With the closed beta now over, I thought I’d give a little insight into what I thought.
First off, I think the closed beta went really well. I was expecting to go into a game that had a few bad spots here or there, and ended up with something that was well-polished except for a couple of untranslated bits and a few annoying-but-bearable graphical glitches with text. (Which initially I blamed on my “not fully compatible” video card until I heard of other people reporting the same issue. For the purpose of the beta we were only able to explore Tir Chonaill, its two dungeons, (Alby and Ciar) and Dugald Aisle which usually leads to Dunbarton. As no obvious glitches stood out, I started playing as normal to see if there were any to come across; Other than a few translation mishaps, I found none.
What I liked:
Mabinogi was a nice change for me to pull myself to the long, arduous grind that was MapleStory for a bit so I could both hopefully point out some glitches in the game and to get familiar with the story. (Because as far as I was concerned, this was a game I was planning to play in the future.) I think the number one thing I like about this game is the fact that this game puts no emphasis on grinding at all. Although you could choose fight until you drop and combat still remains a primary essential, there are numerous other quests that you can undertake that will give you just as much EXP that don’t involve running into battle with your sword flailing. Just about anything you can do in this game, from farming to cutting wool to even playing music, have quests that you can use to get a fairly generous portion of EXP.
And here’s the other thing, too. You don’t necessarily need to grind for hours on end if you do want to level through combat. It may seem hard at first as you get used to the battle system, but once you get the hang of it experience will come easy, and fast. That, and once again in the very early levels you can get your level up very quickly by undertaking quests. Also, unlike MapleStory, you can level up more than once from a single quest. (In MapleStory if you acquire enough EXP to gain two levels, you will only gain the first and the game will leave you 1 EXP shy of your next level.)
Being able to play and compose music is another turn-on for me, and something that just about everyone does. I would think that in the future there will be some rules set for playing music (such as what can be played and performing etiquette) but for now everyone just kind of went gung-ho with it. Two things that I noticed people were doing the most in this game were music and combat related.
Learning skills is another unique aspect. Unlike other RPGs where you can simply learn skills by using skill points that you earn each level, (which you still do in Mabinogi with a bit of a twist) you need to be able to refine your skills in order to advance them, which sometimes includes using that skill, or even being subject to an attack from a monster using that skill. Once you have mastered a skill you can use Ability Points that you earn to advance your skill’s rank (which is done using a hexidecimal number system, going from F to A than from 9 to 1) or you can wait until you’ve perfected the skill at that rank before doing so.
At the same time, the big challenge is which skills you’re going to work on the most. If you choose to learn and advance every skill you come across, you’re going to find yourself at a loss of AP for when you want or need to advance other skills. Although you can fully customize your character to use whatever skills you want, it’s not wise to go after all of them at the same time.
Dungeon bosses can even be a bit of a challenge. Though in the closed beta, chances are if you got to a high enough level and went for your combat skills first, soloing both beginner dungeons wasn’t much of an easy task. However, the opposite would ring true for when attempting a run at a normal dungeon. Forget trying to get down to the boss; It was difficult enough for us to even get down that far and required much strategy and phoenix feathers for reviving KO’d party members. Needless to say, it should be fun organizing dungeon runs once we get closer to open beta and final.
Having separate instances of each dungeon is also good. Despite each dungeon instance being randomly generated, it more or less puts more assurance on the player that they won’t be disrupted, surely a cure for the disease that plagues MapleStory that we’ve come to known as “cc plz.”
What I disliked:
There wasn’t much I didn’t like about this game, but there was one thing in particular that was in this game that I don’t like: randomly generated dungeons. I’ve never liked randomly generated dungeons in any game in any game. Why is this? Because although the concept of each dungeon starts out nice and fresh at the start of the game, every dungeon is going to be the same thing: Find the next room, open the chest to make monsters spawn, pick up the key that any of those monsters drop, defeat the remaining monsters to proceed, find the door with the lock that’s the same color of that key, rinse, repeat, until you get to the boss. Maybe something will be different with later dungeons in the game, and in that sense I hope so, but until then the only reason for undertaking dungeons would be to complete quests, to take on a challenge with a weaker party, or to see how fast you can solo it.
That’s all I have to say about Mabinogi. I think I’d have to be really careful with this game as its gold date comes closer; This might become my latest addiction.
Speaking of dates, an announcement by Nexon is expected tomorrow regarding future betas. (Not sure exactly what, open, closed, final, etc…) Hopefully there will be some assurance that the gap between this beta and the next will not be like KartRider’s. (Search this blog for “One Missing KartRider” to see what I mean.)
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