The way I see it, I bought a pretty interesting PDF pack (including a pretty interesting-sounding megadungeon) and a dozen minis for $100.
Any MMO action I get out of the deal is pretty much a bonus to me; I didn't kickstart their first effort, however.
I did pretty much the same thing. I'm quite interested in the game itself and I really hope it does well, but I'm not terribly confident that it will be an amazing endeavour that will last for decades.
"These people bring a lot of rigor to our cause, but alas, also mortis"
There's a scifi-themed one in development called The Repopulation that also features quite heavily in the sandbox department. Crafting system looks to be quite complex as well.
The Repopulation seems to be heavily influenced by the late Star Wars Galaxies, just with all the Star Wars stripped out. I'm watching it with great interest.
Before following any advice, opinions, or thoughts I may have expressed in the above post, be warned: I found Keven Costners "Waterworld" to be a very entertaining film.
The Repopulation seems to be heavily influenced by the late Star Wars Galaxies, just with all the Star Wars stripped out. I'm watching it with great interest.
I didn't want to start a new thread just to ask a question, but I'm surprised there isn't more being said about The Repopulation on here. Is there background on why or do folks just watch the official forums without comment?
0
Options
CorehealerThe ApothecaryThe softer edge of the universe.Registered Userregular
The Repopulation seems to be heavily influenced by the late Star Wars Galaxies, just with all the Star Wars stripped out. I'm watching it with great interest.
I didn't want to start a new thread just to ask a question, but I'm surprised there isn't more being said about The Repopulation on here. Is there background on why or do folks just watch the official forums without comment?
We are waiting on more tangible information on the game to talk about, especially considering all the other MMOs we got to talk about around here that have more to talk about right now.
The Repopulation seems to be heavily influenced by the late Star Wars Galaxies, just with all the Star Wars stripped out. I'm watching it with great interest.
I didn't want to start a new thread just to ask a question, but I'm surprised there isn't more being said about The Repopulation on here. Is there background on why or do folks just watch the official forums without comment?
We are waiting on more tangible information on the game to talk about, especially considering all the other MMOs we got to talk about around here that have more to talk about right now.
Even better, currently there is a Humble Bundle full of Pathfinder e-books, and if you just drop a buck, you get a lot of nice core books for Pathfinder in e-form, but also a free month of play in Pathfinder Online (which is where I got mine!
Going to go in and make some observations and see just what this game is all about!
So far, I've managed to find some rather big pain-in-the-butt bugs. The game runs fine in full-screen mode... until you go to alt-tab it, in which case it then crashes and forces you to hard-shutdown your computer to get back to where you can use it. It's been traced back to a bug in the version of Unity the game was run on. There's another nasty one where the first time you change your settings, it crashes the game as well and then reduces your window to about the size of two PA Forums Avatars. There's a workaround available for that.
Character creation is, well... pick a race, a gender, a hairstyle and color, a skin color, and an eye color, and that's all for customization. Currently, there are three races- Human, Elf, and Dwarf. Once you make your character, you get dumped right into the world. You get some tutorials as to how to move, and then you get to choose your class- by running around to different camps to try out the four different roles- Fighter (melee damage and heavy armor), Rogue (ranged attacks and light armor), Cleric (healing and support magic) and Wizard (offensive magic). I made my character a Rogue.
You get to go ahead and progress and do a bunch of "kill X whatevers to proceed", and then you hit town and find out that there are also a number of non-combat classes you can take as well- gatherers, crafters- pretty much the class system is a lot like FFXIV- you make XP by whacking monsters or processing crafting stuff and you spend it on feats to open up more options for your chosen class. I think you can get every feat out there for every class, but I'm not really sure.
I left off here to go get some sleep, but I have confirmed that there is an auction house and a banking system in the game. From what I've seen of the art style, it reminds me a lot of EverQuest 1 with better graphics so far. I don't know how much of an overarching story there is; hopefully I'll hit it later as I play, otherwise it's going to be just like EQ1- getting stronger just for the sake of watching numbers go up.
Got the crafting tutorial done. It's based on a timer- you put so much material in the cooker, wait a while, and eventually your finished project or refined materials pop out the other end and go right into your bank. I'm not sure if the timer still runs while you're offline, or if it simply counts online time and nothing else.
But to find the raw materials, you have to go and harvest various points. I've seen three so far- a natural one (for stuff like plants/sap/other natural junk), a scavenging one (for all sorts of random crafting junk) and a magical one that's a heck of a lot rarer (dropped a couple of magical essence things- only found two of these so far). I'm sticking with a combat type right off the bat, but anyone can gather at all the resource points I've found so far, so I might just go ahead and gather a bunch of stuff, load it into my bank (I don't know if this game has a bank limit, so I'm going to pack it as full as I possibly can) and then list it for when I need some extra cash.
Drops from monsters are automatically looted and dropped into your inventory, but you're also going to run into enemies swinging around weapons that don't end up dropping.
I got the month of playtime with the Pathfinder bundle and figured I'd at least see what it was like. Give me a bit and I'll throw up some screenshots of what the game looks like.
I mean, I didn't buy it for the PFO time, I picked up the bundle because it was a shitload of Pathfinder books that I didn't have and the really popular Goblin/Shattered Star adventure paths, and I even got the Starfinder PHB in there, too.
This is my PC is the lowest level of wizard armor out there. Obviously the art level really isn't up there- there are two guys or so working on this game. Like I said above, character creation is pretty much just pick between an elf, dwarf or human, pick a gender, and then pick from a bunch of preset pieces and colors to make something you can stand to look at.
There's another actual glitch I forgot to mention, earlier:
When you finally decide on what base class you want to play, don't go all willy-nilly buying all the feats and skills you can afford with your XP. Follow the directions as they are given to you to the letter- because if you do, you'll have to go to another class's trainer and buy cheapo skills to trigger the "skill learned" flag to advance the quest. If you went ahead and slotted in feats to your action bar? Slot something else to trip the flag again. It's just lazy design to go ahead and force you to spend more XP for being ahead of the curb instead of just checking to see if the skill's been learned or slotted or whatever.
I haven't seen much of anything that resembles a story as of yet; I had to run all over the starting town to find someone to teach me a certain skill.
Another day of playing in the books, and I made some pretty great strides.
I got involved with some other people who have been in there longer, and to be quite honest, this is a game that doesn't really have the single player experience in mind. Like, if you like, you can go around and try and live the life of a single-player adventurer, hunting and gathering and trying to make a living, but after a while, you find out that the game's built around growing together with a crew and exploring and building your own holding and doing escalations and dropping XP on more than just combat skills. I've heard it estimated that it could take one character ten years of solid play to earn enough XP just to grind out all the skills present in the game at this time. And no, you don't need to worry about limits of just how much you can learn, because the only thing stopping you is going out and gaining experience to pay for said upgrades and sometimes a bit of cash for materials.
Also: one of the quests involved is a goddamned gear check- i.e., if you don't have the money to pick up your +1 armor that fits both of the keywords for your current class feat/role, then you're more than a little SOL. It took me a good bunch of hours of gathering to grab some 25-odd silver, and the needed armors are apparently crafted, so YMMV on just how much demand there is for your role, and if the profiteers haven't decided to gouge your class for silver because the higher-level crafting skills haven't really penetrated a whole heck of a lot yet. I mean, a pocketful of silver is still a huge deal here, and more than two gold will buy you pretty much anything off the in-game AH right now.
You don't get XP for killing monsters. Only loot to use in everything. How do you go and get XP?
You get it just by existing, at this point. You go on, you get some experience, and then you either save it or apply it to skills that you desire to have. Want a skill but don't have the XP? You're pretty much SOL and have to wait. I have to admit, I don't think this is really a good idea: given the fact that the crafting skills and the combat skills run off the same XP pool, you could end up just making two characters right off the bat and using one as a main while the other just sits there and racks up XP while you don't even have to lift a finger. Finally, you just log over there and run them to the first town to spend it all on craft skills and there you go.
People with more experience onhand are always going to be stronger and have more skills- it sounds like money is going to be the big thing. There's a player on the server with just under a million XP earned, but they don't have the gold to pay for the training.
Right now, if I had to point at the absolute worst part of this game, I'd have to say the "story" quests, especially the early levels. It's quite literally "Go here. Kill this many of that. Go there, maybe train up your skills. Then run all the way six hexes away to kill one thing and then run all the way back for your reward. Now go do it again but with tougher enemies." Recycle for a while until you either get frustrated or bored.
Training skills is really unclear- you don't have any one trainer to go to for skills, instead your skills are all spread over every single trainer out there. You have to go and train up a number of different skills at a number of different trainers, and as said earlier, it's really easy to waste XP and then having to wait for more takes up even more time. There's absolutely no takebacks once you spend the XP.
Honestly, I'd like to see the current XP situation switched to three pools that all grew at the same time- combat, crafting, gathering.
Right now, the Pathfinder license is the only reason this has any big number of players. Yes, you can do whatever, but the way XP is simply used to extend the playtime, to force you to simply wait more time (fifty cents a day if you're paying by the month), is kind of bullshit. No, the game's not going to be a Warcraft-killer by any means, but for the love of anything, its own mechanics are going to kill it before it gets out of the gate. They even admit that it's not going to look as good, or even have a story half as good, or anything. There's two people making this game, and in my opinion, it's only a matter of time before this goes F2P with packed-in cash shop boosts.
Paizo, I love you guys, and I love the stuff you've unleashed onto the roleplaying world. But do us all a favor and yank the license from these guys and give it to someone who can actually put a game with a story together instead of... this. EverQuest had the same idea, and they were more than twenty years ago, sheesh.
Halfway done with my free month and I have to say, I'm not really enjoying where the game is at right now.
The whole point of the game is to eventually find a settlement (or guild, if you want to use that terminology) to support you and to run dungeons/harder content with, because while you can spend experience to get stronger, in the end, you're not really going to be running around one-shotting smaller mobs. So how does this tie in to how I really seem to be falling out of love with this game?
Forcing people to play with other people is one heck of a way to piss off a bunch of your playerbase- it's also a great way to find out that even reporting creepers is a massive pain in the ass, too. It's amazing what people whisper to a female toon- I was subjected to a fifteen-minute grilling by someone claiming to be representing a guild I was interested in, in which they sought pretty much all my personal details (name, age, location, to find out if "you would be a good fit for our settlement". Uhm, yeah. It should not be hard to stomp on someone creeping like this. And the only thing you ought to need as far as if I would be a good fit is how much do I play, what kind of content I'm into (PvE or PvP), and maybe a message board/discord I can look into. You don't need to crawl up my rump and know everything single fucking detail about the person on the other keyboard.
I've said it before, there's just a two-person development team going on this, but I don't know what kind of customer service reps they have going. I'm giving things a few days to settle down and then I'm going right back in. All I can say is that it's not looking good for PFO.
To elaborate on my last point- one of the reasons something like WoW or FFXIV runs so well is that you don't have to engage with other players if you don't fucking want to. You can put yourself in a queue to run dungeons, to go out and level, to pretty much just do whatever- it makes it nearly painless to actually find people to play with, and if you don't tend to like someone, you can ignore them easily. Here? Not so much. The center of the game is joining a guild and settlement and doing harder and harder content to keep the settlement growing. Grouping and socialization is pretty much required, and, well... it feels like a damn meat market out there as new players come in. The guilds can afford to be rather selective.
One more thing: every server is PvP enabled. And there ARE bandit guilds who will come after you if they catch you in claimed territory, or if you just so happen to be out in the field in a low-security area and aren't any good at PvP. Mmhm. Given the general nature of the internet, how long once this game goes live until we see roving clans of trolls pwning people just for shits and giggles as we did in the early days on Battle for Azeroth? Gee, just what I always wanted to have happen- to spend hours gathering mats out in the forest only to have all that work wasted by some clown who hit a button a few times and attacked me? If you're going to include non-optional PvP like that, then you have to be ready for it to be exploited and hammered by people who take perverse glee in being assholes to other people, and given that not even death is really that much of a setback unless your gear crumbles (which takes twenty deaths to do), it's, well... not going to be a fun time.
Welp, my month is up and here's my final thoughts on the current state of Pathfinder Online:
It's a wonderful license, but it's in the hands of some rank amateurs. A license like this deserves to be in the hands of a crew who understands just what the fuck they're doing instead of a two-person team that thinks they have to design and program everything themselves. That sheer fact right there is what's killing the game and might be the reason progress is time-gated: because if you had nothing to do but sit around and grind all day and then do content you could easily just overpower everything, and you'd end up maxing out the content in, what- two, maybe three weeks? It's more than an utter pile of bullshit, it's not even the good fun kind of bullshit.
Another big problem is that the game pretty much forces you into grouping and joining with a player-run settlement. I'm not the most social person, but pretty much saying "Oh, silly you, running around all by your lonesome- this game is meant for groups, not for solo runs, silly player LOL" So you either have to run around with a bunch of internet randos or hope to anything you can convince a bunch of much more skilled players than you that somehow someday you'll actually contribute to their settlement. Mmhm. It's more "What kind of thing are you willing to do in order to make yourself useful?" In my case it was blow experience on gathering skills instead of leveling up combat skills and run out on gathering runs while hoping I didn't end up getting jacked by your friendly local roving bandit guild. Nothing makes a guy go for a cooling-off period than losing a bunch of rare mats to a fucking player deciding that you made a juicy target because your PvP skills are absolute shit.
PvP is pretty much defined by what hex you're in- either low (anything goes), medium (instigator takes a rep hit), high (have a good reason, like resource theft or etc.), or absolute (no PvP whatsoever). It's not a fun thing- there are times I just want to play the game, and not worry if there's some little scumfuck out there just waiting for the chance to fuck me up simply for loot and lulz. Basing allowed PvP on map hex instead of making it a setting is pretty much just begging for trolls to group up and start ganking everything and everyone they can come across in low-security hexes. Map out where the story leads you, camp out there with plenty of supplies, and you could make someone's life a living hell and make who knows how much profit at it. I mean, repeat after me: non-optional PvP content is very, very bad.
So far, we have required grouping and required PvP. It's not looking all that good, is it?
To be honest, I want to like this game so, so much. It has the potential, but at the same time, I think it really jumped the wereshark because it's focusing on the absolute worst thing about Pathfinder- it's not a kingdom-building game at its heart, it's an adventuring game! It's about so much more than running around the same bunches of hexes and fighting the same enemies and gathering the same nodes and avoiding the same people over and over and over. I mean, why not base an MMO around the Society, for crying out loud, instead of taking the Kingmaker adventure path, stripping out the interesting bits, and dumping it on the table? You have no memorable characters, no memorable anything, and in the end all you really have is something that might have passed for a licensed EverQuest knockoff some fifteen or twenty years ago. I mean, try to name one memorable NPC in this game? Name one moment in the story where you were completely engaged by it- hell, even minorly entertained by it?
It's simple: this game has the Pathfinder look, the license, the equipment, the everything: but, at it's heart, it's not Pathfinder, and it's not a very good MMO at all. It's a long, boring slog that requires you to join a guild even if you don't really want to and to git gud at PvP lest you lose most of what you're holding to other players rather than feel like you're actually a Pathfinder agent. It requires you to sit on your ass and grind money to pay for training because the XP system is a freaking mess to cover for the absolute lack of content and there's no dungeoning or anything involved- you wake up out of the grave because for some unspecified reason the Goddess of the Dead in this universe senses something wrong, so you wake up and sit up out of your grave and commence to sitting around and waiting for your experience to go up so you can do whatever- usually to go kill ten of these, then go there and kill fifteen of that.
Goblin Works thinks this mess is worth $15 a month, or $80 for six months or $140 per year. Honestly, at the rate this game is going, fifteen's too much. Five a month might be doable, but if this hits full release- and that's a big if, I don't have a lot of confidence in the developer- I can see it going F2P right off the bat. There's already a cash shop in the game, and we're not even out of beta yet.
There's also no real easy way to block people in this game as of yet, and yes, playing a female toon will get you harassed and begged for information, because randos gonna rando.
It might be a game, it might be an MMO, but what we have here is a buggy fucking mess of a game that barely works and has little to no polish or storyline beyond "go there, kill X whatevers, come back and repeat ad naseum".
It's not Pathfinder. Compared to the tabletop game, this is nothing more than a terrible third-party splatbook that wants to be Pathfinder.
If you really have to get your Pathfinder video gaming on, well... there's the Kingmaker video game or the Pathfinder Adventures video game adaptation. But stay away from PFO; it's about at Bless Online levels of suck.
I've been keeping my eye on this game as it inches ever so closer to launch, and it looks like despite all the bugs that are still in it, they're going to go ahead with the full launch of the game.
Reports on the official forums mention the game has one server, and about a hundred active accounts currently- and they've gone whole hog on the "terrible MMO decisions". Now, instead of paying $15 for access for a month, you can pay $5 a month per character for premium time, or keep the "free trial" status. What does Premium get you?
-The ability to gain XP while offline.
-The ability to reach a level higher than 6.
-The ability to wield any influence at all in whatever settlement you choose to sign up with (the game is just as unfriendly to solo players as ever).
There's no tutorial, the story still blows very, very badly and the quests are still just "go here, kill X whatevers, come back" type things.
Even worse?
You can buy XP for your character in the Cash Shop. Pay to win, pretty much.
I still stand by everything I said about the game nine months ago: when this launches, I imagine it will be the biggest flop the MMO business has seen since Bless Online went belly up.
But if you want to see all the carnage, you can hit up Humble Bundle and spend a buck to get two months of premium time plus some actually useful Pathfinder 1st Edition sourcebooks!
"We’ll do our best to get through these final months as smoothly as possible, and to provide new content that brings everything to a satisfying conclusion. However, it’s possible that we won’t be able to keep the servers running right up to November 28. The servers are getting quite old, and we won’t be able to switch over to the cloud before then. Fortunately, everything looks stable at the moment and we do think they’re in good enough shape to go the distance. If things do go wrong and we’re forced to shut down earlier than expected, we’ll use the most recent available data about the state of the world as the basis for the final writeups."
So... yeah. Six and a half years in early enrollment and they still couldn't get this off the ground. I can't say I'm absolutely really surprised by this, and I still very much absolutely stand by my comment above from April 2019.
This was not Pathfinder. Hopefully with the death of this game, some studio with the resources and the time can get hold of the IP and actually make a Pathfinder MMO that's not just based around one freaking AP. I sppreciate what they were trying to do, but let's face it, the writing was on the goddamned wall two and a half years ago. It's an absolute miracle the game managed to make it this far.
So, what is the Pathfinder IP? What makes it desirable compared to the million other fantasy IPs that also don't have successful MMOs? Pathfinder to me is just knock off D&D so they could grognard an old, favored ruleset.
So, what is the Pathfinder IP? What makes it desirable compared to the million other fantasy IPs that also don't have successful MMOs? Pathfinder to me is just knock off D&D so they could grognard an old, favored ruleset.
It's a pretty interesting fantasy world with a number of genres blending into it while having an actual adventurer's guild (Pathfinder Society) at the heart of everything. Much of the lore is very well written and the push and pull of their pantheon is genuinely intriguing. There's a hole in the world that demons pour out of and there's a bunch of people dedicated to killing them all day erreday. There's a whole part of the world full of dinosaurs and shit. There's a country full of automatons and egyptian shit. There's a land of Baba Yaga-like folk who also worship Baba Yaga as their rightful ruler. There's so much more.
I am not one to sing Pathfinder's praises very often, but the IP is actually super solid, and their adventure paths are largely very good, to the extent that they have started re-releasing them for use in not only Pathfinder 2.0, but also D&D 5th edition, because people want them. The few video games that exist are largely successful because the campaign is really damn good even though the game kinda isn't (looking at you, Kingmaker).
Yeah, the strength of Pathfinder has always been the modules and the adventure path, the whole world of Golarion and beyond and how much detail and development there is in the lore and everything- there’s so much out there that it makes no fucking sense to just limit an MMO to one little specific region of the world. They were riding high off the Kingmaker adventure path and thought the damn thing would make a great MMO, I suppose.
The bones for a good MMO are there, but you have to focus on the right fucking area and hook to get things started. Kingmaker without all the fucking fun parts certainly isn’t it.
Well, they didn't exactly make a really great impression with this game, I'll give you that much. If they'd went ahead and did something like D&D Online or Black Desert or just, anything instead of the mess Goblin Works shit out, well... I think it would have made a better splash than this. Then again, Goblin Works was down to two people creating, maintaining and upgrading everything, so...
D&D is locked down and has two MMOs (D&D Online and Neverwinter) already. Warhammer had at least one- maybe there's still one limping along? LOTR has one (almost two, but Amazon gave up).
I'd think maybe Game of Thrones, but that IP's kind of a giant pile of shit ever since the last season hit, maybe Wheel of Time, but yeah, Pathfinder's kind of the second-biggest tabletop fantasy RPG out there right now and something tells me Paizo might be more inclined to just sell the rights to some big company (something like Standing Stone, but literally anybody with the time and money except for goddamned Cryptic) and let them make the backbone of the game while they provide the writing and the stories themselves.
That's how they missed the boat with Pathfinder Online: it's because Pathfinder isn't a sandbox game, people want to join the Pathfinder Society and explore ancient ruins, fight the bad guys, and generally do exciting things, not just fucking run around in a forest all day and hit harvest nodes and wait around sitting on their asses to generate XP to get stronger... I mean, Ceiling Cat, that whole mechanic kind of made it not worth to play the game for long stretches because there was only so much you could do before you were just left with mindlessly slaughtering monsters or mining... and we want to run around different locales, not just the same goddamned interchangable forest that stretches on and on with no change at all.
Also, you can't make or keep an MMO running with just two people on staff.
Though they also now have the Starfinder sci-fi game going now, too- maybe there's room for another sci-fi MMO besides SW: TOR and Star Trek Online?
Honestly I didn't realize they were doing Kingmaker with PFO that's just....really dumb. Especially when you consider they have a Kingmaker vidya game.
I would have started every new toon in Absalom, start them out with the Pathfinder Society, giving them quests and shit to do and then send them to the four winds to go on missions.
I'm sure people are just banging down the door for a wheel of time mmo :rotate:
Well, I was just thinking of fantasy franchises that didn’t have games, and that was one of the only ones I could think of at the moment.
But yeah, Thawmus has the right of it- focus more on the Society and then off all over the planet for exciting adventures instead of keeping everyone penned up in the Stolen Lands ala Kingmaker Lite. You have a giant, interesting, intricate world that invites adventure- make a game based around that, throw in original quests, not some terrible sandbox MMO where they couldn’t even do either half of that phrase well. Play original quests, draw on standalone modules, adventure paths and even official Pathfinder Society scenarios for more in the way of quests and DLC and expansions- and you have an absolute epic shitload of material to throw into an MMO. There’s literally piles and piles of stuff to throw in.
Posts
I did pretty much the same thing. I'm quite interested in the game itself and I really hope it does well, but I'm not terribly confident that it will be an amazing endeavour that will last for decades.
I didn't want to start a new thread just to ask a question, but I'm surprised there isn't more being said about The Repopulation on here. Is there background on why or do folks just watch the official forums without comment?
We are waiting on more tangible information on the game to talk about, especially considering all the other MMOs we got to talk about around here that have more to talk about right now.
Thanks!
https://pathfinderonline.com/
Even better, currently there is a Humble Bundle full of Pathfinder e-books, and if you just drop a buck, you get a lot of nice core books for Pathfinder in e-form, but also a free month of play in Pathfinder Online (which is where I got mine!
Going to go in and make some observations and see just what this game is all about!
I can has cheezburger, yes?
Character creation is, well... pick a race, a gender, a hairstyle and color, a skin color, and an eye color, and that's all for customization. Currently, there are three races- Human, Elf, and Dwarf. Once you make your character, you get dumped right into the world. You get some tutorials as to how to move, and then you get to choose your class- by running around to different camps to try out the four different roles- Fighter (melee damage and heavy armor), Rogue (ranged attacks and light armor), Cleric (healing and support magic) and Wizard (offensive magic). I made my character a Rogue.
You get to go ahead and progress and do a bunch of "kill X whatevers to proceed", and then you hit town and find out that there are also a number of non-combat classes you can take as well- gatherers, crafters- pretty much the class system is a lot like FFXIV- you make XP by whacking monsters or processing crafting stuff and you spend it on feats to open up more options for your chosen class. I think you can get every feat out there for every class, but I'm not really sure.
I left off here to go get some sleep, but I have confirmed that there is an auction house and a banking system in the game. From what I've seen of the art style, it reminds me a lot of EverQuest 1 with better graphics so far. I don't know how much of an overarching story there is; hopefully I'll hit it later as I play, otherwise it's going to be just like EQ1- getting stronger just for the sake of watching numbers go up.
I can has cheezburger, yes?
But to find the raw materials, you have to go and harvest various points. I've seen three so far- a natural one (for stuff like plants/sap/other natural junk), a scavenging one (for all sorts of random crafting junk) and a magical one that's a heck of a lot rarer (dropped a couple of magical essence things- only found two of these so far). I'm sticking with a combat type right off the bat, but anyone can gather at all the resource points I've found so far, so I might just go ahead and gather a bunch of stuff, load it into my bank (I don't know if this game has a bank limit, so I'm going to pack it as full as I possibly can) and then list it for when I need some extra cash.
Drops from monsters are automatically looted and dropped into your inventory, but you're also going to run into enemies swinging around weapons that don't end up dropping.
I can has cheezburger, yes?
I mean, I didn't buy it for the PFO time, I picked up the bundle because it was a shitload of Pathfinder books that I didn't have and the really popular Goblin/Shattered Star adventure paths, and I even got the Starfinder PHB in there, too.
I can has cheezburger, yes?
This is out in the field.
This is my PC is the lowest level of wizard armor out there. Obviously the art level really isn't up there- there are two guys or so working on this game. Like I said above, character creation is pretty much just pick between an elf, dwarf or human, pick a gender, and then pick from a bunch of preset pieces and colors to make something you can stand to look at.
I can has cheezburger, yes?
When you finally decide on what base class you want to play, don't go all willy-nilly buying all the feats and skills you can afford with your XP. Follow the directions as they are given to you to the letter- because if you do, you'll have to go to another class's trainer and buy cheapo skills to trigger the "skill learned" flag to advance the quest. If you went ahead and slotted in feats to your action bar? Slot something else to trip the flag again. It's just lazy design to go ahead and force you to spend more XP for being ahead of the curb instead of just checking to see if the skill's been learned or slotted or whatever.
I haven't seen much of anything that resembles a story as of yet; I had to run all over the starting town to find someone to teach me a certain skill.
I can has cheezburger, yes?
I got involved with some other people who have been in there longer, and to be quite honest, this is a game that doesn't really have the single player experience in mind. Like, if you like, you can go around and try and live the life of a single-player adventurer, hunting and gathering and trying to make a living, but after a while, you find out that the game's built around growing together with a crew and exploring and building your own holding and doing escalations and dropping XP on more than just combat skills. I've heard it estimated that it could take one character ten years of solid play to earn enough XP just to grind out all the skills present in the game at this time. And no, you don't need to worry about limits of just how much you can learn, because the only thing stopping you is going out and gaining experience to pay for said upgrades and sometimes a bit of cash for materials.
Also: one of the quests involved is a goddamned gear check- i.e., if you don't have the money to pick up your +1 armor that fits both of the keywords for your current class feat/role, then you're more than a little SOL. It took me a good bunch of hours of gathering to grab some 25-odd silver, and the needed armors are apparently crafted, so YMMV on just how much demand there is for your role, and if the profiteers haven't decided to gouge your class for silver because the higher-level crafting skills haven't really penetrated a whole heck of a lot yet. I mean, a pocketful of silver is still a huge deal here, and more than two gold will buy you pretty much anything off the in-game AH right now.
I can has cheezburger, yes?
You don't get XP for killing monsters. Only loot to use in everything. How do you go and get XP?
You get it just by existing, at this point. You go on, you get some experience, and then you either save it or apply it to skills that you desire to have. Want a skill but don't have the XP? You're pretty much SOL and have to wait. I have to admit, I don't think this is really a good idea: given the fact that the crafting skills and the combat skills run off the same XP pool, you could end up just making two characters right off the bat and using one as a main while the other just sits there and racks up XP while you don't even have to lift a finger. Finally, you just log over there and run them to the first town to spend it all on craft skills and there you go.
People with more experience onhand are always going to be stronger and have more skills- it sounds like money is going to be the big thing. There's a player on the server with just under a million XP earned, but they don't have the gold to pay for the training.
I can has cheezburger, yes?
Training skills is really unclear- you don't have any one trainer to go to for skills, instead your skills are all spread over every single trainer out there. You have to go and train up a number of different skills at a number of different trainers, and as said earlier, it's really easy to waste XP and then having to wait for more takes up even more time. There's absolutely no takebacks once you spend the XP.
Honestly, I'd like to see the current XP situation switched to three pools that all grew at the same time- combat, crafting, gathering.
Right now, the Pathfinder license is the only reason this has any big number of players. Yes, you can do whatever, but the way XP is simply used to extend the playtime, to force you to simply wait more time (fifty cents a day if you're paying by the month), is kind of bullshit. No, the game's not going to be a Warcraft-killer by any means, but for the love of anything, its own mechanics are going to kill it before it gets out of the gate. They even admit that it's not going to look as good, or even have a story half as good, or anything. There's two people making this game, and in my opinion, it's only a matter of time before this goes F2P with packed-in cash shop boosts.
Paizo, I love you guys, and I love the stuff you've unleashed onto the roleplaying world. But do us all a favor and yank the license from these guys and give it to someone who can actually put a game with a story together instead of... this. EverQuest had the same idea, and they were more than twenty years ago, sheesh.
I can has cheezburger, yes?
The whole point of the game is to eventually find a settlement (or guild, if you want to use that terminology) to support you and to run dungeons/harder content with, because while you can spend experience to get stronger, in the end, you're not really going to be running around one-shotting smaller mobs. So how does this tie in to how I really seem to be falling out of love with this game?
Forcing people to play with other people is one heck of a way to piss off a bunch of your playerbase- it's also a great way to find out that even reporting creepers is a massive pain in the ass, too. It's amazing what people whisper to a female toon- I was subjected to a fifteen-minute grilling by someone claiming to be representing a guild I was interested in, in which they sought pretty much all my personal details (name, age, location, to find out if "you would be a good fit for our settlement". Uhm, yeah. It should not be hard to stomp on someone creeping like this. And the only thing you ought to need as far as if I would be a good fit is how much do I play, what kind of content I'm into (PvE or PvP), and maybe a message board/discord I can look into. You don't need to crawl up my rump and know everything single fucking detail about the person on the other keyboard.
I've said it before, there's just a two-person development team going on this, but I don't know what kind of customer service reps they have going. I'm giving things a few days to settle down and then I'm going right back in. All I can say is that it's not looking good for PFO.
I can has cheezburger, yes?
One more thing: every server is PvP enabled. And there ARE bandit guilds who will come after you if they catch you in claimed territory, or if you just so happen to be out in the field in a low-security area and aren't any good at PvP. Mmhm. Given the general nature of the internet, how long once this game goes live until we see roving clans of trolls pwning people just for shits and giggles as we did in the early days on Battle for Azeroth? Gee, just what I always wanted to have happen- to spend hours gathering mats out in the forest only to have all that work wasted by some clown who hit a button a few times and attacked me? If you're going to include non-optional PvP like that, then you have to be ready for it to be exploited and hammered by people who take perverse glee in being assholes to other people, and given that not even death is really that much of a setback unless your gear crumbles (which takes twenty deaths to do), it's, well... not going to be a fun time.
I can has cheezburger, yes?
It's a wonderful license, but it's in the hands of some rank amateurs. A license like this deserves to be in the hands of a crew who understands just what the fuck they're doing instead of a two-person team that thinks they have to design and program everything themselves. That sheer fact right there is what's killing the game and might be the reason progress is time-gated: because if you had nothing to do but sit around and grind all day and then do content you could easily just overpower everything, and you'd end up maxing out the content in, what- two, maybe three weeks? It's more than an utter pile of bullshit, it's not even the good fun kind of bullshit.
Another big problem is that the game pretty much forces you into grouping and joining with a player-run settlement. I'm not the most social person, but pretty much saying "Oh, silly you, running around all by your lonesome- this game is meant for groups, not for solo runs, silly player LOL" So you either have to run around with a bunch of internet randos or hope to anything you can convince a bunch of much more skilled players than you that somehow someday you'll actually contribute to their settlement. Mmhm. It's more "What kind of thing are you willing to do in order to make yourself useful?" In my case it was blow experience on gathering skills instead of leveling up combat skills and run out on gathering runs while hoping I didn't end up getting jacked by your friendly local roving bandit guild. Nothing makes a guy go for a cooling-off period than losing a bunch of rare mats to a fucking player deciding that you made a juicy target because your PvP skills are absolute shit.
PvP is pretty much defined by what hex you're in- either low (anything goes), medium (instigator takes a rep hit), high (have a good reason, like resource theft or etc.), or absolute (no PvP whatsoever). It's not a fun thing- there are times I just want to play the game, and not worry if there's some little scumfuck out there just waiting for the chance to fuck me up simply for loot and lulz. Basing allowed PvP on map hex instead of making it a setting is pretty much just begging for trolls to group up and start ganking everything and everyone they can come across in low-security hexes. Map out where the story leads you, camp out there with plenty of supplies, and you could make someone's life a living hell and make who knows how much profit at it. I mean, repeat after me: non-optional PvP content is very, very bad.
So far, we have required grouping and required PvP. It's not looking all that good, is it?
To be honest, I want to like this game so, so much. It has the potential, but at the same time, I think it really jumped the wereshark because it's focusing on the absolute worst thing about Pathfinder- it's not a kingdom-building game at its heart, it's an adventuring game! It's about so much more than running around the same bunches of hexes and fighting the same enemies and gathering the same nodes and avoiding the same people over and over and over. I mean, why not base an MMO around the Society, for crying out loud, instead of taking the Kingmaker adventure path, stripping out the interesting bits, and dumping it on the table? You have no memorable characters, no memorable anything, and in the end all you really have is something that might have passed for a licensed EverQuest knockoff some fifteen or twenty years ago. I mean, try to name one memorable NPC in this game? Name one moment in the story where you were completely engaged by it- hell, even minorly entertained by it?
It's simple: this game has the Pathfinder look, the license, the equipment, the everything: but, at it's heart, it's not Pathfinder, and it's not a very good MMO at all. It's a long, boring slog that requires you to join a guild even if you don't really want to and to git gud at PvP lest you lose most of what you're holding to other players rather than feel like you're actually a Pathfinder agent. It requires you to sit on your ass and grind money to pay for training because the XP system is a freaking mess to cover for the absolute lack of content and there's no dungeoning or anything involved- you wake up out of the grave because for some unspecified reason the Goddess of the Dead in this universe senses something wrong, so you wake up and sit up out of your grave and commence to sitting around and waiting for your experience to go up so you can do whatever- usually to go kill ten of these, then go there and kill fifteen of that.
Goblin Works thinks this mess is worth $15 a month, or $80 for six months or $140 per year. Honestly, at the rate this game is going, fifteen's too much. Five a month might be doable, but if this hits full release- and that's a big if, I don't have a lot of confidence in the developer- I can see it going F2P right off the bat. There's already a cash shop in the game, and we're not even out of beta yet.
There's also no real easy way to block people in this game as of yet, and yes, playing a female toon will get you harassed and begged for information, because randos gonna rando.
It might be a game, it might be an MMO, but what we have here is a buggy fucking mess of a game that barely works and has little to no polish or storyline beyond "go there, kill X whatevers, come back and repeat ad naseum".
It's not Pathfinder. Compared to the tabletop game, this is nothing more than a terrible third-party splatbook that wants to be Pathfinder.
If you really have to get your Pathfinder video gaming on, well... there's the Kingmaker video game or the Pathfinder Adventures video game adaptation. But stay away from PFO; it's about at Bless Online levels of suck.
I can has cheezburger, yes?
Reports on the official forums mention the game has one server, and about a hundred active accounts currently- and they've gone whole hog on the "terrible MMO decisions". Now, instead of paying $15 for access for a month, you can pay $5 a month per character for premium time, or keep the "free trial" status. What does Premium get you?
-The ability to gain XP while offline.
-The ability to reach a level higher than 6.
-The ability to wield any influence at all in whatever settlement you choose to sign up with (the game is just as unfriendly to solo players as ever).
There's no tutorial, the story still blows very, very badly and the quests are still just "go here, kill X whatevers, come back" type things.
Even worse?
You can buy XP for your character in the Cash Shop. Pay to win, pretty much.
I still stand by everything I said about the game nine months ago: when this launches, I imagine it will be the biggest flop the MMO business has seen since Bless Online went belly up.
But if you want to see all the carnage, you can hit up Humble Bundle and spend a buck to get two months of premium time plus some actually useful Pathfinder 1st Edition sourcebooks!
I can has cheezburger, yes?
In something that should be absolutely no surprise to anyone, Paizo and Goblin Works have announced the sunsetting of Pathfinder Online, with the servers coming offline Nov. 28th- well, if the servers make it that long:
"We’ll do our best to get through these final months as smoothly as possible, and to provide new content that brings everything to a satisfying conclusion. However, it’s possible that we won’t be able to keep the servers running right up to November 28. The servers are getting quite old, and we won’t be able to switch over to the cloud before then. Fortunately, everything looks stable at the moment and we do think they’re in good enough shape to go the distance. If things do go wrong and we’re forced to shut down earlier than expected, we’ll use the most recent available data about the state of the world as the basis for the final writeups."
So... yeah. Six and a half years in early enrollment and they still couldn't get this off the ground. I can't say I'm absolutely really surprised by this, and I still very much absolutely stand by my comment above from April 2019.
This was not Pathfinder. Hopefully with the death of this game, some studio with the resources and the time can get hold of the IP and actually make a Pathfinder MMO that's not just based around one freaking AP. I sppreciate what they were trying to do, but let's face it, the writing was on the goddamned wall two and a half years ago. It's an absolute miracle the game managed to make it this far.
I can has cheezburger, yes?
It's a pretty interesting fantasy world with a number of genres blending into it while having an actual adventurer's guild (Pathfinder Society) at the heart of everything. Much of the lore is very well written and the push and pull of their pantheon is genuinely intriguing. There's a hole in the world that demons pour out of and there's a bunch of people dedicated to killing them all day erreday. There's a whole part of the world full of dinosaurs and shit. There's a country full of automatons and egyptian shit. There's a land of Baba Yaga-like folk who also worship Baba Yaga as their rightful ruler. There's so much more.
I am not one to sing Pathfinder's praises very often, but the IP is actually super solid, and their adventure paths are largely very good, to the extent that they have started re-releasing them for use in not only Pathfinder 2.0, but also D&D 5th edition, because people want them. The few video games that exist are largely successful because the campaign is really damn good even though the game kinda isn't (looking at you, Kingmaker).
The bones for a good MMO are there, but you have to focus on the right fucking area and hook to get things started. Kingmaker without all the fucking fun parts certainly isn’t it.
I can has cheezburger, yes?
I can has cheezburger, yes?
I'd think maybe Game of Thrones, but that IP's kind of a giant pile of shit ever since the last season hit, maybe Wheel of Time, but yeah, Pathfinder's kind of the second-biggest tabletop fantasy RPG out there right now and something tells me Paizo might be more inclined to just sell the rights to some big company (something like Standing Stone, but literally anybody with the time and money except for goddamned Cryptic) and let them make the backbone of the game while they provide the writing and the stories themselves.
That's how they missed the boat with Pathfinder Online: it's because Pathfinder isn't a sandbox game, people want to join the Pathfinder Society and explore ancient ruins, fight the bad guys, and generally do exciting things, not just fucking run around in a forest all day and hit harvest nodes and wait around sitting on their asses to generate XP to get stronger... I mean, Ceiling Cat, that whole mechanic kind of made it not worth to play the game for long stretches because there was only so much you could do before you were just left with mindlessly slaughtering monsters or mining... and we want to run around different locales, not just the same goddamned interchangable forest that stretches on and on with no change at all.
Also, you can't make or keep an MMO running with just two people on staff.
Though they also now have the Starfinder sci-fi game going now, too- maybe there's room for another sci-fi MMO besides SW: TOR and Star Trek Online?
I can has cheezburger, yes?
I would have started every new toon in Absalom, start them out with the Pathfinder Society, giving them quests and shit to do and then send them to the four winds to go on missions.
Well, I was just thinking of fantasy franchises that didn’t have games, and that was one of the only ones I could think of at the moment.
But yeah, Thawmus has the right of it- focus more on the Society and then off all over the planet for exciting adventures instead of keeping everyone penned up in the Stolen Lands ala Kingmaker Lite. You have a giant, interesting, intricate world that invites adventure- make a game based around that, throw in original quests, not some terrible sandbox MMO where they couldn’t even do either half of that phrase well. Play original quests, draw on standalone modules, adventure paths and even official Pathfinder Society scenarios for more in the way of quests and DLC and expansions- and you have an absolute epic shitload of material to throw into an MMO. There’s literally piles and piles of stuff to throw in.
I can has cheezburger, yes?
there was a wheel of time game actually:
I'm not exactly holding my breath though.