about as good as I hoped it would be, and better than I expected.
Too many buttons on hotbars? Pay more attention to game features! You can stack those abilities up to 4:1 in any hotbar button, and they'll work well. It's quite easy to make just a few buttons: single target attack, aoe attack, and so on.
Localization bugs are present, but players still hope they'll be fixed this or next month.
There are a lot of content at max level. I do agree it's grindy to some degree but still fun and different. As I know even hardcore players did not finished main quest line yet.
Astels are different and cute. :-)
So far I enjoy this mmorpg a lot, because there are no new mmorpg's on a market since release of Revelation Online in the end of 2016, and release of quickly rotten Albion Online, summer 2017. I know about WoW Classic, but no one can call a game, released in 2004 year, "new".
Too many buttons on hotbars? Pay more attention to game features! You can stack those abilities up to 4:1 in any hotbar button, and they'll work well. It's quite easy to make just a few buttons: single target attack, aoe attack, and so on.
I am quite aware that you can expand the hotbars and place multiple attacks stacked in a set, but that doesn't make things any easier, and every time I set one up, it reset my custom hotkeys.
It takes me too long to reset my hotkeys so I simply didn't use them. It's not the best system they could have used.
In beta discord admin banned me from the dc cause i said that th's game looks and feels like bless online which is gonna fail in 4-5 month time. After that he just banned me without excuse. For once i like being right.
I've played this game to cap and have capped a couple trade skills. While I like the Astel (pet) system and the role they play in the game... that's about it. The end game content is repetitive and I do the dailies and weeklies so I don't "fall behind" rather than it being fun. However, the biggest banes of this game are the gold farmers and gold sellers. There are literally armies of toons with names like CCPDJ running around the world in virtually every zone farming gold. Meanwhile, gold sellers spam the global channel so much that the channel is unusable by players. The result -- this game has the immersiveness of a rain puddle. Some of the individual zones and stories are interesting. But, the game is so easy that within 15-30 minutes you've completed that content and moved on to the next zone with little reason to ever return.
I've played this game to cap and have capped a couple trade skills. While I like the Astel (pet) system and the role they play in the game... that's about it. The end game content is repetitive and I do the dailies and weeklies so I don't "fall behind" rather than it being fun. However, the biggest banes of this game are the gold farmers and gold sellers. There are literally armies of toons with names like CCPDJ running around the world in virtually every zone farming gold. Meanwhile, gold sellers spam the global channel so much that the channel is unusable by players. The result -- this game has the immersiveness of a rain puddle. Some of the individual zones and stories are interesting. But, the game is so easy that within 15-30 minutes you've completed that content and moved on to the next zone with little reason to ever return.
You can block the gold spammers, you know. My expectation is that when I log in, I'll have to block 4 or so gold spammers. After that, chat is free from their spam until a new one shows up every couple of hours or so.
I have experienced different in terms of how long before new ones come along. I've just gotten tired of blocking names as new ones spawn so fast. I made an alt and when I first zoned into the new character spawn point, there were two ffjjjkecidk named people right there spamming gold sales. They just make new toons over and over and over.
Comments
Im playing it casually at level 44, most hardcore players hit max within 3 to 5 days it is easy to level. It is understandable now that some are idle because theyve gone through most of the content, but guess what all WoW classics content has been cleared aswell so i find that agruement of No Content hard to make.
One concern of mine is what DMKano brought up, that the content in Korea is stagnant.
All in all tho i cant take this game serious it is a good filler but its just that a filler.
There's a wide spectrum. I feel it's important to give every game a chance, in Astellia it just happens there is quite a bit of good. It's just... not great, and there are a lot of issues that prevent it from really capitalizing on the few things they actually do well.
The game has things wrong with it I agree.
Do I enjoy playing it ...... He'll yes I do !!
Am I having fun playing it .... Yes my favorite Astel is Tetrinio .
I have played a lot of mmorpg in my time and this is enjoyable .
I would give it more of a 7/10 if I was giving it a score but saying that I also enjoy fallout 76.
Current games;
Star treck online
Rift
Eve online
Firefall
If an MMORPG is good until the endgame, and then abruptly becomes terrible at the endgame, then that's a good game, unless the path to the endgame is very short. The entire notion of an endgame is that of course it's going to be awful.
I try all games and I will play them with and open mind but after playing Astellia for a few night I really could play it anymore. The Story is well unforgettable becasue it's really not a story it's disjointed and it's so bad it gets lost in the side quests. One of the big problem with Astellia like most of these game are the to cutesy nature of the game. Sure I like cute but the "I think we should kill these bad people,,,, aaaaa Pisces is sorry I shouldn't have said anything" it just annoying!
The game does have some really nice things going for it but all in all it ends up being more annoying then fun for me. I know there are a lot people that will have fun in this game and that great but for me,,, well I will just have to put it in the beer money category (meaning I pissed my money away).
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
The translation isn't bad in itself, but there are two significant problems. One is that the translation of voiceovers for story quests is completely independent of the text displayed on the screen. Neither are necessarily bad translations, but the mismatch is definitely a mistake. The other problem is that quest text while talking to an NPC occasionally goes past the end of the window and gets cut off, as if the translator just put it into a text file and didn't try running it on the screen in the game.
As for sexualized content, some of the females in the game certainly are, such as Sion, Euria, and the female player options for the archer, scholar, and warrior classes. But sexualized children? I don't see it, unless your idea of sexual is a crank sticking out of your back or a fish on your head. The astels aren't children, anyway, as Rota crankily reminds some NPCs.
The astels addressing the player as "master" is somewhat weird, though there is actually a good reason for it. They can't say your name in a voiceover, so they have to either come up with something generic instead or never use any direct address. In Champions Online, for example, many cut scenes will refer to the player as "the champion" for precisely this reason. I'd have preferred something like "star caller" instead, but they chose what they did for lore reasons.
And the game has some substantial good points, too. Rather than fighting against the skill rotations that dominate combat in most MMORPGs, they just accepted it and made it part of the interface. That makes the game a lot more controller-friendly than most MMORPGs with a comparable number of skills for players to use. You might not care about whether the game is playable with a controller, but I sure do.
The game graphically looks good, and also runs very smoothly. I play at 4320x2560, and maxed all of the graphical settings that I care about (while turning off a handful that I don't think make games look better), and the game runs very smoothly--not just high average frame rates, but virtually no hitching at all. It's not just looks good in the screenshot sense, but makes it clear what is what, at least apart from the invisible walls at zone edges.
The game world isn't too big for its content, but lets you move around quickly. You get a mount at level 1, and the distances to travel typically aren't long. While the game has the auto-pathing that some people vocally hate, it's easy enough to ignore it. I rarely use it, as the distances are short enough that I don't see a need for it. The notable exception is when I can't find where to go.
The game also asks you to look around the world and grab things that you see. Some quests basically tell you, go find such and such, and we're not going to tell you where it is. You can look it up online if you wish, but it's less hand-holding than seems to be the norm in a lot of games these days. Yes, many quests tell you exactly where to go on your map, but not all. You don't actually need to finish any of the quests that don't tell you where to go, so you won't get stuck and unable to progress, but having them is a nice touch.
The astels change combat dramatically. It's not at all similar to pets in most MMORPGs in which, even if pets matter, the difference between one pet and another scarcely does. Timing when to have one astel out or two, and exactly which ones, is a major decision. I'm not sure why DMKano insists that the astel system is so awful; I can't think of a better pet system in any other MMORPG ever.
The game gives you a ton of inventory space, rather than crippling you there and requiring you to pay a bunch of money to have a reasonable inventory. You get eight independent inventory tabs for different types of goods, with 30 slots each. The nearest comparable that comes to mind is how Maple Story 2 handles inventory. You also start with 100 storage slots per character, and those aren't restricted by item type.
And the game is emphatically not pay to win, which is unfortunately rare these days. If you're a whale determined to buy whatever you can, you can get cosmetic stuff, the ability to resurrect locally rather than having to run back, an extra 20% experience gain, teleport for free instead of a nominal fee in asper (the common currency that is dropped by nearly everything), 15% faster zender gain, a modest increase in dungeon tickets that look sufficiently plentiful by default that I don't expect to ever run out, more storage space, extra character slots, and a bunch of cosmetic stuff. As part of the initial purchase, if you buy the most expensive package, you can get an auto-loot functionality on one character (not account wide!) that isn't yet in the zender store (daily login rewards, among others), but will be put there in the future.
If you dislike quest-based leveling or pet classes, then Astellia definitely won't be your game. That doesn't mean it's bad; it only means that it doesn't fit your preferences. I don't like first person shooters, but that doesn't mean that every first person shooter ever made is a bad game.
I'll concede that I'm not far into the game yet. Currently, I'm at level 12. But so far, the game has been about as good as I hoped it would be, and better than I expected.
Localization bugs are present, but players still hope they'll be fixed this or next month.
There are a lot of content at max level. I do agree it's grindy to some degree but still fun and different. As I know even hardcore players did not finished main quest line yet.
Astels are different and cute. :-)
So far I enjoy this mmorpg a lot, because there are no new mmorpg's on a market since release of Revelation Online in the end of 2016, and release of quickly rotten Albion Online, summer 2017. I know about WoW Classic, but no one can call a game, released in 2004 year, "new".
It takes me too long to reset my hotkeys so I simply didn't use them. It's not the best system they could have used.