Monday, 29 June 2009
slave to the grind
It’s been a while (as usual), and I’ve come to bitch some more 
I’ve been playing some ROSE Online, a bit. Actually one of the private servers iirc, AruaROSE. I knew it was going to be a grindfest, but I thought I might dig something worthwhile out of it.
Guess I was wrong.
ROSE Online is apparently published by the same guys who gave us Ragnarok Online. Not the same developer I think, but it shares so many features. For one, every character starts in a newbie class (“Visitor”), and you select a class at level 10 (1 of 4), which branches off further into 2 classes (“2nd job”) at level 70. Which pretty much reflects the same growth in many other grindfest MMOs. Yawn.
So why did I play this thing? Honestly, I don’t have anything better to do at the moment. Re: online gaming, at least. I really seriously considered going back to MateriaMagica, but MUDding solo is kind of boring. Oh yeah, you can dual in AruaROSE, it’s got the devs’ official sanction, so that alleviated the boredom some. A little. Went for a fast-melee type + FS type combo. Works fairly well, although it’s coming quite close to Flyff territory at the moment, while offering less in the way of variety.
See, ROSE Online exhibits all the same braindead noncreative approaches all these generic grindfests display. The same superficial classes and arbitrary divisions, pathetic customisation, and mindless adherence to type. There’s very little need to even consult guides, since the game features so few stats and skills that with a little reading you can judge for yourself how to build a decent character.
Fucking lame.
The problem with so little stats and skills is that it results in exactly the kind of thinking that there must exist a build X that is “the best” for that class. Any deviation from it will result in a gimped character, gimped because there’s so few ways to play them that trying to be different will result in a substandard character. I don’t know why the hell designers are so scared to go beyond the bounds. Even upgrades like add a few pathetic stats to your items, hardly enough to support building differently.
Even playing on an accelerated rate server (6x experience I believe) the whole thing is already starting to feel more like a chore than a game, and this even under strict restrictions to play for only an hour a day (I’m trying not to burn out too fast here). Imagine how fast a college gamer on holiday will blow through this thing. Bet you guys will get bored out of your skulls in under a week.
Even the FS type is freaking lame, you get like 3 buffs, faster walk, + to-hit and + dmg. Second job adds like + crit rate and amps up the others. Meh. Flyff’s assists do this during their goddamn first job days and still have more buffs. Not to mention you don’t seem to regen in this game unless you sit down, which translates into FS types needing to hit the mp bottle pretty fast unless you’ve got an understanding partner who doesn’t rush stupidly into battle hoping you’ll save his ass all the time.
The game’s background story is as forgettable as any, although you do have a choice of which faction to join, where you can do faction-specific quests to obtain points which you can redeem for faction-specific items. This is good, but barely expanded on. The quests are also pretty typical fetchquest fare. I don’t get it; how hard would it be to code a random quest generator? It doesn’t have to be totally fucking random of course, but it shouldn’t be hard to code some parameters to follow. Look at MateriaMagica; the quests aren’t random, but the few website guides for it mention that the game has like over 2,000 quests in the roster. TWO FUCKING THOUSAND. Compared to, like, 30 quests at most in the average grindfest.
The game isn’t even particularly inspired presentation-wise. The music is forgettable, although there may be interesting tunes in later areas. I just couldn’t stand the mindless elevator music what passes for the first few area bgm. Graphically it pasts muster, but you all know I have a pretty low bar for that kind of thing anyway.
Don’t really know how long I intend to drag this thing out. As it is I’ve come close to just uninstalling it and walking away several times already. I had more fun with dualling in Flyff, crap exp rate aside.
