PSO2 NGS Headline Recap #14

15 thoughts on “PSO2 NGS Headline Recap #14”

1. Mandatory crybaby post about how this is the worst game, worst developers, worst director, worst most predatory gacha, oh did I say worst game? Worst features, worst patch, worse than base pso2, worst of the worst of the worst, with honors sir.

   But 4 real now, great update and material. Can't wait for these QoL features and these interesting new features. If you're only here to write a bitchy post and still can't uninstall after a year then you have brain damage.

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   • Oh man, level cap increase is the most amazing content ever. I can't wait for a 6th normal attack class skill instead of new PAs like original PSO2 used to get. It's so amazing to get QoL features that original PSO2 had, years later.

     Ironically, if everyone did as you said and uninstalled, the game would be completely dead. It's thanks to those people sticking around giving SEGA constructive criticism in the hopes for improvement, that you are able to sit here and act like you have moral superiority. Insulting your benefactors seems like proof of actual brain damage to me.

     Being satisfied with garbage doesn't lead to improvement. Complaining does. Virtually everything around you was invented by people who were dissatisfied and had complaints about something. If everyone was like you, we'd still be in caves eating dirt.

   • @No U
     I agree, this isnt a fully released game, so while its being made, we get to give opinions that helps guide them on the direction that will most benefit the game. Constructive criticism does help a lot. Its the constant whinning coming from bullies that think they are helping with insults that has almost ruined the game. Although, if those bullies have unninstalled the game, there wouldnt impact the game too much, I'll say a couple of 100 tsundere nerds at best. I also love all the ahh 4 PAs that jet boots had in base pso2, was really nice having all 4 of them and getting complex PA after ahh 5 years?

     One thing tho, why are you picking on the normal attacks, they look almost as flashy as a PA, dont cost pp, helps the combo staying alive, and recovers pp in the process. Sounds to me that you just dont like them being called normal attacks.

2. Thanks for the recap

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   • I don't know what else to expect or look forward to. The story is lackluster; we players are just glorified extras at this point. Manon is more important than us. We're just a cardboard cutout with no personality or special status.

3. A headline so good, they forgot to advertise virtual clothing for 75% of the stream! It's funny when they have actual content and QoL to show how much those tend to take a backseat. Just don't expect that to be a normality.

   That being said, there's a lot of good QoL changes. Some I suspect were saved till the player base would be more divided(support partners will likely help in lower ranks), though some were necessities that probably didn't come to mind initially. Or just were not seen as a big issue given the horror of Quartz for exchanges. I do have some concern about how much time is being spent on QoL, but I suppose there's also the factor of getting it done early so it's easier to implement.

   I just hope they can pump out those mini episodes. So much open world, so little that is being done with it that would be fixed with more quests and small stories. Overall good headline but uh
   They really need to stop letting Mining Defense guy make his crappy TD UQs that waste both devs' and players' time. No one wanted them before, no one wants them now.

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   • welp, guess i gotta change my name to no one from now on, cause i like the tower defense eqs but according to u, i dont really exist…

   • @No one in particular

     At least some one is enjoying it I guess.

4. For now the updates are good but there is still a long way to go to be at the level of the base PSO2.

   In my opinion there are quite serious design problems that are evident as time goes by, and that they were easy to solve. For example the emergency missions, right now there are a lot of them actually, the problem: there are 3 per region and they appear at the same time, to make matters worse, the players will only do the most recent ones for the simple fact of being from the new region. Giving the feeling that there are not many emergency missions. Also, new players in the desert can't do the lower level ones because everyone is in the snowy region. In PSO2 base this was not a problem, as the emergency mission was the same, and still in EP6 people still played the EP2 emergencies . Does anyone still play Dark falz when it comes out on NGS? And the truth is that I feel sorry for it because for me it is the best mission there is at the moment. A new mining mission for Kvaris, I can already predict that there will be another one for the next region as well.

   The other is the city, there seems to be a lack of a central area for players to move around. Right now there are three but everyone is only in the newest one and nothing else, not even in central which should be the most important. But probably this will be something that will be solved later when we see more of the story.

   History is also another serious problem, one so bad that no one cares. I know they have something good hidden and will tell it when the time is right, but that doesn't mean they can neglect the beginning of a story. In PSO2 Base we didn't know many things, but we knew there was something in motion, we just didn't know what it was. In this one it was just the intro, they tell you Dolls are the bad guys and the rest was to solve trivial problems that lead nowhere. They don't have to tell the plot twist right away, but they could give the clues that it exists, something like the protagonist having a fuzzy memory, which by itself is not understood, but stating that something interesting will happen.

   Developers seem desperate to find side activities for people to do, but they either have the wrong focus or reasons for players to try them out. Nobody uses the snowboard except for faster travel in very specific areas and the marathons are just for show. But I think it's easier to do something like the casino, it had rewards and the games themselves were fun, and oddly enough it was in the city, the place where everyone goes to take a break from killing enemies. A place to talk with friends, a place to spend time without any particular purpose, a chill place, was not ironically something that everyone liked but developers did not take advantage of that. Something as silly as a fashion runway for players to see others is sure to have a cult following.

   As for the rest, I think it's pretty good what they have done. The combat has been improved too much and it's been balanced. It's not perfect but it's a very solid base with which to do interesting things in the future. The parkout mechanics are excellent and everyone likes them, hopefully the level design in the future will take even more advantage of them.

   The game has the potential to be as excellent as before, the only thing it lacks is time to develop it, that can't be denied that it was SEGA's fault. Even so I'm anxious waiting for that moment to come, but it won't come for at least a year, even so I'll keep playing, because I love the game, but even though I like it I still have to know that it can be improved and quite a lot. It is because of how much I liked the base game that I expect at least something of at least the same level of quality.

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   • You really should send these concerns into their surveys. I agree with basically every point. I should probably do the same, since one voice isn't gonna do much. Perhaps having a "Rank up" for each UQ would fix the problem…instead of forcing gear to pass some check, you're boosted stat wise temporarily to match, with some extra boosts if you lack access to a region for skill tree reasons. I think output can often be excuse enough. It comes with its own problems but it's still a possibility for better at least.

     Honestly lore is one of the least work intensive ways to get people invested and they do none of it. There's nothing to really speculate, embrace, or have fun with. It feels like they put everything into a plot that's only decent at best and do so little of the world building that made PSO1 and 2 feel so awesome.
     That and we need more environments like under the sea.

   • "In PSO2 base this was not a problem" I think an argument can be made regarding the difficulties of the emergency quests, like, in ep6 people did ep2 eqs, but they did on higher difficulties. If you were new to the game and decided to do dark falz loser on Hard you wouldnt find people to do it with because everyone was on XH.

     'No one' does the ngs dark falz, and I say that with quotes cause ever since kvaris I never really tried to do it to know for sure that its empty, I did tried dark falz once or twice when Retem eqs had rank 2 and I can say I had no problem finding folks to do it, but 'no one' does it because the rewards arent as good. They could fix this issue if eqs had ranks that increased together along with the rewards, like when kvaris showed up, we have dark falz rank 2 (not as a trigger) along with Lenus and the Hammer bro rank 3, and the only difference between them would be cammo and motion rewards. Maybe this will be a future implementation considering how now we have purple and yellow triggers being unified.

     "Developers seem desperate to find side activities for people to do" This was expected considering how many folks that were complaining about the game were complaining that they had nothing to do. They needed to satisfy a schedule of releases and high demmands from the player base, so they try to focus on what people wants. People need to keep in mind that this isnt a fully released game and was never intended to be one until much later. We are experiencing the develop of the game instead of waiting 5 years for its release. To me, the races would be more fun if each region had its own vehicle, and if it wasnt too focused on platforming, but instead they made a point A to point B on a region, and you needed to find the best course to get there considering the terrain, vehicle and maybe even enemies in the area that might get in the way.

     I also think that they had a whole schedule programmed to be released, and that that schedule had casino, my room and other minor updates, but they had to postpone it because of the complains. I'll always see the "listening too much to the feedback" as one of the biggest flaws that sega has and that psobb and pso2 had its charm because they focused on fulfilling that schedule as artistically as possible instead of stopping every 5 minutes to address a personal desire of a small group of people. Its like being in a bus with 30 people and every now and then the driver needs to stop for somebody to pee.

   • Pretty much agreed

     It mostly boiled down to bad design

     There are many players who doesn't understand the problem properly and so they labeled it as "lacks of contents" as a feedback which put the dev-team (whom listens to the feedback too much) into desperation of finding things for players to do which then strays even further from getting the game's fundamental flaws fixed.

   • @MioBunny
     I used to write huge walls of text in the surveys, explaining various issues and possible solutions to them, in Japanese. I did this for almost a decade, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. NGS is the end result of that. So I hope you can understand why someone like me is not exactly optimistic about NGS' future.

     I saw someone say something like, Monster Hunter is vastly more successful than Phantasy Star despite MH ripping off PSO, because Capcom values Monster Hunter and gives it the attention it deserves. Meanwhile, SEGA uses Phantasy Star whenever they want to make a quick buck.

     I think it's difficult to disagree with this if you look at how SEGA has been treating PSO2, how they treated the entire international release of PSO2, and how they licensed out PSO2 to multiple other regions which were all shut down. Those things wouldn't have happened if SEGA valued their franchises better. The same could be said of Sonic.

     Part of the problem is most Westerners look at the state of anything, yell "SHUT UP AND BE HAPPY" and never think about how things could easily be SO MUCH BETTER. Anyone who even suggests improvement gets ridiculed and shut down, like that ableist comment labelling others as brain-damaged. And then everyone wonders why modern stuff tends to be so awful.

5. Over 95% of the outfits in NGS have been worse than hideous, so I was surprised that they're finally adding decent outfits. But I still feel really sad that the game itself is in such a miserable state. I already know I'm going to end up logging in, buying the outfits I want, and then logging out again. I don't care about all the QoL additions when the current and upcoming combat/content are still so boring and awful. I can't even get anybody to play this game because they already tried it and quit.

   People can defend NGS all they want, but it doesn't change the reality that almost nobody wants to play it. They lie and say that NGS has always been better than original PSO2, but original PSO2 always had far more active players.

   I used to simply enjoy playing all the classes in original PSO2, trying to be as efficient as possible in EQs, being strong to help other people, etc. All of that is gone in NGS. Almost all the weapons and classes in NGS feel so horrible compared to PSO2, and the ones that don't feel awful are so braindead and lacking in depth that I can only stand playing them for a short period of time.

   The strongest NGS equipment is ridiculously expensive for an almost unnoticeable improvement (enemies are still boring sponges that aren't fun to fight), and equipment is made obsolete so quickly that there's no point in trying to get stronger. Especially moreso when it costs so much to upgrade equipment while N-Meseta gains are so low. There's almost no resale value, either. None of my pre-Kvaris top-of-the-line weapons have sold. At all.

   Sometimes I get in-game randoms trying to socialize with me because they want to ERP. No thanks, that's not what I'm playing PSO2 for. I get the impression most of the remaining players are playing for that reason. That's why I stay away from the communities of these games. They're probably the same people who label others as "brain-damaged" for pointing out the game's problems. Because they clearly don't care about the actual game.

   Anyway, it doesn't matter what we say. SEGA is going to continue only doing the bare minimum, so they can keep pumping the profits into other stuff, as always. It's sad that there are no other similar decent games to fill in the void. And we're not allowed to have legitimate criticism of anything anymore.

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   • To my point of view, your problem is that you use nostalgia, personal preference and personal point of view to construct your arguments. For example, '95% of outfits are hideous and the combat is boring that you dont want to play every class like you used to in pso2' I've been playing for over 7 years struggling to make the characters look the way I want and only now with ngs costumes I am able to do that, so its not that the outfits are awful, its that 'you' dont like them. As for the classes, its the opposite for me, I didnt like hunter, ranger, gunner, techer, summoner, and now in ngs I play all of them.

     The equipment portion, if the weapons offer "almost unnoticeable improvement" why invest to heavy in them to begin with? Ngs seems to be very punishing to tryhard players, which Im happy about, since I play every class in the game, I cant bother to get the top tier weapon for each char I use, so Im happy spending less than 1.5m on relik or cinquem with a very strong fixa, and fully affixed so I can play every class equally, but if you want to invest heavilly on your gear for whatever reason, then you are the only one to blame for going bankrupt. If you invest real money on this game, and you can afford paying 150m on a rugged weapon and still have money to buy other stuff, then sure, be happy with it, I have just recently reached 70m neseta for the first time and Im not willing to spend all of that on a weapon thats going to be replaced eventually, which surprises me that for some people this is a spoiler alert, pso2 went up to rarity 15*, and some people used to call relik the end game gear for some reason…

     And lastly, and dont put an angry tone on this, this is merely a suggestion, if you want to be heard, or be taken seriously, than I suggest raising your words and not your voice, and I dont mean using fancy vocabulary, I mean changing the way that you say things. I put the 'sega is lazy' or in your case, 'sega does the bare minimum' comment on the same section as you put the "brain-damaged" comments and that choice of words is what changes the "legitimate criticism" that you think you are doing, into an angry rant.

     When you said "yell "SHUT UP AND BE HAPPY" and never think about how things could easily be SO MUCH BETTER." I think there is a misunderstanding on both parts of the discussion, they think that your comments comes from a bully that wants the game to be destroy, so they defend it with the usual "unninstal the game, and move on or be happy with what you got" specifically because of your choice of words that I mentioned earlier. And you misunderstand what they say because the game could be much much better for sure, but sega needs to settle with what they can deliver. Life isnt about making every experience you go through as perfect as it could ever be, its about appreciating what you have.

     And if I could throw a little suggestion of my own, I love ngs, but I also realize that it could get pretty boring if I spent my whole day on it. And its not an ngs problem, I ran into it on old pso2 as well, so instead, I try to play other games or even watch a show in between. Im currently watching The Boys, and playing the Elden Ring, but I usually dedicate a portion of my day, for ngs. Enough that it doesnt get boring, and enough that while Im not playing it, I miss playing it.