Information
- Gender: Male
- Birthday:November 13,1988
- Location: USA
xsOnx
ImparaT
art_olae
r4icard
awin sya
therealf
samrithy
YuriAmy
Kayla To
srefin
jetstar8
saud334
denverbr
Xeim
wuxiongh
Carolgar
Floog
Lati
noofurbi
n3bulaxZanpakutou
Lessons in Game Design: Atlantica Online
Category: Other Game: Atlantica Online Posted on Feb 18, 2012 5:29 pm 3569Views 18CommentsAtlantica Online remains as the only real 3D turn based MMO on the market. As a result, i feel that this has allowed them to be a bit sloppy and the game has changed a lot since their initial release. I will cover all the past features they had as well including their fatigue system. It was originally managed by nDoors, but nDoors was bought out by Nexon and Atlantica Online has been merged with the rest of Nexon's games.
1) Stamina/Fatigue is a really bad idea
Very few games seem to understand exactly how bad this is. nDoors on the other hand, had to learn in the hardest way possible. Between Closed Beta 1 and Closed Beta 2, they decided to implement the stamina system that were on 2 of the Korean servers. The result? Nearly everyone from Closed Beta 1 quit after half a day of Closed Beta 2. Their main complaint was the stamina system. People voiced there complaints on the forum, but it was all dumped in a sub forum and ignored. The average poll had around 80% of the people who were against it. The developers kept trying to fix it rather than remove it. The first change did not occur until Closed Beta 2 occurred where they started restoring it when people were grouping together. However, it failed to prove to be a long term solution. Within 3 months after open beta started, the servers had already lost a majority of their players. You can tell who was around during Closed Beta 1. If their name is in blue, that means they got their character to level 20 during Closed Beta 1. By the end of 1 week of Closed Beta 2, you might have only seen 4 or 5 people who had a blue name. Nowadays, you might not even see one.
When some players learned of the Japanese and various European servers without stamina, they were willing to give up their level 120 characters (level cap at the time) to start over on a foreign server with lag just to avoid stamina.
2) People actually like turn based games
There is a niche for this sort of game. Most of the turn based games often have you control yourself and 1 other person, but Atlantica had you control up to 9 at a time. This was an awesome feature that no other game had. There was also a nice variety of recruitable mercenaries in your team with numerous different skills and abilities. Unfortunately, as the game got more grindy, the number of players declined as well.
There are no alternatives to the game right now. The other ones out there are all 2D or 2.5D and you are restricted to just you and your partner character. Those games mostly rely on groups and it is impossible to progress without a decent team. How this game will perform against others is not certain because there is nothing to measure it against.
3) There is a grind limit that people can take
Rather than releasing content for the game, they often chose to just increase the level cap. This would give players something to do. Unfortunately, there is a limit to exactly how much someone can take. Level 100-120 took 10x what it took to get from 1 to 100. Level 140 is only around 1/4th of the way to level 150 (the current cap). With item mall boosts and bonus exp time, you will get around 3 million exp to your entire team per fight. Unfortunately, this does not mean much when it takes you around 6 billion exp to level up. Very few people are willing to put up with the amount of effort it takes to get to the top. If you started today and played a lot every day, you might be able to make it in 2 years. Unfortuately, there are plans to make the level cap go up to at least 180 and the exp curve only gets steeper.
Once you hit the grind, people start quitting the game. They see it as something that they can never achieve and will be unable to compete with other players. The problem is that levels, upgrades, and equipment are crucial to much of the game and you have to grind a lot to get them. You also need a Blessing License from the item mall just to even be able to grind on mobs at your own level otherwise you will struggle to even fight one group of mobs. You might have to spend an entire week's worth of gold to just buy enough Atlas Ores to make 1 attempt to upgrade an item.
4) One Game, Two Systems is Bad
This is something rather interesting that Atlantica Online did. It almost feels as if there are two games. The first is the traditional turn based where your team is set in a 3 x 3 grid. The second is like a turn based strategy game as if you were playing Disgaea or Final Fantasy Tactics. Unfortunately, the game rewards the second type more and the first type has become obsolete. The second type is dominant in high level areas and also have special missions where you get TBS points each week that you can spend. If you succeed in the mission, you get incredible EXP and money rewards and it further makes the old system obsolete. The game basically experienced a genre shift with low level content being on the old system and high level content being on the new system.
5) Rewarding Crafting
Unlike other games, crafting equipment in Atlantica Online gives you a chance of receiving equipment that already has upgrades. With an incredible amount of luck, you have a chance of crafting a +10 (max upgrade) item. This makes it highly profitable to craft because you can often get the cost of the materials for just under the cost of the item. You just have to grind it to finish it yourself. However, if the item you craft has an upgrade on it, then you will certainly make a profit. It is also possible to set crafts in the guild if you do not have the skills to do it yourself.
The problem is that the highest tier equipment always seems to be only crafted. It takes a lot of effort and billions of in game gold to get 1 skill high enough level to craft 1 type of item. There are numerous types and you need to build at least several skills to be able to craft it. Few people have the time or money to invest to get their stats that high.
6) Making recruiting difficult is not a good idea
While most of the potential mercenaries in your team can be recruited fairly easily, some of them are not and it annoys people when they are vital. A good example is the Sheriff and Vampire. Both are practically essential in high level PvP. Anyone who has ever finished in the top 32 since their release have had both of them on their team. Anyone who has won Titan or Weekly Championship has had both on their team. The problem is that they are $50 a piece just to recruit them. If you want to get their skills, you need to pay an additional amount since there is no other way to get their skill books.
The other powerful mercenaries relies on a lot of luck for you to obtain. You have to complete a fairly difficult raid dungeon. What you get are a few boxes and you have to hope that the boxes will give you the items you need to recruit the mercenary. If it were not for a few events that made it easier to obtain them for a while, very few people would have these mercenaries. Unless you have a couple billion spare lying around, it is costly to obtain them. Oh yeah, you also have to do the dungeons for skill books, which are mostly also by chance with a few enemies having the chance to drop them.
7) Overpowered bosses are bad
Like many MMOs, bosses are ridiculously strong, but not in a good way. The main reason they are strong here is that they can 1 shot your team if they are not protected from the AoE. The problem is that they cast the spell every 3 turns or so and it is impossible to protect your entire team. Your healers can only heal a row or column, but their attack hits everything. Rather than casting smartly like using spells on targets that are weak against magic, they simply force you to fight with half a team with at least 2 of them being healers. Even if you have heavily upgraded gear for your level, odds are they can still take out 1/2 to 2/3 of your team's life in 1 shot. If not, your entire team just might fall to 1 AoE. It just feels like they want to force you to buy scrolls from the item mall just to beat these bosses.
The worst part is that you have to fight some of the bosses to be able to level up. At various levels, there are "caps" and you have to complete a story mode quest in order to continue to gain exp and level up. You usually have a lot of leeway, but the level 120 and 130 ones are exceptionally difficult and people at those levels have a lot of trouble trying to do it alone.
8) Open PK easily becomes harassment
There are two ways PK is possible in the game. The first requires you to be king of a nation or the guild leader of a guild in a nation. This will allow you to use king's judgment, which is the ability to PK another player. Unfortunately, the player on the defense has no way to counter and has a chance to lose a piece of equipment. The second is to be in a nation at war. Most of the time, they can just pay off the gold to refuse to go to war, but if they accept, the two nations can openly PK each other for like 5 days until the war on Saturday. Whoever loses the war also loses their capital city. Open PK quickly turns into high level players scouting out low level dungeons to kill players of an enemy nation regardless of their level.
9) One Client, All Regions
One of the little known facts about Atlantica Online was that the original client for the game supported multiple languages. All that needed to be done was to either edit a text document so that it would read from a specific language folder or just overwrite the files in the language that the client was set to. This was one of the few MMOs that had multiple versions of it being developed and updated at the same time. At their peak, it was around 6 versions being developed by nDoors. However, players took advantage of this and used the language files as language packs to play on the servers of other regions with a fully translated client. This forced nDoors to remove it once players began to migrate to other servers after being disappointed with their local servers.
1) Stamina/Fatigue is a really bad idea
Very few games seem to understand exactly how bad this is. nDoors on the other hand, had to learn in the hardest way possible. Between Closed Beta 1 and Closed Beta 2, they decided to implement the stamina system that were on 2 of the Korean servers. The result? Nearly everyone from Closed Beta 1 quit after half a day of Closed Beta 2. Their main complaint was the stamina system. People voiced there complaints on the forum, but it was all dumped in a sub forum and ignored. The average poll had around 80% of the people who were against it. The developers kept trying to fix it rather than remove it. The first change did not occur until Closed Beta 2 occurred where they started restoring it when people were grouping together. However, it failed to prove to be a long term solution. Within 3 months after open beta started, the servers had already lost a majority of their players. You can tell who was around during Closed Beta 1. If their name is in blue, that means they got their character to level 20 during Closed Beta 1. By the end of 1 week of Closed Beta 2, you might have only seen 4 or 5 people who had a blue name. Nowadays, you might not even see one.
When some players learned of the Japanese and various European servers without stamina, they were willing to give up their level 120 characters (level cap at the time) to start over on a foreign server with lag just to avoid stamina.
2) People actually like turn based games
There is a niche for this sort of game. Most of the turn based games often have you control yourself and 1 other person, but Atlantica had you control up to 9 at a time. This was an awesome feature that no other game had. There was also a nice variety of recruitable mercenaries in your team with numerous different skills and abilities. Unfortunately, as the game got more grindy, the number of players declined as well.
There are no alternatives to the game right now. The other ones out there are all 2D or 2.5D and you are restricted to just you and your partner character. Those games mostly rely on groups and it is impossible to progress without a decent team. How this game will perform against others is not certain because there is nothing to measure it against.
3) There is a grind limit that people can take
Rather than releasing content for the game, they often chose to just increase the level cap. This would give players something to do. Unfortunately, there is a limit to exactly how much someone can take. Level 100-120 took 10x what it took to get from 1 to 100. Level 140 is only around 1/4th of the way to level 150 (the current cap). With item mall boosts and bonus exp time, you will get around 3 million exp to your entire team per fight. Unfortunately, this does not mean much when it takes you around 6 billion exp to level up. Very few people are willing to put up with the amount of effort it takes to get to the top. If you started today and played a lot every day, you might be able to make it in 2 years. Unfortuately, there are plans to make the level cap go up to at least 180 and the exp curve only gets steeper.
Once you hit the grind, people start quitting the game. They see it as something that they can never achieve and will be unable to compete with other players. The problem is that levels, upgrades, and equipment are crucial to much of the game and you have to grind a lot to get them. You also need a Blessing License from the item mall just to even be able to grind on mobs at your own level otherwise you will struggle to even fight one group of mobs. You might have to spend an entire week's worth of gold to just buy enough Atlas Ores to make 1 attempt to upgrade an item.
4) One Game, Two Systems is Bad
This is something rather interesting that Atlantica Online did. It almost feels as if there are two games. The first is the traditional turn based where your team is set in a 3 x 3 grid. The second is like a turn based strategy game as if you were playing Disgaea or Final Fantasy Tactics. Unfortunately, the game rewards the second type more and the first type has become obsolete. The second type is dominant in high level areas and also have special missions where you get TBS points each week that you can spend. If you succeed in the mission, you get incredible EXP and money rewards and it further makes the old system obsolete. The game basically experienced a genre shift with low level content being on the old system and high level content being on the new system.
5) Rewarding Crafting
Unlike other games, crafting equipment in Atlantica Online gives you a chance of receiving equipment that already has upgrades. With an incredible amount of luck, you have a chance of crafting a +10 (max upgrade) item. This makes it highly profitable to craft because you can often get the cost of the materials for just under the cost of the item. You just have to grind it to finish it yourself. However, if the item you craft has an upgrade on it, then you will certainly make a profit. It is also possible to set crafts in the guild if you do not have the skills to do it yourself.
The problem is that the highest tier equipment always seems to be only crafted. It takes a lot of effort and billions of in game gold to get 1 skill high enough level to craft 1 type of item. There are numerous types and you need to build at least several skills to be able to craft it. Few people have the time or money to invest to get their stats that high.
6) Making recruiting difficult is not a good idea
While most of the potential mercenaries in your team can be recruited fairly easily, some of them are not and it annoys people when they are vital. A good example is the Sheriff and Vampire. Both are practically essential in high level PvP. Anyone who has ever finished in the top 32 since their release have had both of them on their team. Anyone who has won Titan or Weekly Championship has had both on their team. The problem is that they are $50 a piece just to recruit them. If you want to get their skills, you need to pay an additional amount since there is no other way to get their skill books.
The other powerful mercenaries relies on a lot of luck for you to obtain. You have to complete a fairly difficult raid dungeon. What you get are a few boxes and you have to hope that the boxes will give you the items you need to recruit the mercenary. If it were not for a few events that made it easier to obtain them for a while, very few people would have these mercenaries. Unless you have a couple billion spare lying around, it is costly to obtain them. Oh yeah, you also have to do the dungeons for skill books, which are mostly also by chance with a few enemies having the chance to drop them.
7) Overpowered bosses are bad
Like many MMOs, bosses are ridiculously strong, but not in a good way. The main reason they are strong here is that they can 1 shot your team if they are not protected from the AoE. The problem is that they cast the spell every 3 turns or so and it is impossible to protect your entire team. Your healers can only heal a row or column, but their attack hits everything. Rather than casting smartly like using spells on targets that are weak against magic, they simply force you to fight with half a team with at least 2 of them being healers. Even if you have heavily upgraded gear for your level, odds are they can still take out 1/2 to 2/3 of your team's life in 1 shot. If not, your entire team just might fall to 1 AoE. It just feels like they want to force you to buy scrolls from the item mall just to beat these bosses.
The worst part is that you have to fight some of the bosses to be able to level up. At various levels, there are "caps" and you have to complete a story mode quest in order to continue to gain exp and level up. You usually have a lot of leeway, but the level 120 and 130 ones are exceptionally difficult and people at those levels have a lot of trouble trying to do it alone.
8) Open PK easily becomes harassment
There are two ways PK is possible in the game. The first requires you to be king of a nation or the guild leader of a guild in a nation. This will allow you to use king's judgment, which is the ability to PK another player. Unfortunately, the player on the defense has no way to counter and has a chance to lose a piece of equipment. The second is to be in a nation at war. Most of the time, they can just pay off the gold to refuse to go to war, but if they accept, the two nations can openly PK each other for like 5 days until the war on Saturday. Whoever loses the war also loses their capital city. Open PK quickly turns into high level players scouting out low level dungeons to kill players of an enemy nation regardless of their level.
9) One Client, All Regions
One of the little known facts about Atlantica Online was that the original client for the game supported multiple languages. All that needed to be done was to either edit a text document so that it would read from a specific language folder or just overwrite the files in the language that the client was set to. This was one of the few MMOs that had multiple versions of it being developed and updated at the same time. At their peak, it was around 6 versions being developed by nDoors. However, players took advantage of this and used the language files as language packs to play on the servers of other regions with a fully translated client. This forced nDoors to remove it once players began to migrate to other servers after being disappointed with their local servers.
Comment (18)
Like it (
0
)
Loading...
Name:
Attach:
Emotion
Photo
Video
