The creator of this video has been following the development of this game since 2011 and has also played the Russian CBT/OBT, Korean OBT and the current rebuild project, and the Japanese OBT. Thus I found it to be one of the most informative overviews to date.
This is a title which I know I would enjoy from the visual perspective because it has excellent aesthetics in terms of world environment and character customization. The combat and character development/progression portion were where my doubts crept in mainly since the former was hampered by original design choices as well as the larger technical issues which resulted in client/server FPS lag (Russia version). It remains to be seen how the netcode portion of the game will fare when dealing with the type of geographical dispersion that exists in the America and European regions.
As I’ve noted before, the biggest issue with this title is that it has not (already) had a very good set of impressions (prior to the rebuild project). Most smaller developers/publishers do not have much wiggle room when it comes to getting that initial impression right. The global version actually has a bit of leeway on this given the fact that Aeria Games (poor reputation when it comes to pay2win monetization plus internal corruption with how game related issues are handled) decided to drop publishing it.
Thus Neowiz will be calling the shots as far as how they intend to do early access on Steam and whether or not they will front load the monetization via the paid early access/Founders pack route. I still believe the rebuild project is an attempt to at least recoup a portion of the original development/production costs by trying to tap into the whales that spend a lot at the start.
The rebuild project is nonetheless taking time (and money) away from actually designing and developing new content. That IMHO is going to be a huge stumbling block because unlike many other Korean MMO titles that are brought to the west (where its original content is divided up and stretched out), Neowiz isn’t going to have that huge of a buffer. Western markets tend to blow through content quickly which adds to the challenges of managing a viable production schedule.
Going off on a tangent, the other bigger challenge is level of support. Webzen’s Dublin based global team is learning the difficult lesson of trying to have a relatively small team deal handle support related issues with MU Legend (which I stopped playing back in early December). During the months leading to the original OBT launch date (summer 2017), their team was confident they would not run into the same problems other publishers had. As they’ve learned, they are at the mercy of their overlords in South Korea and can only put out PR speak in the process.
I’m still seeing players (many who are innocent) being improperly flagged/restricted/banned in Webzen’s poorly designed script. They even tightened up GameGuard (which again is a poor excuse of an anti-cheat system) where it caused the game from failing to run on some systems (also dependent on other development software installed on those systems) unless Intel virtualization was disabled (since the tightened up parameters was meant to detect virtual machines from being used in addition to development software that GameGuard saw as a potential cheat vector). <- This right here is amateur/asinine level decision making since there is a point where a game and its systems should not interfere with being able to fully utilize the functionality of ones own system (especially for folks who use development tools/suites).
Support wise, it’s also unacceptable that there are players who are still waiting for a non-form response to their ticket from 3 weeks ago. Some publishers with poor reputations (like Trion Worlds), I can deal with for awhile but after watching Webzen fumble around with MU Legend like this, I know they are not worth supporting. The cynical side of me does not believe that Neowiz will fare any better trying to self-publish (through Steam) while trying to save operational costs with a thin support staff. I honestly would like to be proven completely wrong on this since this is a title I would like to see succeed on its own merits.
But I cannot ignore the business side ethics with how many of these Korean MMO development studios are cut from the same cloth and have leaders running them who merely see the western market as one final cash grab (aka suckers) to make whatever they can so that they can use that money to move on to the next thing. I also don’t like saying it this bluntly because there are a bunch of games from South Korea that I do enjoy playing due to their aesthetics and combat. But I’m also realistic about how far the developers will go with actually listening to feedback from their western audience. Generally speaking, most times the suggestions end up being filed into a virtual file cabinet that looks like a trash can.
This is why I tend to play them the way I enjoy playing them (as opposed to slaving away with the dailies or getting on the designed hamster wheel grind). I realize this tangent is heading way off the original topic so I guess that is better left to another post (which I kind of touched on before) as to how someone like myself (mostly a solo ARPG/rogue-like/dungeon crawling player) could find any sort of affinity playing some of these MMO’s (which are usually the antithesis of the previous mentioned genres).
