Neo Steam Open Beta restart
Of course there was a character wipe before the open beta of Neo Steam. As such, I had to start over. I picked the same faction, race, and class as last time, and ran through the same beginning quests. Flipping over the rocks still takes an annoyingly long amount of time. ;) Talking with Neko about it, he agreed with me.
I ran into a very interesting bug while trying to do my specialization quest. I was killed, but was still standing and able to run around the map. I couldn’t target anything, however. When I selected to be rezzed, I ended up back at the save point, but the rez menu was still on my screen, and I still couldn’t target anything. I ended up having to log completely out and then back in to be able to do anything. I tried to get some screenshots of it, but apparently they didn’t take.
As for the oddness of screenshot above, that requires a bit of explanation. When you aren’t standing directly in front of an NPC, and then try to talk to them, the game temporarily moves you in front of them. Though, sometimes this doesn’t work right, as seen in that screenshot where I ended up talking back-to-back with the NPC instead of face-to-face. ;)
Thankfully, I’m not getting stuck in terrain like I was in the previous beta phase… that was really annoying, especially when you were out in the middle of nowhere trying to run to a location to try and find certain mobs… and there weren’t any mobs in the area you could use to pull yourself out of the terrain by attacking.
For all the odd and/or annoying things I’m pointing out, I’m still having quite alot of fun playing Neo Steam. Let me go ahead and list off several things that I love about this game, especially in comparison to the other MMORPG I have significant experience with, Aeria Games’ English release of Shin Megami Tensei: IMAGINE, which I will be abbreviating as Megaten.
- Items don’t have “durability” and thus don’t need to be repaired.
- Global shouting requires level 15, plus an expensive in-game item (bough with in-game money, not real cash), and it uses up Neo Steam.
- First off, you have your equippable Neo Steam tank, which can hold only so much Neo Steam.
- Second, you have to pay in-game money to refill your Neo Steam tank. (Though I believe this only kicks in once you hit level 15, which again is the level you can start sending shout messages at.)
- Third, you’re only allowed to purchase a certain allowance of Neo Steam per hour.
- Costumes
Items having durability is really annoying. Having to keep track of that, and then pay out gobs of money to repair your items is really frustrating. Especially in Megaten, where when you repair items, they have a chance to lose max durability. And when that max durability hits 0, the item is broken and disappears. This applies to all items, even ones you may have purchased using real money. The only way to regain durability is to buy one-use items for more real money to recover said lost durability.
Sure, some may see this as a downside, but I’m sure it will prevent blanket spamming by bots, or at least curtail it. Someone has to spend the time to level each character up to 15, buy the item, and even then, they’re limited to a certain amount they can do. This is because of how the Neo Steam system works.
All these together serve to make it more expensive and annoying to try and spam the shout channel, hopefully serving to discourage such activities. I would compare this to what craigslist did to discourage employment ad spam, institute a nominal fee such that a few postings here and there isn’t a big deal, but it becomes prohibitively expensive to spam the service with listings.
There were times I had to just shove global into its own tab in Megaten to just get rid of the spam so I wouldn’t miss other important messages. This wasn’t just bot spam, though there was some of that after a while, but also just people doing random stuff like having entire random conversations unrelated to Megaten over the shout channel. Or people just randomly spamming to be annoying. I believe this system would tend to curtail such abuses.
Okay, so you’ve got a nice set of gear with nice stats, but you like the look of a set of gear with lower stats. You can take those nicer looking items and use a premium item called a costume scroll to turn them into costume items. Costumes change how you look, without changing your stats. Yes, premium items cost real money, but they’ve got to make money somehow, right? At least they actually give you the option to do this, which I think is awesome. ^_^
I don’t know of any other MMORPG that allows this, certainly not Megaten, and not WoW from what I understand of the game (never really played it much, just one session in the starting area on a trial account is all).
I’ll be posting more as I work my way through the game. ^_^
Tags: beta, mmo, Neo Steam, Video Games
