It's been announced Phantasy Star Online 2 is going to be a Free-To-Play game with microtransactions.. What about price of admission? Pay-To-Win? http://www.dualshockers.com/2012/03...e-to-play-and-supported-by-microtransactions/
I'm wondering how playable it will be w/o giving any money... Also, I thought the Vita version wasn't due out until 2013. Maybe that's whitey version.
http://www.tssznews.com/2012/03/26/pso2-planned-for-mobile-going-freemium/ I seriously hope this doesn't impact the IQ of the game on PC at least.. It'd be a good excuse to keep the graphics looking like they do now(Because honestly, it looks like a game from 2006/7 ish. and in the long run it's going to start looking dated to many people real quickly, PSO1 was high end looking for it's time IMO at least). Though that's only one small aspect of the game. Waiting for it to come out is killing me. I dont' want to judge it until I play it for myself. BAH (Because there are also a ton of good posibilities that can come out of all this.) Here's hoping to the best Gentlemen!
This is very bad news. Having played Sega's Spiral Knights (which sucks BTW) under the free to play model there are very disturbing issues. Less disturbing is that you sort of have a limit on how many dungeons you can enter per day. If you pay for an elevator pass, you can travel in more dungeons before you run out of juice. In fairness the juice does seem to regenerate slowly so you can probably quest again the next day, but unless you pay, it seriously hampers your grindings. The more disturbing issue is that you can only get currency by buying it and in order to progress through the ranks, you need the virtual currency to complete wsome missions, or be stuck as a noobie forever. Personally I prefer the Team Fortress 2 free to play business model - everything is free, as in completely free and the unpaid user gets the same loot via random drops, those who pay only get it without the luck. I'm guessing under a similar model Sega will be selling items such as the Spread Needle and grinders to +99 for those who cannot or will not wait.
I guess for me PSO2 doesn't peak my interest because it is more like a new iteration from PSU than it is PSO. It is only PSO in name. The visual style of the game just isn't the same. The colors are desaturated with many opaque colors a la PSU instead of the rich vibrant over-saturated colors of PSO. Also, I know developers were trying to use "realistic" textures on the Dreamcast when they made the game. They tried to use textures for grass, rocks, etc in the Forest areas. However due to the low texture resolution and low polygon environment, this was a much more surreal and abstract world for the end user. In PSO ragol seemed very much alien and foreign. The environments in PSO2 are a bit too familiar. I am sure PSO2 will be a decent video game, I just have a hard time making a connection between the original PSO's and these newer online phantasy star titles.
http://pso2.jp/benchmark/ http://bumped.org/psublog/pso2-the-c...us-mini-guide/ Phantasy Star Online 2 Benchmark and Character Creation tool is out! This is some of the best Character Creation i've seen since Aion came out and the original PSO! *Game settings @Maximum* 720p Benchmark Score http://img4.imageshack.us/img4... 720p GPU Overclocked Benchmark Score http://img528.imageshack.us/im... 900p GPU Overclocked Benchmark Score http://img864.imageshack.us/im... 1080p GPU Overclocked Benchmark Score http://img641.imageshack.us/im... Reference From Sega ★ Less than 2000: Please adjust your game settings because the processing load is quite heavy. ★★ 2000 through 5000: The game runs fine at the setting, if you have room, you can adjust some settings. ★★★ 5001+: The game works wonderfully at this setting. According to the Minimum Requirements, the specs are awfully close to that of the PS3.(the GPU at least) I wouldn't be surprised if they made a PS3 port in addition to the already announced Vita port. I'm pretty excited. The game looks a lot nicer than their official screenshots have been showing the last few months on maximum. Still up close, character Textures/NormalMaps/SpecularMaps/etc are rather Disappointing looking. And the dynamic shadows look pretty nice, now they just need some sort of filtering/Jittering like Crysis did and they will look amazing. Environment texturing seems to have gotten a lot higher quality as well, and there is some AA which looks pretty good but there is still some pixel crawl/aliasing. Don't know if it's because they use POST-AA or it's Shader/etc aliasing. Hopefully they'll have even more higher quality options for high end PCs once it's released. Considering it's already SUPER SCALABLE(SRSLY , @ 720p non Overclocked with the settings at 3 with basic shaders and High-res textures , I was getting over 300FPS and my score was gigantic). There is no downside to giving us that extra mile for PC. PS. It DOES NOT LOOK "Realistic"(High Resolution textures only further the Art Style, not "Realsim" Just look at The Darkness II for example. It has fairly high res textures , but they all go for style than realism.) Seriously this PERFECTLY replicates the visual and musical style of PSO1. Don't say otherwise until you try yourself. Keep it up Sega!
LOL, I only got 1200 points with everything at maximum. I agree about the art style looking like DC PSO, don't usually play MMOs but I'll probably give this one a try when it comes out.
Cheers for the heads up. I've actually been rolling back the clocks to stock and undervolting today - I literally just got my CPU vcore to a stable 1.048 then noticed this thread. Under the same logic my GPU has been reverted to reference spec too (gpu @ 822mhz vram @ 4ghz) so at stock/undervolt @ 1080p maxed settings with 2500K + GTX 560 Ti I got a score of 6896. Basically that means I was well above 60 FPS at all times so I can get a smooth experience with the best visual quality. Actually I didn't get around to undervolting my RAM yet, but I did cheat and drop it from 2T to 1T commands whilst keeping it at 1.5v. Keeping the 2500K turbo @ 3.4GHz but ramping up the GPU to a moderate 900mhz with vram @ 4.2ghz (there are factory overclocks at this... easy mode ) gets me a score of 8217. I tried again with one of my significantly higher albeit unstable settings but it wasn't too keen on it (though RE5 is ). The bottom line is a well built mid range machine can easily smoke this thing at max quality on 1080p so if you have a half decent PC you should do alright. As for the visual style, it does look good but not great. I am assuming this is to ensure the game will run well on more mainstream machines so you don't need to be an enthusiast to experience it. In any case I'm looking forwards to playing it (without hacking it!)
Being LeGIt means playing the way it's meant to be played. Boy I got 5000 something at LV3 with a PC that was high end in 2008ish. So if there's something this game is not is heavy. Edit: And I tinkered a lot with the character creator thing, this came up: Called her "Drim"....
I was looking through some menus and you could be right regarding a PS3 port. I can't read a word of Japanese, but I noticed what apear to be different controller schemes and stumbled across one with PlayStation icons (see attached image). Nothing strange there given there is a Vita port, but Vita has R, not R1. You only need to number it when there is more than one, which would suggest R2 on the controller and thus a Dual Shock. Or I could just be a tard and the Vita shoulder buttons are called L1 and R1 but the Vita manual refers to them as L and R only http://manuals.playstation.net/document/en/psvita/basic/partnames.html If anyone can read japanese maybe the icons are just superficial for the PC version and you use them to display the correct icons for the controller you are using? AFAIK DualShock can be used on PC too. FYI PSO2 also supports my Xbox 360 controller too
The game is super Scaleable which is a great decision on their part. Considering the minimum is like a 7800GT too hah. Undervolting eh? Hah. Man, if I undervolted all my components I can't imagine how good of temps i'd get. I have everything super overclocked/overvolted and I still get great temps because of my airflow/cooling. Specs: (1st Gen) Core i7 950@4.2Ghz , no turbo boost or anything like that. 6GB DDR3 (Tri-channel) RAM@1600Mhz(1333Mhz def) GTX460(V1 256-Bit Bus)1GB@900Mhz Core, Max voltage,2100Mhz VRAM(720 Core/1800 Vram default/reference) (Max Temps only go to 72C Overclocked with a super quiet fan profile. I only use my OC preset for more demanding things normally though.)
Oh I have good airflow/cooling and have overclocked the balls off my PC before and I have no problem giving it a premature death provided it lasts 3 years to get replaced by something better, it's just so annoying when I've only got crappy 1 watt speakers and the fans kick in to turbo whenevber there is a fancy effect that takes the GPU above 50 degrees;. I could invest in some crappy 2.1 speakers which I may do next pay day, but for the time being undervolting is lowering my temps thus cooling requirement thus noise so I can hear the footsteps or whispers in games etc, plus it doesn't hurt to save a little bit of electric, especially when I get in the mood for a marathon EDIT: Overclocking the CPU from 3.3 to 4.8Ghz made no noticeable difference. Overclocking the GPU to 1Ghz and VRAM to 4.8GHz (and loading off a RAMDisk) got me a score of 10139... which in a way makes sense as the GPU does most of the work @ 1080p / lvl 5.
