Thanks for reading, everyone, it really matters to me :)
Don’t know about your nation, but we Russians have a saying: “how you spend a year is how you meet it”. I wish everyone to meet the New Year healthy, happy and reading Chick Geek Games, so you’ll stay that way for the whole year – healthy, happy and still reading Chick Geek Games :)
Cheers,
Nina
This is a header post, like the ones you see under a “Sticky Header Posts” menu in the right column. It is here to keep my off-topic posts in one place. Why would i need that, you may ask, and I'll answer: because sometimes i want to talk about some topic that has not much to do with online games. Like, for example, to tell you about me with pics and details, or tell a little story out of my “geek” experience, or some interesting thing i had discovered on the internets. Or even to post a milestone with Chick Geek Games stats after some period of time. Well, you get it. Links will be added every time when i post something new :)
AlaPlaya is a world-wide game publishing network that is going to release ARGO Online (a hybrid between fantasy and steampunk genres, i wrote about it here and here). Now i’m getting really nervous about ARGO because of what one of AlaPlaya divisions is doing right now: www.alaplaya.eu is keep sending illiterate, dumb and absolutely clueless spam thinking they’re making an “offer” (and probably a good one!) to its players:
“Hello ChickGeek, we wish to give you some starting funds for your favorite game. Just download one of the alaplaya games, create your own charakter and buy cool items. Click here to see the alaplaya games. As soon as you have created your own charakter in one of the games, you will receive your bonuspoints”.
CharaKter. And these people are supposed to sell us games.
Who the hell are they taking us for? Some clueless morons?
Well, many of you may think there’s no problem with making grammatical mistakes. If you write for yourself or for a friend that might be the case, but writing an sales promotional copy (which this emails are obviously supposed to be in an ideal world) is a whole different thing. Some people were dumb enough to get some manager (or a student, or even some employee’s kid – a person, that doesn’t even have a clue what they are doing) to write a text that was supposed to promote sales of their games. And no one even cared to check the spelling.
Be it just one time “charakter”, okay – that would be a misspelling, but twice repeated – it means someone being illiterate. And someone else – extremely dumb, because I've got this same mail twice – today and back on 17th December. And someone ELSE had hired all of those morons and keeps paying them salaries! If I'd write a text like that for someone who pays me money for that kind of thing – instead of getting these money I'd have my ass handed to me faster, than you can say “cheeseburger”.
And all of those people are supposed to sell us GOOD games! Those who can’t even spell a “CHARACTER”, how did they managed to run the business for so long? I only hope that they outsource game translations to someone more capable of working with words…
![banner_DivineSouls[1]](https://lh3.ggpht.com/_A1qh3u1M_a8/TRhfyDU2OII/AAAAAAAAAMA/U1LinDXLqPw/s1600-h/banner_DivineSouls%5B1%5D%5B6%5D.jpg "banner_DivineSouls[1]")
When i wrote a post Divine Souls Review: Open Beta First Impression, i said, that this game has design problems and bugs, and if GamePrix won’t screw it even more than as it is now, who knows, maybe it could turn out to be a nice game after all? Well, so far it couldn’t. I was tired of constant bug infestation and dropped it. GamePrix, obviously, sees constant drop in active accounts number and sends everyone a message like “hey, you’ve asked for it, and we made the game better!” – come back, we’re all white and fluffy! I came back, just in case. Was anything working better? Not a single thing. And i see increasing number of search inquiries about Divine Souls bug and crashes. Guys! Listen up here! It’s BUGGED LIKE HELL!
Well, okay, Divine Souls is in open beta stage, right? It means, it HAS to be bugged. But it also means that we are beta testers and thus we shall send bug reports, and GrandPrix should fix them in a series of patches, and everyone would be happy ever after. Now, let’s face it. It’s not what going to happen. GrandPrix doesn’t even gather any info about bugs (there’s no obvious way to report anything from in-game), least they want is to fix anything . Do you know, why?
Because Divine Souls isn’t any beta, this game was already released at least in Japan, and if they did wanted to fix any bugs, those bugs would have been fixed already by now. But they are not, which means they’re expecting us to play “as is” for now and then start paying. But instead people get disappointed and leave, and GrandPrix thinks it’s a smartass – and sends out a spam about game improvements that did not happen (or i couldn’t find any obvious trace of them).
If you were looking for Divine Souls Open Beta bugs, here i confirm that I've seen those:
Some menu options aren’t working or not working properly. Well, are you happier now that you know other people have the same bugs as you? You may be asking, what you can do to fix all those and keep playing happily? I don’t know… maybe doing a fiery dance of Yoruba tribe and sacrificing a goat to the full moon would help, or writing an angry letter to GrandPrix… No, wait, the goat thing would probably produce more results on that matter.
Guys, it’s a game made for consoles, but released on PC as an MMO. I’d bite my own ass if it weren’t bugged after that! But as i said above, GrandPrix is pretty happy together with its own bugs. Maybe – just maybe! – after seeing a real decline in accounts activity they’ll start doing something and fix the game, but for now… just keep in mind: either you play it bugged, or don’t play at all. Your choice. I myself deleted Divine Souls until further notice...
Upgrade from 27.01.2011: New post!
Divine Souls: Not All Hope Lost Yet? Divine Souls Is Taken Down Until Critical Issues Are Fixed
This is Part 3 of the story of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. A story of the fail that really was famous in it’s days, the story of a game that was pretty much fail at the beginning of its life - but got fixed, patched and in time became a real gem that would shine if this game was released, say, last or this year – but not many people know about it. Because if you fail once, it’s almost impossible to avert the damage (and Square Enix is learning this lesson now too, i bet). So, we all heard it was a big fail, right? But how and why did it happened in the first place? And why now I'm calling this game “a gem” when you probably heard no one plays it now?
This is Part 3 of the story, you can start reading it here:
Vanguard. Saga Of Heroes: The Famous Fail Beginning And End – Part 1
Vanguard. Saga Of Heroes: The Famous Fail Beginning And End – Part 2
Vanguard wasn’t a still-born child, it was rather a sickly child born long before its time and left alone by its parents. It tried to survive as best as it could, but what it could wasn’t the best at all. System requirements made the game barely playable on the most high-end playing computers of the time and scared off so many players it’s impossible to count now, people left after just 2-3 levels. Crashes, bugs, characters stuck, mobs fighting each other (now, that’s even funny – what was a bug back then now is a feature in some MMOs), falling though the world and other stuff like that scared off another part of the audience.
The world-building took so much time that there wasn’t much left for other things, so about two weeks after the game went out, people ran out of content. It had a level 50 cap, but players ran out of content around 30 levels – those who hit lvl50 were still wearing lvl20-30 gear, because there wasn’t anything else to use. Six months later new content started coming in, but it as well was bugged like hell and lasted a couple more weeks. Another six months later (year after the release date) was released the first raid zone. It lasted for around a month of casual raiding, not mentioning for being also bugged. After another portion of six months passed, more new content was introduced (like griffon mounts) and in an attempts to make players play longer, devs tweaked drops to be extremely rare, so Vanguard apart from being bugged became also a grind fest.
All this time people were leaving. Some were coming in, but more were leaving. That made the giant game world into a ghost town. With lack of the content that Vanguard suffered every piece of content was needed, and part of it was group-oriented - but to group you had to stumble into other players – and this task was getting harder and harder to accomplish, harder with every passing month. By 2009 Vanguard player base was almost non-existent. Good thing they had brains to merge servers at some point.
SOE, who acquired the game and went on with “developing” it had no idea of saving Vanguard. Why did they acquired the game in the first – is a true mystery. It’s even possible that they did it for McQuaid, because he once worked on EverQuest and SOE has got a lot of money out of that project. Who knows. But Vanguard was – and is – a direct competitor for both EverQuests, and will never receive any special attention – just because SOE doesn’t care about it. It lets the project live for as long as it lives, merging servers again and again, but that’s all they’re doing for it.
When i started writing this story, i said that Vanguard is a shining gem. After all this you have read, you might be asking, why in the hell would i say that? Well, if Vanguard would have been released now by, let’s say, Blizzard instead of SOE, and with a lot of advertising going on, it could have been #2 game after WoW. Seriously. Vanguard’s system requirements aren’t insane anymore – we all have computers surpassing its needs with machine power. This game was of 3th generation, but it was released among 2rd generation games and looked really beautiful, so even back then there were people who kept playing it no matter what. Its graphics look beautiful even now – almost 4 years after the release! – and certainly more beautiful than many of the games released today, like Korean/Chinese cheap clones that AeriaGames is producing non-stop.
I have heard from gaming forums that Vanguard right now has serious issues with player support - being scarce to non-existent – my guess is that SOE did what Sigil did and put one or two persons on support team, and that’s the problem. But, on the other hand, many other games suffer from lack of player support, many of Aeria’s project do that, for an instance. With time that passed since the launch, most of Vanguard’s bugs were fixed and more content was added, and there is still a player-base – a really small one comparing to other games – but people are still playing. I have tried Isle of Dawn 2 weeks free trial several months ago, and noticed no bugs, but the game literally took my breath away with its beautiful scenery and solid world.
Also, Vanguard utilizes some systems not seen in other online or offline games. For example, the Diplomacy System is kind of a mini-game in itself. You play a game of cards that represents how you handle the diplomacy conversation with someone, and your deck depends on skills of your character. If in any other given game out there you can only fight your foes, in Vanguard you can talk them into getting neutral to you or even into actually doing something good for you. This opens a really interesting opportunity for the gameplay. For example, if you talk a city ruler into certain things, that city’s life could be changed for a time, and you can get some kind of a bonus out of that.
Another interesting thing in Vanguard is its crafting system. I’ll write a post about that sometimes, because it’s really innovative, but to tell a long story short: in Vanguard crafting is set as much closely as possible to actual work of real crafters. For example, to craft a metal axe you need to master several different skills, gather different tools and clothes used for crafting (because real metal smiths do not work in full plate armor, didn’t they?), and get some resources ready at hand – like bandages to use if you accidentally hurt yourself. Then, after you’ve got everything in place, you start crafting a pieces of item you want to make – and it’s not just “click and get it ready” process, there might be obstacles on your way like you burn yourself with hot steam or the furnace could crack… And when you finally had crafted something, you feel like you’ve really done a job, not just clicked a mouse button.
Some call Vanguard’s crafting system a fail too, but i saw an interesting moment during RIFT Second Closed Beta Event: players were discussing in a global chat how cool would it have been, if TRION made crafting system “like the one they had in Vanguard”. Also, in Vanguard crafting it’s not just a way to level up to Grand Master and produce some uber-super-mega-hyper-items for sale on Auction House – no, it can make you a living. Yes, that’s right, you can just travel around the world and do crafting work in different places to earn you money for living.
And there’s even more things about crafting! You can craft, for example, a ship. It’s no easy job and requires a lot of work and different professions to participate, but in the end you can get your guild’s very own ship, that will sail and transport you around the world. I can’t name other games giving an opportunity like that just out of the top of my head – well, in Dawntide they boasted you can do something like that, but i don’t know if this will be true after the release or not. Actually, i tried to play in Dawntide’s closed beta but this bugged crap couldn’t even install properly and formatted mine Games disc with 140+GB of games, so I'm staying as far away from Dawntide as possible.
But the hell with Dawntide… I’m actually planning to go back to Vanguard after New Year when I'll have some free time before writing my diploma work, and i will write in details about what is going on in this game right now, and why it’s got better. Because i really liked what i saw and i want more people to know that it’s not the fail it was anymore – and to give it a chance before its entirely gone.
This is Part 2 of the story of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. A story of the fail that really was famous in it’s days, the story of a game that was pretty much fail at the beginning of its life - but got fixed, patched and in time became a real gem that would shine if this game was released, say, last or this year – but not many people know about it. Because if you fail once, it’s almost impossible to avert the damage (and Square Enix is learning this lesson now too, i bet). So, we all heard it was a big fail, right? But how and why did it happened in the first place? And why now I'm calling this game “a gem” when you probably heard no one plays it now?
If you haven’t read the previous post, check it out here:
Vanguard. Saga Of Heroes: The Famous Fail Beginning And End – Part 1
…One more serious mistake has been made. As i said before, the game engine they choose to use wasn’t meant for MMOs back then, and it was heavily tweaked – which, of course, did not add more stability or make it less resource-hungry. Vanguard’s world was giant and seamless – you could see things miles away, and the graphics were outstanding by the time. So what did this mean? Low stability and insane system requirements. Why wasn’t it optimized, you’d ask? Well, partly probably because they couldn’t do that, and partly because the management fails again.
When McQuaid worked on EverQuest, it was running on Voodoo video cards, which was an “insane system requirement” back then, because video cards were just presented to the player audience and only a small amount of people had them. But people were ready to buy them - to upgrade their computers only to play EverQuest. McQuaid expected audience to do the same for Vanguard. He missed the point that EverQuest wasn’t a rule set in stone, it was released after Ultima Online, when player base was mostly hardcore and geek, and there weren’t many online games out (especially, online games made in 3D). So EverQuest was just the right game for just the right time. When Vanguard came off, the audience was more casual, there were plenty of games to play and no one bothered to buy anything for the bugged monstrosity they saw at the first look.
When beta-testing phase came…
…now, hold your jaw before you read next, i mean it…
…here i cite that ex-Sigil employee interview i mentioned before:
f13.net: How was QA treated through the course of development?
Ex-Sigil: QA?
f13.net: QA.
Ex-Sigil: QA was one person up until about November... ONE.
f13.net: What. 
Ex-Sigil: 100% serious.
f13.net: What? How? This is an MMOG.
Ex-Sigil: Vanguard had one internal tester for probably 95% of the design cycle.
So if you play a game and have a feeling that no one ever tested it and the devs didn’t even played it themselves, that could be 100% sure, Sigil totally proves that.
During beta stage McQuaid and Butler disappeared. Literally. At first, McQuaid played the beta, but then he stopped and was just writing on Sigil’s forums, but then he stopped doing even that, and Butler went out ever earlier. Probably they saw the inevitable crash that was coming and couldn’t face it – or who knows, why they did that - but they just retired to somewhere, stopped making decisions and went out of contact. It was right before the release, and other managers who were left alone were of course aware of the eventual failure that was awaiting to happen and were so scared of making even more wrong decisions that they weren’t making any at all. Development team then lost its decision-making center, programmers, designers and artists were working overtimes in hell (like 18 hours a day, according to ex-Sigil employee), but they were on their own – there wasn’t anyone to take lead of the team.
And then the release date came.
On January 30, 2007 Vanguard: Saga of Heroes was co-published by Sigil and Sony Online Entertainment.
On May 15, 2007 SOE announced that it had acquired Sigil’s “key assets” and thus now owns Vanguard. One afternoon prior to that the staff of Sigil were told by email to gather the stuff they would need for the evening (like keys and wallets) and to meet in the parking lot. There they heard “you’re all fired” from Andy Platter, who was Director of Production. Dave Gilbertson, who was currently in charge (being VP) was there, but had not said a single word, and Brad McQuaid or Jeff Buttler, the founders of Sigil Games Online, weren’t even there. So whole Sigil team was kicked out in a blink of an eye. Some of them were hired back by SOE (something around 50 employees), but most had to look for a new job.
Ex-Sigil: Well, worst of all.. at the end of Sigil, Brad wasn't even there to look us in the eye and apologize.
The beginning of this post is here:
Vanguard. Saga Of Heroes: The Famous Fail Beginning And End – Part 1
There is another part that will finish the post series and i will post a link to it here as soon as it’s online.
For those of you who do not have access to the beta events, here is a new trailer from TRION.
Little tip: i was participating in 2nd RIFT closed beta “Guardians of the Vigil” that took place last weekend (took 300+ of screenshots), and going to participate in 3rd beta event “Enter the Rift” that will be going on Dec. 28 – Dec. 31.
Cannot speak now about RIFT - until after NDA is lifted… oops… i think i just broke it by mentioning that there’s NDA at all – okay, or at least until the beta ends, but rest assured that as soon as it is possible i will bring you every juicy detail of why RIFT is fucking cool to play. All hail TRION! :)
It’s also very cool that they made us testers this gift of playing RIFT at New Year’s Eve week-ends, but, on the other hand – how am i supposed to be preparing New Year’s dinner while there’s an RIFT beta going on?! Don’t want to miss the beta, don’t want to left everyone hungry either. Going to be a tough New Year for me :P
Previously i wrote the Famous Fails tag for those games that look famous and popular, but in truth – if you look closely - they are actually a pretty bad choice to play. Now, this is a different story. A story of the fail that really was famous in it’s days, the story of a game that was pretty much fail at the beginning of its life - but got fixed, patched and in time became a real gem that would shine if this game was released, say, last or this year – but not many people know about it. Because if you fail once, it’s almost impossible to avert the damage (and Square Enix is learning this lesson now too, i bet). It’s the story of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. So, we all heard it was a big fail, right? But how and why did it happened in the first place? And why now I'm calling this game “a gem” when you probably heard no one plays it now? Let’s find out!
To tell a true story of Vanguard fail we’ll have to do begin with some history digging. As Wikipedia tells us, “Vanguard: Saga of Heroes is a high fantasy-themed MMORPG created by Sigil Games Online, and now developed and run by Sony Online Entertainment. Originally, the game was co-published by SOE, and the company producing it, Sigil Games Online.” Well, that’s actually not true (do you ever believe to Wikipedia? You better stop doing so) because Vanguard development did not began with SOE.
Sigil Games Online was founded by Brad McQuaid and Jeff Butler. McQuaid worked on EverQuest as a lead programmer and later as its producer and one of the lead designers, and Butler was an artist who worked on such games as Heretic 2, SW Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast, X-Men Legends 1 & 2 and other games. McQuaid left SOE after WoW just launched and (commercially speaking) screwed the future of EverQuest2, and went on gathering people to create “the best mmo, ever”. Majority of the workers who were hired by Sigil were ex co-workers on some of the past projects, other had impressive resumes and some were just friends. They all tried to form a team but, as McQuaid wrote in the series of his blog postings, management fails led to low morale inside of the team - that wasn’t the only mistake they have made.
When they started developing Vanguard, it wasn’t SOE who funded it right away, it was Microsoft who invested a huge pile of 30+ millions of dollars into the game’s production. At first, Microsoft didn’t intervene and kept hands-off the development team, but as time went one they became nervous at what is going on with their money. An ex-sigil employee told in an anonymous interview, that to keep Microsoft high-spirited (so to say) Sigil periodically showed them a pieces of game that were made especially for the purpose of showing them to Microsoft, with no intent of using that content for the actual game. But Microsoft grew suspicious, and at some point its inner hierarchy had changed – those people with whom Sigil had an agreement were gone, and the new management stopped wasting money on an ever-lasting project.
By summer 2006 – when Vanguard actually was supposed to be released – Sigil was looking for outside investors to help fund the development. That’s when SOE came on-board, not anytime earlier. It’s partly a mystery how McQuaid managed to make SOE sink into a project that, well, lacked an actual product behind the shiny show-off. Even Sigil employees did not knew why SOE would buy a game it’s not yet actually a game after such a long time in development, and especially why they would buy a project that is a direct competitor to their EverQuest series. SOE did help Sigil with money, but they haven’t really put a lot of people onto the project, it’s said to be like 5-6 persons and some help with testing. I’ll get back to testing part later, you’ll be amazed at the truth of how some MMO are tested – that would prove your nightmares, believe me… But, back on track with SOE. They never went on saving the game, they just wanted as much of their money back as possible, so by the end of 2006 Sigil ran out of funds *again* and was forced to release an unfinished, untested project that everyone saw end of January 2007.
But why wasn’t Vanguard ready in time in the first place? There were different reasons. I think, the first and the most serious problem – the root of everything else – was management failures. Vanguard was developed on Unreal Engine 2.5, which wasn’t supposed to be used as an MMO engine back then (the way it is used now is thanks to Vanguard experience, among other things), and of course it did not meant to support seamless world that Sigil wanted to implement. The game was developed with in-house tools that were only a baseline functional (for example, the engine did not even had a script language, which everyone wanted except for those who made decisions on such things). So Sigil programmers and designers were forced to literally cheat to do things they needed, which led to the development progressing very slowly and painfully.
Another mistake was the world itself. Sigil management wanted Vanguard to have a giant, seamless world. They put a tremendous amount of effort into art and story assets when the engine was barely working, and remember that they were running out of time and money at the same time. They wanted 3 giant continents (Thestra, Qalia, and Kojan) that would be home (starting areas) for different races.
But when Sigil artists started building actual landmasses it took much longer than anyone expected. Cutting one continent out meant that some races became homeless, and shrinking the world by removing pieces of continents was another problem – the continents weren’t made modular, and by the time that problem arise Thestra and Qualia were almost finished. So they cut out a piece of Kojan and by the time it was released this continent was smaller than two other starting areas. And then Sigil went back on to polish all 3 continents, which took even more time. And they were running out of time and money, remember? So building the world took out so much time that there weren’t much left for the content that would fill this newly-created world…
At first, i thought to write only one post about Vanguard, but while i was writing i found it to be too long for one-post article, so i spread it into a few different posts. Read the next part here:
Vanguard. Saga Of Heroes: The Famous Fail Beginning And End – Part 2
Hello everyone, this is an off-topic post where i give out a new picture of me and also want to let you know about recent changes i have made to the blog, some statistics on how the things are going on here and what you can expect in a near future. First thing is that Chick Geek Games runs on Disqus and supports a “do-follow” tag in every blog comment :) Disqus had been working for some time now and pretty nicely too, but there are other things added as well, like a Google.Translate widget from today on. I have noticed that my blog has visitors from other countries that use Google.Translate, so I've made this easier for you, guys :) Now, on to the other news…
Also, Chick Geek Games had been indexed by Google :) A small step for humanity, but a big step for me: this blog is less than 3 months old, and yet I see some of my pages in top 10 Google search results for certain games. Also, i know that people read me: there’s 30+ people subscribed via RSS, Networked Blogs, Google Followers, etc.
Those of you who started reading Chick Geek Games early may have noticed that upgrade schedule had changed from daily to a few times per week. The blog is certainly not shutting down, i just had my exams – i’m on 5th year of an Advertising degree, and these are my last yearly exams before i have Final State Examination and finish my Diploma work.
But - considering the coming Holidays - there may be a shortage of posts in the first week of a new year. Yes, there is an option to write posts beforehand and set them on auto-posting schedule, but i believe that writing the blog in a “living mode” is more important. Expect more games reviewed after New Year’s Eve and more analytic articles – because this blog’s first goal was to analyze why some games are good and some are not, why we play them at all and how game developers make us pay them – and we’ll get back on track!
Now, some Chick Geek Games blog statistics:
Pageviews today: 200
Pageviews yesterday: 255
Pageviews last month: 5,346
Pageviews all time history: 10,119
Pageviews all time history by country:
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Divine Souls is a free-to-play fantasy action MMO developed by Korean team GamePrix and released be Outspark, which is currently undergoing an open beta stage. And this game is some really rare weird shit, i must tell you! Their current slogan is “your console will be jealous” and that is really true, because Divine Souls is a console action made into an MMO and released on PC. I can only guess what weird stuff they were high on that made them release a game made for consoles on PC, instead of Xbox or PS3, and why they made it into an MMO in the first place. So, this game gave me a really mixed feeling… Being a console-style has both its pluses and minuses, so here’s my first impression on this game, if you’re interested. Upd.: if you came searching for Divine Souls bugs, read Divine Souls: Are Beta Bugs Driving You Crazy too? post here.
First on, why i call this game a console game? Let’s see… Because it was made that way! Remember Fable? The first part, that was ported on PC. I played it on my notebook and it felt really weird, because console games has a whole different design than PC ones – there’s no vast, open game world that we are used to, like in the Gothic, the Elder Scrolls or Fallout games – it’s more like you’re moving in a metro tunnel, unable to step to the left or to the right, because the walls won’t let you, even if they are invisible. Here we have all the same console stuff: no open world for you, just the walls and small instanced areas. If you see, for example, a tent – there’s no way you can get under it, because a wall of glass holds you out.
(btw, about screenshots here and below – they’re showing low level character because i was too annoyed with game crashes to take screens at the higher levels then.)
Another thing is controls. Unlike other console-to-PC games, Divine Souls designers had PC in mind and made a keyboard and mouse controls convenient enough to let us play the game with them. But, this game also supports Xbox compatible gamepads for PC, and to tell the truth i plugged mine in after some time. Yes, you can play with mouse&keyboard, but gamepad feels much more better – what would you want from a console game? The only problem for me was that i don’t have Xbox controller, i have an old Logitech RumblePad2 and couldn’t make the game to recognize its keys when i wanted to change the default key layout for the gamepad. The default controls worked, but not custom… I consider it a bug, because sometimes a key worked, but then stopped answering at all.
Now, about the instanced areas again. When you enter Divine Souls, there are a few common areas where quest and trader NPCs are dwelling, and there are gates leading to dungeon areas. These areas are pure instances, you can enter them alone or in a team - you’re offered to choose when you’re entering one – and also one gate can lead to several instances for different levels, which you can choose too. Also, there is different difficulty levels for each instance, new levels open from easy to hard as you progress further into the game. When you’re given a quest, you go into an instance and simply kill everything that moves in there, after you’re done a new gate opens and lets you into the next part of the instance. In the end you either just reaching a new common area or have to kill a boss mob. When you killed everyone and finished the instance, you’ve given a “bonus stage” that is like an rock-scissors-paper game and you’re getting some additional money or items in case you won.
This “kill them all” style is all what this game is about, really. Fighting system is the main promotional point of Divine Souls, because the fighting style is all console too. You probably saw the combat videos, and if not, here i posted some just last week. The second video in that post shows pretty much everything you’d see when you begin playing. Fighting consists of an attacks, jumps and blocks, all weaved into a chain of combos you have to perform. There are a huge list of those combos available from the very first level, and you can learn new ones every few levels. There are also “divine skills” that you can execute once in a while, which requires some sort of a “divine energy” and isn’t available at all time.
Fighting in Divine Souls is fun. It really is. I’d come again to play it just for the fun of it, but other console parts of the game is really letting me down with the feeling of a small, repeatable instances. And you’ll have to repeat them over and over, many times killing its inhabitants and bosses – over and over and over again, because quests are all “kill this and kill that”, and when you clear the instance chain you have to start it again - because you still are missing 3 more kobold thingies. And there’s no way you can enter an instance and just walk out of it when you’ve got enough stuff – you have to clear it to get the gate opened. So it’s grind, grind and grind from the early beginning – and it’s fun because of the fights, yes, but it can’t be fun for all the eternity, so earlier or later the grind will take your divine soul, heheh. Well, unless you’ll pause for PVP action, which at least is some fresh air in a land of grinding. Though, get your ass ready for some kicking, because a lot of time passes until you get some gear for your character.
There is one more console mark on this game: its graphics. The visuals are outdated. Those people who say that Divine Souls looks good haven’t seen contemporary A-class Western MMOs to say so, for a console game – yes, maybe it looks good, but for a PC MMO it shows a very average graphics. Textures are all blurry and covered in a high level bloom that’s supposed to hide the low-res textures. Characters looks somewhat better and not so blurred, but the models could be better too. By the way, about the characters: there’s almost no customization at all. Divine Souls has 3 classes – a girl with magic gun, a girl with big sword and a guy with cool pants. That’s it, you can’t have a guy with magic gun or a girl with cool pants, no way. Each character has 4 faces that look really alike to me; 4 hair style, that are at least different, and several options for skin and hair colors. So practically Divine Souls is a land of clones, especially considering that for now cash shop is not available and there’s just 1-2 items per 5-10 levels to wear, so many characters look really identical.
Standard feature of a console game is that its being made for a standard hardware and doesn’t needs any scalable quality levels, so does Divine Souls. Or doesn’t – it doesn’t has any options to change texture or anti-aliasing quality (if it has any anti-aliasing), or shaders, or whatever. You can change from full-screen to window mode, thanks gods, and you can pick from a whole 3 (THREE) screen resolution sizes (the biggest one covered a whole half of my screen). And – surprise, surprise! – Divine Souls has an option for stereo graphics! Thought, i don’t know how would that look, because my graphic card doesn’t supports that and my husband won’t let me install Divine Souls on his comp (actually, when he sneaked upon me playing Divine Souls, i jumped up at his scream “WHAT?! you’re playing weird shit with a gamepad?!” %)
The interface… Well, what do you guess, it’s console. Weird thing is when you play with a gamepad, you still need mouse to click in some menus, which is annoying. When you fight there are kills count showing on your screen, and when you cleared the stage you’re shown a big “Stage cleared!” sign the size of a screen and stats on this particular stage and your character, plus rock-scissors-paper stage i mentioned above. Totally not an mmo-style, i tell you… feels like I'm playing an offline fighting game or something...
Music and sound effects. This is where Divine Souls rocks and sucks at the same time. The music is really, i mean it, really cool! Especially the one that plays when you’re in a fight – it’s very energetic and the compositions aren’t too short, so it’s not very repeatable. Reminds me of an Unreal series score, the one they released on a “History of Unreal Music” CD. Also, the characters are speaking, the voice acting is not full, but many quests trigger cut-scenes where characters speak to each other. But I'd rather prefer to shut up some NPCs, because some voices are very annoying, the old mage guy for example. Each time you speak to a trader or quest NPC they say the same phrase over and over, and you can’t shut them up. Sound effects leave mixed feeling too: there’s not so many sounds coming up when you walk, so for example walking in water triggers the same “splash” sound over and over again, which gets pretty annoying too. When you fight there are repeatable sound too, but not so annoying at least.
And now it’s time for a part where i go totally apeshit and kick GamePrix where it hurts. When was Divine Souls closed beta? Back in August. What have changed since then? Nothing, it’s the same bugged crap it was before, for as far as i can see. Couldn’t they do something to the resolution options in four months? Apparently not, and there is more things that made me angry.
There are still GUI problems – i assume, they’re calling it features in their inner meetings – you can’t change anything in GUI, even resize a chat window! Some windows you can’t even more on your screen, while some other are perfectly movable. Why is that so? A mystery to me. The chat window is supposed to be hiding automatically when you don’t need it, sometimes it hides its header (where channel names are written) and you have to click in a empty screen space to change a channel, because it won’t come out to show what you’re clicking!
Next – the game is bugged. They had 4 months since closed beta to fix that stuff – okay, you didn’t want to add more items, or more screen resolutions, or fix the interface – okay, let’s imagine it will be fixed sometime on the live servers. But the bugs?! How could you not fix your critical bugs, hello! The very first critical bug is found right away, it seems to me that Divine Souls has some serious memory leakage problem because the game hangs on every half an hour AT BEST. Maybe it’s not so obvious on a machine with 4+ GB RAM, but on 2GB it can even happen each 15 minutes if i go between zones too often. Sometime it’s possible to alt-tab and close Divine Souls, but sometimes it hangs so bad that only a reboot helps. There are other bugs with controls and with speech freezing and repeating, but it’s minor and at least could be endured, but rebooting every half an hour… ugh, no.
So, to sum up it all…
1) Console stuff all over the place, no open world, feels like metro
2) COOL fighting
3) COOL music
4) Sound & graphics is average at best, but it doesn’t really matter in a game like that
5) bugs, bugs and bugs! that’s what matters
And 6) some serious grinding on the horizon
I’d give Divine Souls 50\50 – if they at least fix the most critical bugs, it will be possible to play and have fun. And we’ll have to see what comes with the cash shop, because it’s not available yet – how will it affect the gameplay and how much money will it require? Anyway, i will keep and eye on this game, in hope that GamePrix won’t screw it more than it did already – and maybe it will turn out to be a nice game for a niche it created, who knows?
Upd.: if you came searching for Divine Souls bugs, read Divine Souls: Are Beta Bugs Driving You Crazy too? post here.
Upd. from 27.01.2011: Divine Souls: Not All Hope Lost Yet? Divine Souls Is Taken Down Until Critical Issues Are Fixed
Alicia Online (aka Project Alice) by GameTree is an online fantasy horse racing game currently getting ready to be released in Korea and I mentioned it in this post, where you can find game’s videos before. We – who joined its Korean beta or just saw the videos and loved the game – are all curious if this game is going to be released on English and when will that happen. I know from the statistics that many people come to this blog searching for Alicia Online English release news, and here i have some for you!
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THIS POST IS OUTDATED, as of July 2011 i have got a never information about Alicia Online English release – proceed to this post
Alicia Online: News About English Release As Of July 2011 – Also, More New Screenshots!
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Also, there is now a way to play Korean version of Alicia Online, if you’d like to know more – proceed to one of these posts:
How to register an account in a Korean game – finding KSSN (Korean Social Security Number)
How to register an account for Alicia Online – step-by-step walkthrough
How to download Alicia Online – step-by-step walkthrough
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Alicia Online has an official Korean twitter account, where fresh game news are posted and fan questions being asked. I asked if they have plans to release the game on Western or Europe market (some of you who read my twitter may have seen that message on Korean), and I’ve got the following answer:
alicia_fan 말과 나의 이야기, 앨리샤
@ChickGeekGames 현재는 국내에 성공적인 런칭을 목표로 열심히 준비하고 있습니다. 국내 서비스가 안정화 되면 그 이 후 해외 진출을 생각해 볼 수 있을 것 같아요.^^ -GM각설탕-
“Currently we’re working hard on the most successful launch of the domestic version, which is a primary target now”, GM SugarCubes says, “After stabilizing the domestic service, i think we can consider overseas [service] after that”.
What does this mean to us?
A) There is no English version in the works, and it’s NOT going to be released anytime soon like “spring 2011”.
Because, there is a rumor that people keep repeating without citing any source: about Alicia Online being released on English “til’ the end of 2010 or early in 2011”, which is obviously not true.
B) There may be English version after Korean release, depending on how successful it turns out in Korea.
So cross your fingers, guys and girls, and sit tight!
Some Alicia Online screenshots in the meantime:
A list of other posts about Alicia Online can be found here:
Alicia Online: Fresh News, Tips and All You Wanted to Know
Divine Souls is a free-to-play Action-Fighting MMORPG developed by GamePrix and published by Outspark, that is said to “make your console jealous”. Game’s background story is build up on a mixture of fantasy with a light addition of science fiction (mages travelling on spaceships, that sort of thing), so the world seems to be at least different comparing to those average MMOs we got around. Looking at the game footage, Divine Souls is supposed to be offering rich console-like action that is also hard to be found in average MMO, plus it would be possible to play with gamepad - ??? – don’t know how it turns out, but i want to check it out! Divine Souls open beta starts in just 4 days – December 14, so don’t miss it. See the game’s screenshots and video under the cut.
Upd.: Follow-up post:
Divine Souls Review: Open Beta First Impression
The graphics looks nice enough, at least characters. I don’t see any major eye-staking flaws.
Here’s promotional video released by Outspark, it certainly shows lots of action:
And here’s an actual gameplay footage from a Japanese player - Divine Souls has already been released in Japan.
