Category: Phantasy Star Online 2

So you saw in the Character Creation demo you had a limited amount of clothes and hairstyles to choose from. But with Arks Cash you can enjoy even more varieties, and more will be added into the game through updates. If you play the Closed Beta you can get more color variations of  clothes. If you look at some of the NPCs in the lobby, you could see some of the future costumes that will eventually come out.

Now certainly you've been making many characters in the Demo, but in the main game, you will have one character. You must purchase the right to make additional characters through Arks Cash. (You can try this out in the Closed Beta since Arks Cash is distributed.) For all ships, you can have a total of 12 characters.

[via pso2blog]

Character Creation Contest!

Character Creation Contest!

• Entry: 4.11.2012 through 4.20.2012
• Voting: 4.27.2012 through 5.7.2012
• Winner: 5.11.2012
• Website: PSO2Chara

Grand Prize: Your Character in the Official Game!

 

Producer Prize: Your Character 3D printed (like WoW)

 

Arks Prize: Your character drawn by PSO2's designer.

 

Rappy Prize: Known locally as the Chogokin Racaseal

 

 

• Enter a nickname
• Email Address
• Comments about your character
• Whole body screenshot
• Face closeup screenshot
• Character Creation Game Data

One entry per person, please finalize your character before submitting. You must make an original character, you can not submit a character that would infringe others copyrights. Winners will be contacted through email.

Dengeki Playstation Interview

Shougai posted a new interview about Arks Cash, Playstation Vita, and the Update plans, and Shougai posted another interview with 4gamer.

Arks Cash and FUN Gacha!

• Players can rent My Rooms for 30 days.
• Two kinds of Arks Scratch, one that has costumes, and the other has costumes and consumption items.
• There's also a free Gacha called FUN Scratch, that uses FUN points.
• You can get things like room items and other items.
• You can collect FUN points through player evaluations.
• Like for example 1 person can say "Good Job" through a menu to someone else and that will increase both of the players' Fun points.
• ((It is unknown currently what restrictions they have on player evaluations, like once a day or one time per person?))
• You can also collect Fun points by doing quests with Friend Partners.
• *Friend Partners are NPC AI's of your friends characters*
• You can also get points by purchasing Arks Cash

Rental Features and Packs

• My Room, My Shop, Extra Storage, etc  can be rented for 30 days.
• You can purchase a "premium" pack.
• Features that you can rent will be included in this premium pack as well as other features like trade functions .
• Some of the items in this pack will apply to all your characters on your account.
• (This would make it appear like monthly charges, similarly how PSU premium course has you pay for My Room access.)

Buyable Features

• Additional Characters
• Hold more item in the item pack.
• An additional Skill Tree

Account

• You get 1 character per account, when you want additional characters, you must use Arks Cash to purchase them. You can have up to 12 characters on one account.
• He is considering allowing characters to move across ships (servers) in the distant future, but for now your characters are tethered to the one ship they were created in.

Updates

• Sakai plans to update the game every 3 to 4 weeks with maps, system updates, scratch contents, etc,
• Plans to add new classes later
• The level cap once the game comes out would be around level 40. This cap will increase as the game progresses.
• Initially, players can choose to play up to Hard difficulty, but they plan to have several types of difficulties. You can unlock these difficulties once you meet a certain condition.
• After the game comes out they plan to add super huge bosses in multi-parties.
• These bosses are much bigger than normal bosses, and you can have 12 players fight it.
• They plan to start off with 3 planets.

Matter Board

• As you fill up the Matter Board, new story quests will appear. 
• Depending on the situation, when you replay a story quest, different events may occur.
• Some events can happen outside of story quests.
• Like if the Matter board asks you to collect certain items, you can do so with friends, and an event could occur.

Playstation Vita

• He's still investigating this, but for now he thinks the Vita version should use the onscreen keyboard.
• He will probably have the beta test for PSO2 Vita start sometime during the fall through winter, but nothing is definite yet
• He's thinking about the possibility of a separate offline title.

Beta

• After the Closed Beta is over, the data is reset.
• They plan to have you transfer your Open Beta Data to the official game when it starts.

 

Did you guys enjoy creating your characters, especially now that you can actually read it. Well this post dives a little bit on the technical side of the benchmarking. If you are going to purchase a laptop or desktop for PSO2, this post should come as a handy guide on which graphic cards or computers you should purchase. Before purchasing always check the graphics card to see how it stacks up against others.

Before you read on, don't get too hung up on your scores. If you saw that you ran 30fps on the setting you were on, then you can still play the game well.

4gamer performed their own benchmark test on their own computers. The results of their tests are based on PSO2 Benchmark Scoring System as well as Fraps frames per second logs. The post below is a quick summary of their results. Their post looks into whether the Graphics Cards or Processor (CPU) affects the benchmark score.

They performed these tests on full screen (1920 x 1080), default graphical level 3, shaders on standard, with high resolution textures.

 

Nvidia Cards are Green / ATI Radeon Cards are Red

Based on the settings described above, the Nvidia GTX 560 TI outperformed all the cards. The Nvidia GTX 560 and ATI Radeon 6870 came in second.

What's interesting is how the ATI Radeon HD 7770 outperformed the Nvidia 550 GTX Ti, considering both are 1 step down from their powerful counterparts. (As pointed out in comments, Radeon 7000 is a newer series which is why it outperformed the older Nvidia 500)

The next graph shows the framerates. It looks as if the framerates match up with the benchmark scores.

Using Fraps, they mapped out the average and lowest frame rate recorded. The GPUs with benchmark scores above 5000 have an average frame rate of more than 80 fps.  The GPUs that scored 3000; Nvidia GTX 550 Ti,  Radeon HD 7750, and Radeon HD 6770, all averaged more than 60 fps. (The A8-3870K is kind of unique, it's an APU where the graphics card is embedded within the processor. This processor has a ATI Radeon 6550D, so the fps is slightly better than Radeon 6450. We're not quite sure why the FPS says 13.7, it could possibly be a typo since the bar is closer to 28.)

The next chart looks at if the processors made an impact over the benchmark scores. Four different processors were tested using the GTX 560 TI graphics card.

The four processors tested were Intel's Sandybridge processors Core i7 and Core i3 (with hyperthreading on and off), a 2008 Core 2 Duo E8600, and AMD APU A8-3870K. The Core i3 processor has 2 cores, with Hyperthreading enabled, it turns these 2 cores into 4 virtual cores. Even so, there were hardly any differences with the scores, though the older Core 2 Duo score fell a bit.

 

For the Sandybridge CPUs,  the number of cores didn't make a huge impact on framerates. The older Core 2 Duo E8600 still had a reasonable framerate.

 

With the Nvidia 560 TI Graphics card, you can see that the Shadow Quality has made an impact on the frame rates.

 

The shadow quality seems to affect the scenery more than the characters themselves. You can see a profound effect on how buildings are highlighted. The benchmark score also seems to have taken a nosedive with shadows at 5.

 

The closed beta adds mags, which are mechanical life forms that grow when you give them items. Mags now have an Energy Bar. This bar will let you know when your mag is hungry. When the bar reaches 0% you won't see the mag's full potential. But as you feed it items, it can perform various supporting actions. The mag can help supplement the stats of the player too so you can equip that weapon that requires certain stats.

When the mag reaches a certain level it can evolve and perform "automatic actions". Your mag could be a striking type and will attack the enemies, or with range it could fire bullets, or as a force type mag, it can fire technics.

You can also set "trigger actions" that lets the mag do things under certain circumstances, like when your HP is low, it will heal. Each individual mag will learn trigger actions as it evolves. Even having the same mag as another player, each could possibly have quite different actions. You can also use items called devices to add actions too.

In the closed beta, mags can level to 99, this allows it to grow up to its 2nd stage. If you want a mag you should complete the client order "Mag License" マグライセンス.

In the closed beta, 4 kinds of photon blasts are available. When a mag evolves to its second stage above level 50, it can use photon blasts.

 

Chaining photon blasts are also possible, when one person uses a photon blast, a circle shows up around them. When other players see this circle they can contribute to the photon blast. When other players chain, the attack power of the photon blast increases!

 

Closed Beta adds a new city area! This city area isn't on a planet, it's actually on the Arks ship! Up until now, there weren't many city battles in the Phantasy Star Series, this stage could give you the sensation of those FPS games. You can run through this stage and imagine what life is like for the Arks, however this city is under a state of emergency since the Darkers are invading it.

 

This city area is under a new type of quest that wasn't in Alpha Test 2 called "emergency quests." Several times during the day, this quest is randomly released for 1 hour.

Before the quest is released, an ominous message is shown to all players. Then an emergency call is sent out to all ARKS to defend the city. These quests also are time limited, and PSE and rare interrupt events occur at a higher rate.

The existing areas you've already played will now have new gimmicks, objects, and interrupt events, so please play them too!

 

There's also a new boss called Dark Ragne (not pronounced as rain).

 

You may also see him appear within the city area and other fields too but he doesn't show up very often.

Sakai is also going to hold a Character Creation contest, there will be various prizes but one of them could be your very own character showing up in the official game! He hasn't discussed what the other prizes are but he requests that you continue making your own characters.