I started the game about a month ago, and to be honest I find the game quite entertaining and refreshing.
1. Exploring the world. Its quite large and cities dot the landscape. Travel times can vary but you can take a travel agency to previously visited towns. (important for crafting!) On high scale graphics the world looks pretty good overall and I have yet to notice any graphics glitches so far.
2. Combat: Its turn based and if your into that its quite fun. Each side gets an amount of time depending on a couple of factors. NPCs enemies only get 15 seconds max. Players get 15 seconds at start and when you add your 5th mercenary at 20th level or higher you max out at 30 seconds to make necessary adjustments. Players will only be able to use 5 mercenaries or characters a round max. There is ranged combat, spells, melee and each class has a magic attack of some sort or another.
3. Crafting: there are tons of options on crafting and in order to craft you have to do battle! while not innovative it certainly beats standing at some table click click clicking away for hours on end like say, Vanguard. You select what you want to make (from skills menu) and if you have the components it tells you the number of jobs to complete it. completing a battle awards crafting job points. You can make any number of items say, 10 swords out of 1 batch if you wish, though it will take longer and more fights.
4: PVP I have just barely gotten into PVP doing just 3 fights, and I must say tactics and thought will be needed in may fights to win. You can gain points towards ranks for a win and get awards for finishing first. I will post more on this later as I have more chances to slug it out in the arena.
There are many more things to atlantica then I have time to write (im on lunch at work and times running short!) But I can easily see how this game is so highly rated. It wont appeal to all players but if you have even the slightest interest, is free to download and free to play and has an item mall. Best part is everything on the item mall can be found in the game (from what I have been told, and its near impossible to confirm.) All in all it has been quite a fun experience, I have passed the 40 hour game play mark so far and can see myself logging a couple of hundred hours in this game easily. Max level currently is 120 and you have 9 characters eventually in party.
-Sortran-
1. Traveling from point A to point B once isn't so bad. But the game sends you back and forth and back and forth and back and forth so much that a considerable fraction of your time is spent travelling. The travel agency or even buying a teleport license is of limited help here, as will restrictions mean you often have to wait a few minutes before you can warp.
3. The crafting system is of the "something stupid to grind levels in" variety. Workload restrictions do prevent the first person to get high level in some crafting feature from mass producing the item and flooding the market, so there could theoretically be some profit at the high end. But even if so, it's profit from grinding, not from doing something interesting.
4. As with a lot of other games, PvP is mostly one player is a lot higher level than the other, and thus wins easily. Free leagues try to balance it a bit, which means that the level difference might be 10 or 20 instead of 50. That's not enough to balance PvP.
Wed Feb 04 2009 6:53PM Report1) Kind of depends on your level. At level 87 where I'm at, it costs only 20 Will (2 minutes regen time) of 118 max to teleport; I almost never have to wait because I mostly teleport after I have a battle (which usually last longer than 2 minutes; so if I'm at 0 at the start of a fight, I'm easily ready to teleport after it). I can teleport 6 times if I am starting at max Will before I need to wait, and the need to do that is incredibly rare. (assuming it takes me at least 12 seconds to decide where I am porting to)
Earlier in the game it does cost more Will, however even if you are a mad-crafting trainer (which I am) or you do a ton of info trading (which I do), a teleport license helps immensely. Generally, most quests aren't too bad about the back and forth until you get to Mohendaharo around level 45.
3) I love crafting in-game, and have most of my crafting skills at above the 2nd trainer level (21) and all of them over the 1st training level (11). I don't find it a grind at all, as I'm usually making items that I either use myself or I can make a profit from. You definitely don't have to be the highest level crafter to make a profit; I started over a month after the server opened, and didn't start crafting until weeks after that, and still have made good, and sometimes huge, profits on some very low level items. It's all about reading the market and determining where supply is not meeting demand.
Crafting is also something I do when I can't commit my full brain to the game, such as if I am doing chores or hanging with the GF, so it actually feels like multi-tasking or anti-grinding.
A final note, once I hit level 11 and could train people and gain craft exp that way, I was able to level most of the way to 21 in almost all the skills without even crafting anything, just training. Not much of a grind there, it just cost Will.=)
4) I agree there needs to be some work done on the PvP and Free League. I think most of the challenges could be solved by tightening up the Free League brackets (instead of a 20 level range possibility, it should be 8 in either direction). However, I still PvP and love it and have had a good run of fights lately against folks in my level range (80-90). NDoors continues to work on changes to PvP and they have announced some of those coming online in upcoming patches, so I'm hoping they take baby steps toward a great, instead of just a good, system.
Wed Feb 04 2009 10:55PM ReportMMORPG.com writes:
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