Fantasy Earth Zero: initial impressions

A couple of days ago, I was browsing around for an MMORPG that emphasizes skill over grinding and gear, when I noticed a peculiar banner at the bottom of my screen:

Hmmmm... that font and those colors look oddly familiar. Is this a Final Fantasy knock-off? I did a quick search and found its wikipedia entry. It seems that it was indeed a Square Enix game. But, oddly, the official website is http://fez.gamepotusa.com. What's the deal with "Gamepot"? Wikipedia explains, "Several months after the release, Square Enix canceled the game because of severe lack of demand. The publishing rights to the game were later bought by Gamepot, where the game has enjoyed much greater success as they dropped the subscription based element present when under Square Enix's PlayOnline service, and became a "Free to Play" game." The game just arrived on US shores on January 2010. Free-to-Play you say? I'll give anything free a shot.

"Fantasy Earth Zero is a 3rd-person action-MMORPG. There is a large emphasis on PvP on a massive scale.
Sweet! I like PVP.

"One of the features of FEZ, that makes it different from most other fantasy-setting MMOs on the Free-to-Play market, is that attacks must be aimed manually and there is no auto-attack. Players manually aim at their opponent and then click the left mouse button to attack."
Hmmm... interesting. Aim to shoot? Sounds like an FPS or Global Agenda.

At this point, I had enough motivation to check the game out, so I downloaded it and explored the initial gameplay a little



I rolled a Sorcerer. The first set of mobs are melee mobs. They have an overhead strike that they telegraph with a slight pause, so it's easy to dodge them with sidesteps or simply moving away. The second set of mobs have a ranged attack that looks like a vertical cleave that travels along the ground. The cleave travels slow and is given away by wind-up animations, so it is easy to dodge too. At this time, I have a small AOE attack, and multiple single-target ranged attacks. Another thing to note about the video is that in the first set of mobs, I use the targetting system where my cursor is free to move, and in the second set of mobs, my cursor is locked to the middle of the screen (like in an FPS).

First thing that comes to mind is that it plays a whole lot better than Age of Conan (AOC). AOC had the whole sidestep thing and directional attacks too, but the following are what the differences are. In AOC, the sidesteps are useless because you cannot evade attacks with them. Here, the attacks are either telegraphed by an initial animation root, or they travel slowly to the target. So it becomes a game of timing, attacking, faking attacks and counterattacking. Furthermore, In AOC, each directional attack was a unique ability, taking up many hotkeys or hotbar slots just to be able to swing a weapon overhead, over the left shoulder, over the right shoulder, etc. This is exacerbated by the design of AOC's gameplay that gives each person many abilities. In FEZ, each class only has a small number of abilities (you select them with the mousewheel or keys 1-6), and you use the cursor to point and attack. This frees up keyboard real estate for "sidestep" keys, keeps things simple, and doesn't distract the player from the action.

As described, you do have to aim to shoot. But the game doesn't require you to be accurate. It's more like sloppy targeting. The hitboxes are pretty big, so you can hit the targets even if they're not directly under the cursor. Although, I don't know if this will change as you advance in the game.

One thing I haven't experienced yet is the PVP:
"Armies of up to 50 players, each from their own Kingdom, can go head to head in a type of war known as "Kingdom vs. Kingdom." The KvK battles are balanced so that, on the battlefield, one side will have 50 players max and the opposing side will have 50 players. KvK battles are all held on the same server."

"Kingdom battles also have many elements that are similar to a RTS game. Players "mine" crystals by crouching next to a giant crystal. After a certain number of crystals are mined, players must trade crystals with each other to get the appropriate amount of crystals they need to build a structure or summon a unit of war. Units of war are essentially "Summons" like in Final Fantasy games, but the Wraith and the Giant require structures to be built before they can be summoned. When a player character summons a unit, they assume the form of the summon and directly control its action. Buildings can be built on the battlefield and each has its own purpose. Obelisks are used to capture enemy territory. Gates of Hades are used to summon Wraiths. War Workshops are used to summon Giants. Arrow Towers fire arrows at the opposing side."

It looks like PVP involves waging war with neighboring territories and then coordinating buildings and summoned units, in addition to personal combat. I haven't figured out how this part of the game works, so I have no comments here.

As a summary: the graphics are kinda kooky, but that's Final Fantasy style for you. That's fine by me since I don't really care about the style of the visuals of a game, as long as they look polished. What I really care about is the gameplay. The music is Final Fantasy-esque too. The combat feels pretty slick, and I can see what kind of experience they're going for. I really want to PVP, so this game's next "success or failure barrier" to me is how easy it is to get into the PVP.

Age of Conan free trial review: as fun as reading a dictionary but way more annoying

Some of my guildies brought up Age of Conan (AOC) as a game to try to keep us busy temporarily. I looked it up, and was curious about its complex combat system and its M for Mature rating. Fatalities! Blood and gore! I really wanted a game that rewarded me with some blood as I hacked and slashed. I'm not a kid anymore and I feel entitled to play a game that has more than the flashing lights and rainbows that all the MMORPGs have for animations these days. Besides, AOC's expansion was getting released so it seemed like a good time to try it (already out for some time, bug fixes, new content, etc).

I decided against buying a copy of the game and downloaded the free trial instead. I FRAPSed my adventures through level 7 and annotated them with my comments:



I am glad I did not pay any money for that garbage. There was not a strain of fun content to lead me along from lvl 1. The game's combat plays horribly and the interfaces are clunky. I simply could not get past level 7. I was confused that the game could be so shitty, so I went to my guild forums to ask for the opinions of some people who played it more:

I'm having trouble getting started... I'm level 6 now and I've been using the same 2 abilities for hours. PVE is making me cry and nothing seems to happen when I queue for that scenario thing on the top left. I keep looking at my XP bar every half an hour and it barely seems to move. When does this game get fun?

Also, the positional/directional melee combat thing seemed like a neat idea at first at first but now it just seems clunky and a waste of 3 hotbar slots. Especially with the double tap evasion bullshit. You have to start evading 3 seconds before your enemy actually does anything for it to work, which makes me feel as nimble as a hippo. Sometimes I double tap and nothing happens! Then there's the stupid shields. That feels so clunky too.

I received some helpful replies, but none reignited any desire to play. They confirmed what I thought, and that it was the game and not just me. I'm pasting some of their comments here for objectivity:

The double taps aren't really to evade individual attacks. They are more to quickly change position if you are getting surrounded. I used them all the time on my guardian to keep enemies in front of my shield, but you are right they are not very effective at dodging attacks. They do give you short buffs though after you do them. If I remember correctly going left or right gives you a small evasion buff, going backwards gives a defensive buff, and going forwards gives a damage buff.

I always found the directional attacks to be fun. At least up until high levels where the chains were 4 and 5 moves long, but I hear they have fixed that.

The shield system is just plain dumb, it was simply a failure. Most people just ignored it. The only time I could see it be useful is in PvE when a boss mob telegraphs some nasty attack. My suggestion is don't worry about it.

and:

To me it was cool at first, then I found out why Q and E weren't strafe by default and it was because apparently they were also 2 more wasted hotkeys. I must admit I never got high enough for it to matter but uh, well i was like WTF am I going to do I already have like 700 keybindings I'm used to and work fine in any other mmo.

That and wtf was with a Hard Coded auto run button??? no matter what I did I had to turn mouse 4 and 5 into god damn random keystrokes so I could use them again.did they change any of that stuff?

As for Tortage (the starting city) it took me like... 10 hours to get out of there? I was going rather inefficiently for awhile but I was still kind of pissed it took me 10 hours especially since I had Skrigg basically hand guiding me for a large portion of it.

This is another one of those promising games that reeks of mismanagement to me. I can see some ideas that have glimpses of brilliance, but the implementation/execution is a 5-star failure.