Phantasy Star Discussion

[Kona]

Originally Posted by Valdra

Yeah, it was unlocked after about a month on the Japanese version so it'll probably be similar here. First month was a mass update with Moatoob, upgraded level cap, more photon arts etc etc. More stuff'll come

Thats what i dont get. We have to wait same time as jp do. If something is released regardless of region, just release it. All sega is doing is hurting themselves (the scores like ign and gamespot were low and less people are gonna play it online). They should of released more stuff when game came out (npc and pm ai tweak and def more missions).

[Shikimori Kazuki]

Hello there again, i got 2 questions i would like to ask again.

#1. I know that people can use a gamepad to play this game. Is it possible for me to use a pc-gamepad to play this game on the computer? Right now, im using a logitech (a playstation similar type) controller to play games. So i wonder, can i use this controller to play this game?

#2. There are of course updates for this game. Do some of the updates also apply to the single-player as well? such as new/better items, bugs stuff like that?

[Gevurah]

Originally Posted by Shikimori Kazuki

Hello there again, i got 2 questions i would like to ask again.

#1. I know that people can use a gamepad to play this game. Is it possible for me to use a pc-gamepad to play this game on the computer? Right now, im using a logitech (a playstation similar type) controller to play games. So i wonder, can i use this controller to play this game?

#2. There are of course updates for this game. Do some of the updates also apply to the single-player as well? such as new/better items, bugs stuff like that?

#1 Yes, it's gamepad accessible. I use my 360 controller and it works wonders.

#2 And yeah, there are updates for both single and multiplayer. I believe the Japanese got another chapter for Single Player not too long ago.

[Lebron]

New sequel announced, PSU: Ambition of Illuminus, and will be coming out sometime this year.

Illuminas is a full sequel, the latest issue of Famitsu reports. It includes a story mode as well as a full online mode of play. The original game is not required in order to play.

http://www.xboxyde.com/news_4052_en.html

[Question]

I played PSO:BB...and at that time i saw a game company commit one of their biggest mistakes ever...they basically told tons of their fans they couldnt give a damn.

Not literally of course.

Firstly their business model for the international version of BB was basically "Make them wait as long as possible for updates so the monthly fees will keep rolling in". Disgusting. Thats like EA putting in as little content in each game as possible so they can put the rest into "Expansions".

Secondly, they knew perfectly well BB was going to get hacked to pieces like every PSO game in the past...yet they took absolutely zero percautions. Their anti-cheating software could be bypassed by an average computer user with no special tools in less than 30 seconds. They didnt even bother with the pretense of a GM team to catch hackers...they had one GM, who basically never showed up except to meet with winners of a contest for a publicity shoot ingame that would be turned into a wallpaper(which btw, almost everyone blasted because it looked incredibly amateurish, yet took over a month to make.).

He never showed up even though 4 hackers were in the 1st game room of the 1st lobby during peak time and they had blatantly hacked levels(something like 999), they were pratically begging to be banned, they stayed there for something like 6+ hours before getting bored and leaving. A forum thread with tons of screenshots and posts asking where the GM was, if im not wrong, locked without explanation when events were over.

Gee i dont know, thats a bit like robbing a bank, sitting there and having tea for a couple of hours, and leaving without the police showing up even though people are mass calling 911 about it.

Thirdly, the so-called new content EP4 took ages to get unlocked totally. Within the first week of its initial release hackers were showing off that they had unlocked the enteriety of EP4, proving that Sega could actually have unlocked it at start, but were holding off on it to drag more monthly fees out of their customers.

Worse, the launch of EP4 was plauged by a bug where picking up any EP4 rare would result in an instant crash to desktop.

Fourthly, the boards were basically un-moderated trash. I am NOT exaggerating when i said the mods were more interested in banning people for bumping their marketplace threads too often instead of banning people who spammed and trolled a few dozen times a day. They had a nice sub-forum full of rules that pretty much never got enforced, people were blatantly spamming flames everywhere and the mods didnt care. At one point the admin even said it was perfectly fine to flame people but to take it to PMs(which btw contradicted the rules in the rules forum). The irony is that someone then flamed the admin in a PM and became the first person banned on the forums, it was pretty quick as well, within a few hours. Talk about hypocrisy. At another time the mods said to send them PMs about posts that broke forum rules as they couldnt catch all the offending posts. People did so, and no action was ever taken. I personally got threatened with a ban if i continued sending them links to posts that broke the forum rules. They said to stop bothering them with my own personal problems, if you can believe that.

At about the time i quit people were just blatantly spamming the market place forum with posts asking to trade away hacked items. They were offering truly absurd stuff for easy to get items, happilly throwing away tons of insanely rare EP4 items. Was any action taken? Nope. The economy at this point had basically gone into the gutter...for the past few months i had been playing soley for the trading mini game, maxing out the amount of photon crystals i could carry on all 4 characters, and at the end i still had tons of team points in the form of rares, a secondary form of currency. Of course some long members of the community decided to show off their absurd EP4 stuff like heavens punisher and claim it was legit, which it never turned out to be(the guy with the heavens punisher who had showed it off on the forums quit before i did, and he basically boasted that none of his stuff was ever legit, and that all the people who supported him in claiming he didnt, would never, or knew he would never cheat were complete morons).

By that time everyone was basically saying "yea there are lots of hackers but sega doesnt care, they havent done anything and never will.". The amount of people who permanently quit the PSO series because of BB was pretty amazing, i must have seen dozens of goodbye posts on the forums and swearing they would never touch another PSO/Sega game again, and thats only the people who bothered to post.

It didnt help that people who played the japanese version kept gushing about how amazing the support there was, how the devs frequently posted on the forums and were willing to discuss any issues players had, and that there was pretty much no hacking going on. Most people then blamed Sega for racism policies, if the japanese version was so good, and the international version so crappy, there was only oner eason : Sega didnt care enough about their non-japanese customers to offer them decent support and service, yet were perfectly willing to charge the same price anyway.

EP4 was just absurd for being the much touted new PSO content. The story mode was absurd...it was supposed to wrap up the story, yet only ended up making people more confused by throwing in tons of NPCs from what looked like nearly every important side quest from EP1 and 2, yet somehow managed to make it look as if they werent doing anything, the final boss battle was just a huge WTF because it had absolutely no link to the plot at all. It was just laughable how they had "blackout" scences whenever a fight between NPCs was supposed to occur. You would see some NPCs squaring off, and then suddenly a blackout and the "battle" is suddenly over, or one side suddenly decides to walk away instead.

And nearly every EP4 rare was absurd, we are talking like 100 THOUSAND kills to get one rare...Sega was pretty damn desperate to get more monthly fees...one crazy guy had a thread where he posted his attempts to get a certain rare, and it was something like 1000+ runs....i dont remember the exact number of monsters killed but it was way in excess of 10k killed. Oh and nearly every EP4 monster was annoying as hell, birds that kept you perma-stunned on the ground, rhinos that chained charged you so you could never get a shot off, etc. The whole thing felt like a shameless attempt to make things as hard as possible so players would spend as much time as possible on it, leading to more monthly fees.

So yea, i really dont see why anyone would play the international PSU version unless they were insanely masochistic or they were just serious hardcore fanboys of the series. It wasnt that long ago Sega mis-treated their fans with the international version of BB, and i highly doubt their policies have suddenly changed to one of "Lets give our non-japanese fans the best possible service we can and make them happy!".

[Varion]

Wow, feel any better now?

No seriously, I know where you're coming from. Played PSOBB for a few months (up to when they put the desert area in) and yeah, it was ridiculous. I quite enjoyed the first area, but the desert was just crazy. Kinda fun though. Never got to the boss.

As for PSU, in the few months I played it they did a few things better, and a few things worse. One in particular, which goes down as the single stupidest thing they've ever done. If you didn't hear, it was this. They decided Europe and the US would be on the same server, happily watched all the import threads then... banned anyone without a proper US credit card address (and a fair few who had one, somehow) from registering for the month until it came out in Europe. That's like someone walking up to you in the street with £30 in their hands saying, 'Here, want this?' and you saying 'Not right now no, but if you're still offering next month...'. The first few days were a bit of a joke with the servers too, but that was to be expected, really. Hackers? Not much changed, though apparently improvements have been made more recently. There were some ridiculous cases of a room bug that let you go in to other people's rooms, steal stuff from their storage and reset their Partner Machineries too, which basically meant either locking your room (thus kinda defeating the point of the shop system) or carrying everything valuable on you (defeating the point of having a storage at all). So, yeah.

In terms of content, things were much better. Mostly. The first month was a bit slow in terms of areas, but after that you generally wouldn't find yourself short of things to do. Some of the levels were quite well designed too, the Seabed-alike ones were fantastic, some of the Neudais areas were really pretty, and the Neudais ruins were really nice looking too. On the other hand, they did make the same mistake again with regards to Megid. I don't dislike hard games, I like hard games, but challenging and cheap are pretty far removed from each other and putting 7 mobile monsters with tons of HP in one room constantly shooting it at you isn't challenging, that's cheap. If anyone ever takes me into Endrum again, I think I will break down into tears. They changed the rares system, but in a bad way, but Japan suffered exactly the same in that regard so...

Basically, they did some really unfathomably stupid things with PSU but on the whole, it was an improvement over PSOBB. Not enough to keep me around, but I think I'm almost done with online RPGs anyway. I'll play Grandia Online if it comes out, but apart from that...

[Benoit]

Firstly their business model for the international version of BB was basically "Make them wait as long as possible for updates so the monthly fees will keep rolling in".

How is that different from other online RPGs? The only reason people were complaining about that is because they saw the content that the other PSO versions had accumulated over the years. You could make an argument for the difficulty unlocking, though I think that was a nice way to get people to cooperate on unlocking them. Of course, the players have to be willing...

So yea, i really dont see why anyone would play the international PSU version unless they were insanely masochistic or they were just serious hardcore fanboys of the series.

Phantasy Star Universe is a new game, while PSO: Blue Burst really was nothing more than a cheap rehash and PC port of the XBox version. That alone leads to less of an effort.

I've played PSO on Dreamcast and GameCube. I especially enjoyed my Dreamcast days, though the PKing along with the feature of dropping your weapon sucked. Apart from duping, I didn't see any serious hacking on the GameCube yet, though I hear about serious hacking on the PSO Episode III servers some time after I stopped playing the game.

I haven't played Phantasy Star Universe yet, though I plan on picking it up when I finally get off my behind to build my new computer (not in a hurry to replace my current 8.5 year-old one that works perfectly fine, though it can't be used (effectively) for compiling stuff). I saw a good price in a store a couple days ago. 30 EUR instead of the 50 EUR they still charge at other stores.

[Question]

Benoit, the difference is that other online RPGs, successful ones that is, generally do not drag things out for over a year to implement existing content that is very easy to port over. You do not end up playing WoW and thinking "Wow they have like 2 expansion packs worth of content already there but we will only get it 2 years later than everyone else."

They dragged it for absurdly long, and that was the problem.

Also yes, PSU and BB are different games. They are the same company however. Generally companies that massively screw up one game lose tons of credibility for their future games. Especially if the screw up is deliberately planned by the company and not things like "ran out of time to fix bugs" or "publisher forced us to finish it before it was ready".

[Benoit]

Benoit, the difference is that other online RPGs, successful ones that is, generally do not drag things out for over a year to implement existing content that is very easy to port over.

Can you give a couple of examples? I don't know of any other online RPGs that got ported to another platform while missing some existing content from the original.

One in particular, which goes down as the single stupidest thing they've ever done. If you didn't hear, it was this. They decided Europe and the US would be on the same server, happily watched all the import threads then... banned anyone without a proper US credit card address (and a fair few who had one, somehow) from registering for the month until it came out in Europe.

Let's put this into perspective. The video game industry is known for being against importing. Perhaps the PSU website also issued a warning that those credit cards would be blocked, I don't know. But behold, the gamer says "fuck this", being impatient, imports the game, and gets blocked. Then he/she blames the company for being stupid? I would say the stupid one would be the gamer, since he knew their policy, and they were being consistent.

There are possibly also other facets to this, like support and fair play. Giving support to an European player when the game isn't even out there yet? Doesn't really work. And when a European imports the game, he has an advantage over the other EU players, getting to play the game months before the others. Arguably, this is less of an issue, since the US players are on the same server, and already get to start playing earlier.

[Question]

No, but the japanese version already had all the content ported over to PC...infact a substantial portion already had a PC verison years ago. I think it took Sega over 2 years to unlock the later quests. Its very bad form for a company to do cheap things like this just to try and squeeze more money out of a franchise.

The stupid one is not the gamer and is Sega. How many customers and money did they lose from being so stupid? They could have simply not have had such a silly policy in the first place. They get more money, gamers get to play the game a little earlier if they REALLY want to, this is a perfect win win situation for both sides. Instead they chose to turn it into a lose lose situation where they lose customers and potential revenue, get bad publicity, and lose more customers through secondary sources like word of mouth.

Sega will continue to make bad decisions like this until their leadership gets a major shake up.

[uLTraCarL-]

the worst case was with Moatoob.

That bitch was locked for like what, 2 months? Upon release there was only a handful of missions available. 2 or 3 from the Guardian colony, 4 from the first planet (i think the planet name was Parum) with the dragon run & ruins run, and 3 or 4 from neudaiz.

Everyone kept playing, including me, in hope that they would unlock more content within the first month because honestly people were leveling up way too fast. There were people hitting the caps within the first two weeks or what not.

Fast forward two months later, a lot of people stopped playing already and then they finally send out the moatoob unlock. The sad thing is it is available in single player, which means that it is just a simple unlock or whatever the hell they do.

Another thing that was not cool about PSU was the fact that it relied so heavily on synthing crap. With armor creation percentages so friggin low, as well as having heavy material requirements, it made the process totally not worth it. Gather all your mats for some super cool armor, give it to your PM to start synthing, coming back a few hours later, check to see that it has just failed and you have wasted a good amount of time. And when I say low, I mean low like 30%. There's no way at all to raise the armor success percentage with a PM unlike raising the striking weapons, ranged weapons or what not. Raising the Body attribute helped some other crap instead of helping the armor success which seemed totally retarded.

[Benoit]

The stupid one is not the gamer and is Sega. How many customers and money did they lose from being so stupid? They could have simply not have had such a silly policy in the first place.

Yes, they could have, but the reality was that they had that policy. So it's quite stupid to whine about your importing afterwards. You know what you're getting into.

[Akeval]

So...anyone bored of this yet?

[Lebron]

Some new images from Ambition of Illuminus
http://www.xboxyde.com/gallery_5287_en.html


Hopefully, they have a Beta test again, so I can freeload and play for free till it ends

[zoomaux]

So how many of you guys already bought the jpn version ?
Stupid me, got the ps2 game and completely forgot about the dnas ^^.
However there is a real story mode in PSU, with realtime cutscreen.
The storymode has only 12 chapter and the final boss fight is pretty lame,
and overrall it is too easy.
After finishing the 4th chapter the offline extra modus will be unlocked,
where you can play the free missions offline, with your own custom character.
As for the ps2 version , a lot of framerate issues, especially later in the game,
when the ememies starts to cast spells.
It makes it feel like everything is running in slowmotion ^^, kind of annoying.
Honestly i wouldn't recommend the ps2 version,
instead get either the xbox360 or PC release.

Originally Posted by Potatochobit
i hope they use much larger group linkshells/guildchat functions this time like in FFXI or other games. i think PSOBB had 10 members max? what should we call the official animesuki group? NoNighcatgris? or PSU AS? or team potato works j/k

It took months to even get all the stuff from PSO v2 in there

I was mainly talking about the security service. It's true it took a long time for existing content to get on there, but they did that to keep people playing, and being able to serve new content every month. For veteran PSO players, it sucks, but on the other hand, it's understandable as a business practice.

[zoomaux]

image:



video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xt1k96KDFI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Zy-Vb722iA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNFsJ7iCMGk

[zoomaux]

video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR2LzVb7NAE

[siya]

I've played them on Gamecube then it came out on Xbox for Xbox live and I was like OMG YAYS!..So I played that for awhile, did alot of the quests and missions and stuffs...Talked with alot of people in the lobby..talked about stupid stuffs...and everything and alot of other things....It was awsome...I found it to be really fun....Joined a clan...Dark Prophets...Got to lvl 200, then....Everyone stoped playing...Started getting on Xbox 360 and started playing PSU when it came out..very sadning..cause I couldn't play it..nor can I now...I don't have a 360...I could get it for computer...but I don't know if the 360 and computer servers are connected, anyone know??

But anyways..if you have played it, Did you like it, and what ones did you play?

[GyroidFanatic]

For PSU, PS2 and PC servers are connected, but 360 servers are separate.

[siya]

Originally Posted by GyroidFanatic

For PSU, PS2 and PC servers are connected, but 360 servers are separate.

Ah, Ok, I see..Yea, I would play it, But I would rather be on the 360 cause of the fact I have friends on that one ^^, I've been thinking about getting the one for PC...but the fact of the fee...my mom doesn't trust putting her credit card into things on the computer (But she wil for Xbox live XD...Interesting...)...So I'm kinda at a stop point...I really want to play PSU and stuffs...but it's like UGH NOOO...I've never played the ones on Dreamcast though...But uhh, Yea....On PSU, what's the community like, are the nice? or are they like OMG YOU! YOUR FAULT! GET OUT NOW!...XD...And the game play...and what's the lvl cap?...and is there only one mission everyone does in a group?...like on PSO for xbox Everyone on live always did uhh..wachya macallits....RSF I think..been a while since I played it.. ...But, Yea, I remember doing the mission all the time, Got me to 200 in no time, So I lvled some other characters, and what not....Then it just started going down hill when it got closer for PSU to come out...I miss PSO...and I wana play PSU...I wonder if there are still anyone on PSO..I should check...