/v/ - Video Games

Fuck that turned out to be a lot of text.

PSO may not have as flexible movement as PSO2, but it is in fact far more skill-based than the grindy mobs of later online Phantasy Star games where it's hard to do anything without teammates. And there's still no replacement for the original's solid Challenge Modes.

>Yeah I get it, it's an MMO

Also it's not a fucking MMO you idiot.

Play PS1 if you enjoyed PS3+4. It is hands down the greatest third generation JRPG.

>>15473048

Massive Multiplayer Online

Pretty much is, the hub area where you are when you first log in is the big part of that and allows for multiple players across the world ot party up

>>15472837

psobb made character faces look more anime compared to older versions

the slower pace of old pso is comfy

the old pso music is more synthwavey compared to pso2's more orchestral aesthetic

no dodge rolling and inhibited movement in proximity to enemies is good in pso. it encourages strategic engagement. old pso has less power creep than pso2. very hard mode remains challenging for many levels after it is unlocked. ultimate mode was actually designed to be challenging even to hacker players which sega decided that they couldn't control back in the day. now that there is a better system in private server psobb to enforce a separation between legit and hacked playstyles the ultimate mode presents a great challenge to legit players well into endgame levels.

old pso is for players that prefer a relaxing pace of gameplay with potentials of being more strategic and challenging than pso2 in certain areas.

PSO1 is to PSO2 as GW1 is to GW2. Separate audiences.

blocking in pso is rng based and dependant on your evasion stat vs the opponent's accuracy stat. it is also dependant on the angle of the attack. an attack from the front is more likely to be blocked. you don't usually want to raise your evasion too high because then enemies can lock you into continuous blocking animations that interrupt most combat actions. the defense stat only reduces damage taken from hits. sometimes its better to have high defense and low evasion so you can take hits while still attacking.

I had a similar experience to you, OP.

One of my best friends was looking for games to play in Dolphin, and he found PSO. He talked wonders about the game, and I decided to give it a try. What I found was a boring game that consisted entirely of pulling monsters near the door, then pressing buttons in a rhytmical pattern until they dropped. I picked Support and it was even worse since I just mashed the fireball button and looked for mana potions in my inventory from time to time. Then the boss came, he jumped on top of us, the camera started doing weird shit, and we died.

And he still swears the game is good, and the issue we had was that we didn't have any quests unlocked (yeah, apparently you have to unlock them first in single player), but I can't believe how fucking boring that was. The music and aesthetics were top tier, but the gameplay was total ass.

PSO2 sucks.

>>15473042

>And there's still no replacement for the original's solid Challenge Modes

How many maps/modes were there in the original?

PSO2 does have challenge mode, but it only has two maps.

It's a great mode that has a lot of potential but they just abandoned it. I assume to focus on shitty arena pvp that nobody plays.

>>15473537

>you didn't start the game properly, so of course you didn't get a good experience

This is appropriate for Dwarf Fortress, nothing else

>>15473562

pso challenge mode has 15 maps

10 for episode 1, 5 for episode 2

>>15472837

>Why play PSO1 today?

For the online gameplay

>>15473632

correction, 9 maps for episode 1

episode 1 challenges:

#1: forest 1&2

#2: caves 1

#3: caves 2

#4: caves 3

#5: mines 1

#6: mines 2

#7: ruins 1

#8: ruins 2

#9: ruins 3

#1: vr temple

#2: vr spaceship

#3: gal da val island (central control area, jungle, mountain, beach)

#4: seabed

#5: east and west towers

>>15473574

What? This is a thing in virtually any RPG that has a class system. Most games even do a decent job of warning you that some classes are harder than others (D&D CRPGs are a noted exception and assume you are a max level grognard; most peoples experiences with those games boils down to what class they chose).

>>15473562

There are a lot of "maps". First let's break it down.

PSO1 Episode 1 (Dreamcast). Forest 1, 2. Then Caves 1,2,3. Mines 1, 2. Then Ruins 1, 2, 3, and 4.

PSO1 Episode 1 & 2: All above along with a new Pioneer lobby ship. The new maps begin with 2 "VR" region maps, which test your abilities for the next place. Basically a Forest->Ruins labyrinth of monsters with 2 new bosses reminiscent of Ep 1.

Then it gets wild, you have the Central Control Area which allows you to explore the 1. Jungle 2. Seaside 3. Mountains. Upon completion of the three, you unlock the CCA door to reach a Griffon boss.

After that you go to an underwater lab called Seabed, split into 2 zones. Then you hit the final boss.

Its about the journey and experiencing the nice regions, and actually feeling good progression. Not only do you clear all the regions, once you do you level up 20 or so from the start, and now you are ready to jump into hard mode. With that you have tons of new item-weapons to unlock, repeat Very Hard, repeat Ultimate. Ultimate gives entirely new enemies in all regions. Very fun at endgame where you can min-max your character, getting OP items and being a purposeful member in 4-man parties. What's fun is the journey, and the sense of strengthening.

Nostalgia helps, and when you know all the ins and outs, it is like a weekend night drive, it just feels right. Going in blind to this game, especially playing online and not knowing what endgame items to hunt for make the experience a lot less fun. These days you are better off playing this with someone who knows it all and can help you understand the game.

Also there's episode 4, which adds as much exploration Ep 1&2 had. Quests, seasonal online item hunt events, etc makes good reason to hop in every now and then.

>>15474294

>Spamming was the antithesis of PSO combat, since enemies could break juggle and counter-attack

More than that, I should mention, that you'd never even get past the first attack animation. You'd have to properly time attacks to actually get a combo to work, otherwise your character would cycle it's animation back to the rest state during which you'd be unable to attack - which made fighting enemies effectively pretty much impossible.

That was always the hardest part of getting other people into PSO, was teaching them to watch the animation cycles and properly time their attacks so they could follow-through with a hard or special attack. Nearly everybody who tried it just wanted to get in close to the enemies and start spamming like it was an action game. It was not, and to this day it's still a mistake to treat it like one.

Also, I never had a problem with the camera that so may other people bitch about. You just have to make it a habit to hit the L shoulder button to re-orient the camera each time you change directions. I won't argue that it's poor design, but it's not game-breaking by any means either. When the camera flips out while locked onto ariel enemies - that is a more legitimate gripe to me, but after fighting them once or twice, you can anticipate when the enemy is going to do it and compensate appropriately. The bigger issue is, when fighting the dragon variants, they'd create floor hazards which you could no longer see to avoid when the camera fucked off to go do it's own thing.

>>15475652

>Also there's episode 4, which adds as much exploration Ep 1&2 had. Quests, seasonal online item hunt events, etc makes good reason to hop in every now and then.

Episode 4 was a lazy piece of crap actually. It added a bunch of cheap enemies, a few incredibly monotonous and overlong maps, 1 really cheap extra boss, and a ton of broken rares that totally fucked with the nice balance they had figured out with Episode I&II. I dare say that Episode 4 was a foreshadowing of sort of awful design they would start doing with PSU.

>>15475768

The only time I have a problem with the camera is against Vol Opt. when it fires the green entrapment blob at you, but that's really only on Blue Burst. That attack is a piece of cake on the console versions, but in Blue Burst they forgot to actually implement analog movement so even with a controller you just have the same digital directional inputs as keyboard with a giant dead zone between them.

>>15474294

>A L/L/H attack, or a L/H/dodge/L/H attack loop could be faster and more effective than a L/H/H or L/H/S if it broke an enemies ability to counter.

With certain weapons (swords for instance) you don't even want to do the third attack unless you're sure it'll be a killing blow. PSO's combat may seem simple but there's quite a lot of skill involved if you're trying not to get killed and don't want your teammates to get mad about carrying your ass everywhere.

>>15475903

Not to mention there's a bunch of enemies which have attack/damage triggers. Nar Lillies and Pouiful Slimes, for instance. Hard attacks would trigger the Lillies paralyze, and a third attack on a slime would cause it to divide into more enemies (useful for farming their rares). Those skittery little gunner enemies in the ruins were invulnerable to attacks until just before they fired their beam attack when the crystal popped up, but if your FO had a high level barta spell and was paying attention, they could freeze them which would also make them vulnerable.

So many enemies had their own little mini strategies which were far from complex to deal with, but when you have small rooms with mixed enemy types it's really fun having to approach enemies differently.

>circling around a single enemy to land one-two hits with clunky ass controls and animations is fun!

Is PSO1 the Dark Souls of MMOs?

>>15476805

It's not an MMO, so no.

>>15473253

>you can block

Blocking is automatically performed by stats

Most who prefer PSO1 were probably alive and of the age to enjoy it when it was released. I played PSO1 offline because I was poor up until 2010 or so when I started jumping onto private servers and was getting tired of private server WoW.

In terms of gameplay I see PSO2 is an overly easy devil may cry game with an online lobby and PSO1 as a diabloesque style game with an online lobby. I'd call them both online action games but there are many other games I'd fit into that category.

In terms of story, PSO1 is better only because everything is translated and you don't have to cross reference or check everything with other people and hope that the moonrunes you're seeing isn't relevant to the story to any real extent.

>muh english patch!

It doesn't cover everything. I like my flavor text and I'm certain there's quest text and other tidbits not translated.

>learn Nippon fagget!

no.

PSO2's character creator is pretty good and post creation customization is even better but it seems like many people use it as a waifu doll dressup style game (which is fine) but it feels more like fetish fuel than some Si-fantasy/cyberpunk asthetic that PSO1 had. At that point, you drift into subjective tastes of "wut is gud" rather than a more objective declaration.

>>15476972

>In terms of story, PSO1 is better only because everything is translated

Speaking as someone who does understand what is going on in PSO2, the story, at least for the first 3 episodes, is decent for what it is but nothing special. Past that it's shit. PSO's story is fairly simple but gains a lot in the way it's presented and is probably better as a whole.

>>15476805

PSO challenge mode is dark souls before dark souls

>start over if you die

>find grave marker where you died previously and collect items from it

The normal mode in Dreamcast version is also an early soulslike

>drop weapon and meseta on the ground when you die

>have to run back to pick it back up

>hope other player didn't steal it

>attempt to unequip rare weapon when near death to prevent it from dropping again

im glad they changed that

>>15473048

>>15476853

pso retroactively became an mmo when guild wars redifined the mmo term. now instanced combat areas with a hub are mmos.

>>15472837

Ive started playing PSO again after not playing it awhile. It was a formative experience for me. The singleplayer quests all had interesting side stories.

I also like how it delved into Cosmic Horror and turned the tropey AN ANCIENT EVIL AWAKENS into something with government coverups, trailing someone's recordings as they fall into despair, and elements of body horror.

After I completed all the missions back on Gamecube, i desperately wanted to go online to find out more, but I think you're just a cog in the machine, someone who takes jobs for people. You're never going to take down the corrupt system. You just keep grinding away.

Gameplay is simplistic as fuck, though and the presentation of quests reeks of amateur modding more than something a real game would do (but that allows for all sorts of quests within the limited system)

I play it on Ultima right now, which has 3x experience, so experiencing the story should be much better without all the grind.

>>15477372

if you play PSO Episode 3 you can join the Arkz and bomb the lab of Pioneer 2

And if you get the Ragol Ring in PSOBB and wear it in Episode 4 quests the dialogue will change and you will be recognised as a hero. I think some dialogue also changes in Episode 4 if you wear WORKS gear where some NPCs recognize you as a member of Pioneer 2's military.

btw the Episode 4 boss Saint Million is Dark Falz.

In the Fragments of Memory quest it is revealed in Pioneer 1 military logs that you find that when Flowen was attacked by "it" during the ruins excavation that his team of soldiers were able to kill "it" and drag Flowen back to the lab. Flowen's team actually survived. Flowen's journal is different because his mind and body was being corrupted by the D-Factor and he believed that he was the lone survivor.

In government quest 4-9 there is a WORKS soldier that mentions that Dr.Osto had the original body of "it" buried in the desert after extracting D-Factor from it. When WORKS tested the Heavens Striker weapon and shot down a meteor it reawakened "it" in the crater as Saint Million.

>>15477434

In lore the episode 1 Dark Falz boss match is actually a nightmare. Hunters exploring the ruins would randomly encounter an illusionary battle with Falz and if they lost they would vanish into mist like in the From the Depths quest. Episode 3 reveals that this recurring illusionary fighting was being used by Falz to gather energy to evolve into a new Profound Darkness. But the spirits of Rico and Flowen intervened resulting in the birth of Endu and the failed evolution of Falz into Amplam Umbra.

>>15477356

You mean when retarded faggots started calling guildwars an mmo. The devs didn't, they called it a CORPG.

>>15477480

too late now there are tons of other similar games that everyone calls mmos

pso2 is a hub city with 16 player instances and is considered an MMO

>>15477490

Man PSO1 had a chatroom lobby too. Also since when does 16 players make an MMO? Is CoD an MMO?

>>15477434

actually government quest 9-4

>>15473537

I doubt online multiplayer would have had a better gameplay.

Also, Force wasn't hard at all. It was just throwing fireballs. It was just boring. I guess once you got more spells it got more complicated but fuck, I have seen lots of games overrating their own difficulty levels just to be underwhelmed by piss easy shit.

you cant get better techs unless you buy them or find them. techs at decent levels rarely appear in stores and tech drop rates are very infrequent. when they do appear in stores they are expensive and as a low level force you are usually always spending money on fluids and never have enough meseta. stores reroll their inventory every time you visit ragol so its best to buy something rare when you see it if you have cash. forces also rely on equipment bonuses more than any other class so anyone playing force should be very familiar with droprates and farming.

>>15477800

>Also, Force wasn't hard at all. It was just throwing fireballs.

Confirmed for never getting past Forest 2, holy shit. Even then, it should have taught you about elemental weaknesses and animation exploitatation, such as juggling hildebears with zonde - not because they weak to lightning (they're weak to Barta), but so they're pinned in place and can't leap/swing at you.

or optimally a barrage of light attacks from a handgun if your FO has reasonable ata, since light attacks flinch them, with barta thown in when you can be sure it's going to hit to save on TP

>>15478675

>Confirmed for never getting past Forest 2

"It gets better after a week of grinding"

>elemental weaknesses

Wait while I choose between Fireball, Fireball or Fireball to kill them.

>animation explotatatatation

wat

>juggling

No need to juggle when you can just pull them near the door, where their AI just dies off.

>>15478997

>he cant find cave 1

>he couldnt find at least zonde level 1 in forest

>he doesnt know door sniping only works mostly on early area enemies

most enemies beyond early game areas will either run out of range when you step out through a door so you cant target them safely or they will despawn in your absence only to respawn with full health. some ranged enemies will even say fuck your door and will continue to attack you if they have line of sight. and in special areas some enemies will ignore doors and plow right through.

>>15478997

>It gets better after a week of grinding

So you never did get past forest 2? Shameful, disgraceful.

FO is pretty easy up until you get to Ultimate, where they decided to give every enemy disproportionate elemental resists/

>>15475869

I agree, Ep 4 really is just 4 big copy paste "crater" map, a big central crater entrance, and the subteranean desert map. But experiencing that after Ep 1 & 2 was a shock, mainly because all these enemies are so much more powerful. The only good map layout was the lava room with a narrow zig-zag path, the room with the huge quicksand trap, and the last few rooms which really make it feel like you are in a cavern.

>>15475869

Give me a reply when you wanna play Ultima this weekend, its been a while. I have it all, so my fun is less about hunting the right item, and more about utterly destroying enemies or just supporting the team.

>playing on ultima in 2018

get on ephinea son

normal mode for vanilla pso with some optional extra treats thrown in

hardcore mode for pso prepare to (permanantly) die edition

sandbox mode when you want to experiment with endgame builds

>>15479910

>>15479976

I'll play on Ephinea, but first I need to figure out how to make Blue Burst run at full speed on Wine, if such a thing is even possible. I have never been successful so far. Turning off GLSL gave a big frame boost but it wasn't quite enough.

>>15480469

PSO1 is hard locked at 30 fps btw.

Meanwhile PSO2 runs at 200.

>>15480893

And it was enough, assuming that's true.

>>15480898

>30 fps

>enough

>for anything ever

Lol.

No.

>assuming that's true.

I played BB a few months ago, you can't unlock framerate.

>>15478987

>saturn has 8 button controller

>sega knowingly goes into the next gen with this 6 button controller

Seriously what was their fucking problem?

>>15479976

I played Ephinea a year ago probably, stopped around lvl 85 or 90, I was in hardcore mode. I just like Ultima more because they made cent/battle and unlocked DF, gave HUs more variety.

>>15480993

Nothing, it turns out shoving all your inputs onto face buttons was a stupid idea and SEGA realized it. Too bad Saturn controller fanboys continually conflate its nice D-pad for its shitty face button layout to this day.

>>15475869

At least the music was good

>>15479132

He was bad enough, but at least he didn't have an attack where he stood and spammed a sweeping beam across the battlefield that moves faster than you can move and the only ope to not die is holding a freaking scape doll or being so overlevelled you can sponge the attack possibly twice.

>>15480469

Tell me your secrets, anon. I was able to get it working aside from the framerate drops and JP input, so anything to improve that would help. What's GLSL and how do I disable it?

you can't make pso run at 60fps its locked at 30fps. this guy used video editing to attempt to make it look like 60fps.

there is a guy reverse engineering and rebuilding the entire psobb client

once thats done we could make true new content, new maps, new monsters, a whole new episode, more characters in instances, multi party areas, etc.

>>15481670

GLSL is the OpenGL substitute of direct3D's high-level shading language (HLSL). Wine games often run like molasses with it on but you can often turn it off for a huge performance boost without missing much. Here's what you do:

winetricks glsl=disable

It hasn't quite been enough to make Blue Burst playable on my setup though. The lobby is functional now but down the planet it runs too slow.

>>15481712

Yes because I acquired a big amount of DTs by getting tons of cent/battles back when one cost 45-55dt. You could solo 1 drop every HH. People will buy stuff you hunt, i.e. stuff yoh don't need and quests you love to hunt in is a plus.

Just spam a quest that has good spawns for the seasonal event. Play with me sometime.

I want to fug a caste grill

>>15483963

You are a wizard, anon.