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.

Global Agenda: Introducing... Assault

I recently got my Assault to max level. This was a class I initially thought I'd never play, but after levelling up a little and unlocking some skills and weapons, I appreciated the damage and the point-and-shoot gameplay of the class. Of all the classes, the Assault plays the most like a traditional FPS: damage damage damage (bombs, guns, rocket/grenade launchers). You have the option to spec for defense so you can take a lot of punishment and be easy to heal, but I specced mine for straight up RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA MAX SPLASH DAMAGE and equipped the Magma-"Noob"-Lance rocket launcher.

The MagmaNoobLance does a lot of direct damage, some splash damage, and ignites the target with a DOT. In addition to damage, the other nice thing about the rocket launcher is mobility --- find the target, squeeze trigger, and move on while the rocket is in the air. The disadvantages of speccing the Assault for damage are that you're squishy, and it consumes a lot of power. In a few instances in the video below, I had insufficient power to kill the target under my crosshair. Also, my spec is more for solo play, and there are specs that synergize with other classes (like the Medic) better.

I'm not as spry as I used to be and can't really "air-rocket" in this game (yet... :P), but the Assault is fun to log into sometimes for a change, and turn my brain off and pew pew.

Robotics: fun with turrets (and drones)

After spending more time with each class, I'm starting to like Robotics a little more than the rest. The set of equipment I've settled into has: Personal turret, Hornet and Grizzly. The personal turret is a deployable with a short cooldown, short range and can fire 180 degrees around it with 100% accuracy. The hornet and grizzly are drones that automatically attack targets in range. Turrets stay alive until they are destroyed or another turret is built, while drones only appear for a short time.

In the past, I've either focused on turrets and stations and had a more bunkered style of play, or I've been super mobile, flying around and dropping drones to do all the dirty work. But lately, I have found that it's actually very effective to use both turrets and drones together. I've even ditched all my defensive abilities like shield wall and healing station.

My first priority is usually to find a super sweet spot to set up my turret. A well-placed turret can really ruin someone's day, and can be the difference that wins or loses games. The super sweet spot could be somewhere just outside everyone's field of view, or somewhere people are not paying attention to. In "escort the payload" missions, this can be in a nice blind spot around the corner that people are going to walk by, where they don't realize the turret until they're dead. However, once the turret is up, it's only a matter of time until it kills enough people and people start to notice and try to take it down. This is where I used to have troubles in the past. Someone would enter the "deadzone" behind the turret's arc of fire and try to destroy my turret. I've tried to spec for rifle damage but I couldn't kill my target before my turret died. I also tried speccing for max repair power, but I couldn't heal my turret through the damage or they'd stop attacking my turret and start attacking me instead. Then, with my turret down, my killing power would drop drastically for a while and I would have lost control over an area.

This is where the drones come in. By using drones with turrets, there are no longer any deadzones. Anyone trying to destroy my turret at close range will be welcomed into a 360-degree meatgrinder. I can also set up nice angles by using the turrets with the drones, by being in two places at once. E.g. a turret can pressure people to hide behind a rock, and I can then drop a drone behind the rock. The drones work well to take out enemy turrets too.

The following video starts of with me setting up a turret in a blind spot right outside the enemy starting point. It slaughters people one after another as they fly out. The mission is "payload escort" mission. I was on the defending team, so our goal was to make sure that all the bars in the top right of the screen don't turn red. We actually get pushed back all the way to the last checkpoint, but we stood our ground and repelled the payload. On my hotbar, C is Hornet, X is Grizzly and E is Turret.



The next video shows robo gameplay on other missions. The video ends with a short clip of me and another robo working together in a Payload mission to set up a nasty bunker in a stairwell to stop the payload. He also deployed a sensor, so you may notice that many stealthers that tried to sneak in to blow stuff up got busted and shredded.

Global Agenda early start gameplay videos

This weekend was Global Agenda's early start. Pre-order customers were given the opportunity to get all their characters to level 10. Although there are 4 classes, I only got 3 to level 10 because the Assault class just wasn't that appealing to me. Gameplay videos below.

Recon: sneaky stealth ninja that can spec for melee attacks, long range attacks, or bombs. The best class to take out key enemy support units like turrets and respawn stations.



Robotics: robomaster who can summon force fields, turrets, healing stations & drones. Playing this class reminded me of the board game 'Go' (which I'm not good at).



Medic: healer who shoots out green beams of healing goodness to allies (also has healing bombs and AOEs). A medic can also spec for poisons, debuffs and DOT damage.