Mags and The New Lobby in Phantasy Star Online 2

Our 3rd post for today is a recap of information updated on the official site. Some information has become clearer.

 

Mags are mechanical life forms that support the player in battle and serve as pets.  When you give them items they grow up and acquire special abilities. Mags that grow up will have various effects.

 

Don't mess with the unicorn.

After you accumulate a certain amount of damage, your mag will transform into a mythical creature (like this Unicorn type Photon Blast.). Now the AI takes over and the creature will attack on its own,  players can also fight alongside with it.

 

The Arks Lobby Upper Level

There's an elevator in the Arks lobby that divides two main areas.

 

The upper level is called the Gate area, you can access the quest counter and Camp Ship from here.

 

 

Arks Lobby Lower Level

The lower level is called the Shop area. This lower area can also be used as a rest and relaxation spot where players can meet and hang out.

 

 

3 New Weapon Classes

Hunters can now use Partisans. They can do quick attacks,  have extended reach, and can attack surrounding enemies. It has a special action simply known as dance/twirl which fills up the gear gauge.

 

Rangers have access to Launchers that shoots a missile which gives an explosive blast. You can't shoot while moving though. (In screenshots it appears you can shoot while in the air.)

 

Talis is a card throwing weapon for forces. You can throw them to attack enemies and cast technics from them. Throw them to enemies in the air and your technic could have wider range.  Or you could throw it and cast resta to provide support from long distances.  

 

Dengeki Event

Well now that twirl thing makes more sense! She spins the partisan around to boost the gear gauge. If you're wondering what "gear" actually is, I believe it's the gauge that Hunters have on their action palette. Unfortunately there wasn't much documentation about the inner working of this and was left up to players to figure out.

  • Mags have their own behavioral pattern.

In this particular case in the Mag status screen there were two areas called, "Auto Action" and "Trigger Action." Unfortunately they were too blurry to make out, it looks like healing was one of the behavior patterns when the HP is low.

Mags can also attack enemies.

The tekker shop was mentioned, the guy from PSO who decides what your ???? item is.

You can ride the launcher. You can aim where you shoot the Talis and techs spark out. It looks as though you set the technics to the palette similarly as you do to the rod.

The mag status screen had each stat listed Striking, Range, Tech, Ability, Striking Defense, Range Defense, and Tech Defense. From the video he showed, there was a different mag at level 50 called Raira (blurry) and there was an icon below it which said "Helix Proi/Broi" (blurry) which I can assume is the photon blast. He gave his mag a "striking ?? device" which gave the mag a lot of striking stat.

Keep in mind this wasn't the REAL media briefing, just a short preview. The 2nd media briefing is coming later this month.

 

PSO2 @ Dengeki Specs

There were Alienware PCs with specs listed at the Dengeki Event, this is a combination of the specs they used to play the game and Shougai's experience with using the related machines.

 

Tidbits

The cool guys at Shougai wrote a little transcript so now I'm able to read some things that I missed.

Beta Test Features

  • Makeup Counter
  • Tekker Shop (He said it MAY appear, not definite yet.)
  • Medical Center (towards the gate area).
  • Get a taste of the Story
  • Client Orders (a feature from PSP2)

The medical center is kind of a mystery, when we die we go back to the camp ship. It's possible the medical center may have something to do with Mags instead.

The Medical Center's signboard was in the alpha test version of the game but nothing was implemented there and we couldn't reach the counter.

Although the mags have similar stats to the players, they have a different suffix. 支援, or support/aid is written after the stat. So it would be Striking Support, Range Support, Tech Support, etc.

When the mag evolved after eating the striking support device, it added a new "trigger action."

  • HP Low / HP Recovery 1
  • Incident / (Performance)* Increases 1

Maybe it attacks more or the stats get stronger?

Sakai told Vita owners that it may be required for you to purchase a Memory Card so you can receive the large scale updates or whatever he's planning. To recap, the PlayStation 2's memory card supported 8MB of data, whereas the Playstation Vita memory cards can support 4 – 32GB of data currently. So you don't need to worry about it being un-updatable like PSU was.

[via shougai + mags + vita]

Commentary + Feedback

I didn't really see much feedback on the blog about the whole not being able to sell/trade very rare items to other people. It's not a concept I'm familiar with but people have mentioned that it exists in lots of modern day MMORPGS. So to summarize this is called "Item Binding" although there are various forms of item binding, for PSO2's sake, when you pick up a very rare weapon/unit you can choose to sell it in your shop, NPC it, or trade it. If you equip the weapon one time, you are no longer able to sell or trade the item to others. In most games you can NPC your items which sounds like a fine alternative but there's a catch.

In Phantasy Star Portable 2 Infinity, when you get a very rare item, you can NPC it in the shop for less than 20 meseta. It's not always consistent though, there are some rare items that sells for a good amount of meseta but by the time you reach that level, it isn't of much significance. If Sakai follows the guidelines laid out by Infinity (which he has been pretty much doing throughout PSO2's development) there would not be any incentive to NPC your very rare items. 

The best thing to do for you money makers is to watch the market, see what very rare items are selling. If you get one in a drop, just bite the bullet and set up a trade or put it in the shop immediately.

From what others have been saying about this, this Item Binding method lets everyone focus on getting rare items themselves, so you won't rely on player shops to get weapons for you. For now I will just wait until a future blog post on the exact details on how Item Binding will work and what we should expect.

Selected Japanese player responses

  • Personally I felt the length of the quests were short. I wish there would be plenty of highly difficult missions like PSO's ULT ruins and seabed.
  • I'm not very satisfied with the user demands. Future requests could be about improving the character creation, having different animations per race/sex, further review of the trading system, higher details for top of the line PCs.
  • I was surprised by some of the responses. I think character creation is somewhat lacking… I wanted things like adjusting the hair length.
  • Regarding turning on and off the auto words, I don't know if your response was directed towards the whole entire auto word feature or each and every individual auto word. In addition will there be a way to turn off another player's auto words?
  • You should closely evaluate the map sizes because the quality of our adventures is at risk if the map is too narrow.

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