Besides which, the numbers are Media Create. They're the same numbers whichever site you read them on.
Official White Knight Story (level 5 RPG) thread
- Thread starter Archgamer
- Start date
Besides which, the numbers are Media Create. They're the same numbers whichever site you read them on.
The official blog has an interesting entry on White Knight Chronicles online platform:
http://blog.us.playstation.com/2009/09/white-knight-chronicles-introducing-the-online-system/
It's comforting to see RPG developers getting creative on the online front. ^_^
http://blog.us.playstation.com/2009/09/white-knight-chronicles-introducing-the-online-system/
It's comforting to see RPG developers getting creative on the online front. ^_^
Gradthrawn
Veteran
I can't believe September is the last time someone posted in this thread! Does no one at B3D have WKC? 
Received it a couple of weeks ago, right around the time I was finishing up ME2. Quite a contrast, going from one to the other, and they both show the diversity of the RPG genre. The execution of the story is way too hokey for my taste, and I'm normally not one to complain about such things. It's not even the "save the princess" cliché that bothers me (not at all, actually), but rather how some of the events have played out thus far and the melodrama of the main character. To put it bluntly, at certain points, it just seems stupid.
Regardless, that hasn't really impeded my enjoyment of the game. The combat mechanics seem pretty solid, although the 3 customizable rows of command bars takes some getting use to. I've found its crucial to filter through the unlocked skills and only assign very useful standalone commands, while grouping others into combos. Although the inability to use any learned command by going through a menu (like you can with items) seems strange to me (and quite annoying at times).
While the combat mechanics are solid, what really has me hooked is the Dark Cloud light feature they've included (Georama). It allows you to (slowly) build your own hometown to act as a starting point for online quests. For someone just starting out in the game, it requires a pretty significant investment of their resources (from the single player campaign), necessitating careful planning to make the best use of the limited space provided before the next upgrade. It provides a nice sense of accomplishment (for me at least) as my hometown is slowly built.
They've also made it quite easy to set things up for occasions when you want to be bothered with others, don't want to be bothered with others, or only wanted to be bothered with friends. Basically, each home town supports multiple "rooms", which are essentially just instances of the town, with varying rules. Player level, guild level, and private/public access restriction can be implemented. From a room (max of 12 people per room), multiple quests can be spawned, each with their own settings (max number of players, password, etc).It makes it easy to just play around in your town and launch quests from it alone, meet strangers to play with, or play with just your friends. Each Home Town also includes an Adventure's Log, which is essentially a blog for the user that allows others to comment. Outside of Demon's Souls, it's probably the online system I've gotten the most use out of.
Received it a couple of weeks ago, right around the time I was finishing up ME2. Quite a contrast, going from one to the other, and they both show the diversity of the RPG genre. The execution of the story is way too hokey for my taste, and I'm normally not one to complain about such things. It's not even the "save the princess" cliché that bothers me (not at all, actually), but rather how some of the events have played out thus far and the melodrama of the main character. To put it bluntly, at certain points, it just seems stupid.
Regardless, that hasn't really impeded my enjoyment of the game. The combat mechanics seem pretty solid, although the 3 customizable rows of command bars takes some getting use to. I've found its crucial to filter through the unlocked skills and only assign very useful standalone commands, while grouping others into combos. Although the inability to use any learned command by going through a menu (like you can with items) seems strange to me (and quite annoying at times).
While the combat mechanics are solid, what really has me hooked is the Dark Cloud light feature they've included (Georama). It allows you to (slowly) build your own hometown to act as a starting point for online quests. For someone just starting out in the game, it requires a pretty significant investment of their resources (from the single player campaign), necessitating careful planning to make the best use of the limited space provided before the next upgrade. It provides a nice sense of accomplishment (for me at least) as my hometown is slowly built.
They've also made it quite easy to set things up for occasions when you want to be bothered with others, don't want to be bothered with others, or only wanted to be bothered with friends. Basically, each home town supports multiple "rooms", which are essentially just instances of the town, with varying rules. Player level, guild level, and private/public access restriction can be implemented. From a room (max of 12 people per room), multiple quests can be spawned, each with their own settings (max number of players, password, etc).It makes it easy to just play around in your town and launch quests from it alone, meet strangers to play with, or play with just your friends. Each Home Town also includes an Adventure's Log, which is essentially a blog for the user that allows others to comment. Outside of Demon's Souls, it's probably the online system I've gotten the most use out of.
I was tempted in the early days, but I've sworn of JRPGs. Although they have great ideas, invariably they are too long and too stupid on ocassions that they're just a frustration (that actually goes for many Japanese titles and just not JRPGs, although they tend to have more annoyances than most. eg. ICO's forced 2 hours of ending was painful and spoilt the experience of an amazing game). for me to pick up another Level 5 title after the enjoyable-but-overly-long Rogue Galaxy, they'll have to simplify the game style into something more action packed.
I'm getting the game when money comes around for me. Should be getting it around March. A couple of my friends already has it and says it plays like a mix of FFXI and Monster Hunter. It's worth it if your into those types of games and like grinding for equipment. This one is mostly enjoyed online.
I think patsu was getting it too. But because of so many games coming out right now and next month he is delaying purchase. I'll post my remarks about the game once I get it.
I think patsu was getting it too. But because of so many games coming out right now and next month he is delaying purchase. I'll post my remarks about the game once I get it.
WKC 2 for Summer:
http://www.siliconera.com/2010/03/1...akening-of-light-and-darkness-set-for-summer/
Dear Lord, I haven't even read a single WKC review/impression yet.
http://www.siliconera.com/2010/03/1...akening-of-light-and-darkness-set-for-summer/
Dear Lord, I haven't even read a single WKC review/impression yet.
Well that was quick
And then you remember how the first game came out in December 2008 in Japan, and it starts to make some sense.
I only played to the second town, maybe two~three hours.
Then I shamefully switched to that other game
And then you remember how the first game came out in December 2008 in Japan, and it starts to make some sense.
What can I say. It feels like a Level 5 game. Huge sprawling areas, meticulously paced, simple but fun combat system, great interface, very efficient and nice to look at.
I only played to the second town, maybe two~three hours.
Then I shamefully switched to that other game
No rush. Most people on my friends list are on GoWIII or FFXIII. Rather funny to see so many roman numerals when I scroll down the list. Then I have Y3 and Resonance of Fate to look at.
Might as well wait for WKC 1 & 2 bundle. To me, the details and buzz around WKC is almost non-existent. I don't know what kind of game it is, and whether I'll like it yet.
Might as well wait for WKC 1 & 2 bundle. To me, the details and buzz around WKC is almost non-existent. I don't know what kind of game it is, and whether I'll like it yet.
Well it's an RPG, duh, more of the fantasy variety apparently. I'm not getting as much of a sci-fi vibe as from Rogue Galaxy, or FF XIII for that matter.
One thing that seems to have carried over from Rogue Galaxy is that there's a whole lot to do for completionists. I can already see dozens of skill slots to fill out per character, with effectively one skill tree per weapon class (every character can learn any weapon), and I haven't found out yet if those lists will eventually scroll. I can already see that their level structure is wide, wide open, more so than in RG. They've built webs of roads, not corridors. My ballpark guess is 75%+ of the first outdoor "level" I traversed was optional stuff you can explore if you really want to find another few chests, but if you don't want to, you can make a beeline for the next town and that's that.
My problem right now is that I've started to enjoy FF XIII, as it ramped up a little bit now, and I want to keep playing that
So I've played this for a while now, entered and left the third settlement, out of the desert into the mountains.
White Knight Chronicles has a lot of unexpected jank to it. The decision to not pause the game when the menu opens, even in single player is partly to blame, but some of the basics just seem unpolished. E.g. when you fight a big battle, level up, and spend a few minutes allocating your skill points and doing other management tasks -- more in a sec -- it can and will happen that the exact same beast you just fought spawns again, right on top of you. I thought a little radius check to prevent this was a well-understood technique. Apparently not.
The battles take place in the game world proper, no seams, no "battle screens". You enter combat mode by targetting an enemy and pressing X. That readies your weapon/shield, the combat HUD comes up, and your little ATB clock starts running. Your combat party members, who visibly follow you around while exploring, only enter combat mode after you made your first strike however. That means another 4~5 seconds until they take their first action.
If you're not in combat mode, but being attacked by a monster that went aggro for some reason, your party members will not defend themselves, nor you. They'll just stand there getting pummeled.
If you've run ahead, trying to avoid a fight, it can happen that one of your party members gets stuck running "through" a powerful enemy, because their pathfinding does not include circling around them. And then they die, of course.
You can only target things that are visible on screen AND in front of the character. You cannot target something you know is there unless the camera has properly framed it. It has already happened to me a few times that my entire party (automatically) left combat mode (swords sheathed, ATB progress lost) while enemies were still charging us, because those enemies were coming from behind my current camera view.
Speaking of targetting, the same mechanism that is used to activate combat mode when aimed on an enemy also can be used to check out chests, work on harvesting spots or inspect your party members. The latter isn't very useful because it replicates functionality found in the menu anyway. However, it creates ambiguities where you want to draw your blade, but because a party member stands in the way you land in the "inspect" menu which you have to back out of first, while the enemy already gnaws at your shins.
Combat is generally very slow. It funtions like a traditional ATB Final Fantasy on a basic level, i.e. you watch a [strike]bar[/strike] circle fill up, and then perform a single action from a menu. Enemies tend to take a lot of hits. There's not one enemy in the game I can one-shot yet, not even if I teleport back to the very first outdoor area, which was 17 levels and at least 3 equipment tiers ago. So fights do take some time. That makes all the small inefficencies an extra bit annoying.
WKC is also a huge managerial task. You get a full party of completely equivalent characters dumped in front of you. They all start with no skills learned, and the same weapon class (small swords). So it's not that you can break them out of their roles; they don't have any roles to begin with, despite some cut-scenes pretending otherwise.
You level up with combat experience, and then you gain skill points which you allocate into skill trees ordered by weapon class. There's also separate trees for divine and elemental magic (in addition to staves; magic can be cast regardless of equipment).
The big "wut" comes when you realize that your characters do not use any of these skills, unless you manually add them into what I'll call a skill palette. It's a fully editable menu of combat commands, 8x3 entries deep. You can (and probably have to) create combos, which chain together multiple attacks into a single entry. This is how you make battles go by faster, but it expends "action chips", which act as a slowly recharging super-move cooldown. And it's not just the controlled main character, it concerns the computer-controlled party members all the same. You have to regularly go spend skill points and rework the skill palettes for all your characters if you want them to do anything but "slash".
This is a huge amount of effort. You also basically start over every time you want to try out a new weapon class for one of your characters. Physical skills from one skill tree only work when a corresponding weapon is equipped.
Apropos "all your characters", I still have no idea who's supposed to be my main. I have my custom avatar and Leonard basically synched in all aspects now, because at certain points the game will force Leonard into your party, but all the sidequests are played with the custom avatar alone. So to get my style of play, use my favourite weapon on my main, and fill the other two slots with complementary roles, I made them interchangeable. You can go Leonard+Avatar+Support of course, and control the avatar. The game has two main characters, basically. I know they did it for the online mode, but it's weird nonetheless.
Another super-janky aspect is how the game discards the information you gain about enemies (resistances, weaknesses) immediately after battle. You always start at zero. Even after defeating dozens of them, even after using the "inspectables" to "figure them out", come the next fight, your AI comrades will again happily use fire magic on fire elementals.
This is particularly noticable in direct contrast to FF XIII, where the full log of enemy data is used not just for lore, but forms the basis to the automated skill selection of your party members.
To summarize, so far this feels to me like Level 5's take on FF XII. Out with the blazing fast action combat system (Rogue Galaxy) and in with editing and management and ... distance.
I wish it was faster. If only the "ATB" circle filled a little quicker, it would give the combat a proper pace. As it is, I feel detached, not in control, forced to wait a lot for things to get going.
Story is "save the princess", traditional fantasy, fair enough. Gave me a FF IX vibe for a while.
Very easy game, huge timesink nonetheless, and rough edges galore.
I don't really know how I feel about recommending this, but I'll keep playing. Maybe things will fall into place eventually.
White Knight Chronicles has a lot of unexpected jank to it. The decision to not pause the game when the menu opens, even in single player is partly to blame, but some of the basics just seem unpolished. E.g. when you fight a big battle, level up, and spend a few minutes allocating your skill points and doing other management tasks -- more in a sec -- it can and will happen that the exact same beast you just fought spawns again, right on top of you. I thought a little radius check to prevent this was a well-understood technique. Apparently not.
The battles take place in the game world proper, no seams, no "battle screens". You enter combat mode by targetting an enemy and pressing X. That readies your weapon/shield, the combat HUD comes up, and your little ATB clock starts running. Your combat party members, who visibly follow you around while exploring, only enter combat mode after you made your first strike however. That means another 4~5 seconds until they take their first action.
If you're not in combat mode, but being attacked by a monster that went aggro for some reason, your party members will not defend themselves, nor you. They'll just stand there getting pummeled.
If you've run ahead, trying to avoid a fight, it can happen that one of your party members gets stuck running "through" a powerful enemy, because their pathfinding does not include circling around them. And then they die, of course.
You can only target things that are visible on screen AND in front of the character. You cannot target something you know is there unless the camera has properly framed it. It has already happened to me a few times that my entire party (automatically) left combat mode (swords sheathed, ATB progress lost) while enemies were still charging us, because those enemies were coming from behind my current camera view.
Speaking of targetting, the same mechanism that is used to activate combat mode when aimed on an enemy also can be used to check out chests, work on harvesting spots or inspect your party members. The latter isn't very useful because it replicates functionality found in the menu anyway. However, it creates ambiguities where you want to draw your blade, but because a party member stands in the way you land in the "inspect" menu which you have to back out of first, while the enemy already gnaws at your shins.
Combat is generally very slow. It funtions like a traditional ATB Final Fantasy on a basic level, i.e. you watch a [strike]bar[/strike] circle fill up, and then perform a single action from a menu. Enemies tend to take a lot of hits. There's not one enemy in the game I can one-shot yet, not even if I teleport back to the very first outdoor area, which was 17 levels and at least 3 equipment tiers ago. So fights do take some time. That makes all the small inefficencies an extra bit annoying.
WKC is also a huge managerial task. You get a full party of completely equivalent characters dumped in front of you. They all start with no skills learned, and the same weapon class (small swords). So it's not that you can break them out of their roles; they don't have any roles to begin with, despite some cut-scenes pretending otherwise.
You level up with combat experience, and then you gain skill points which you allocate into skill trees ordered by weapon class. There's also separate trees for divine and elemental magic (in addition to staves; magic can be cast regardless of equipment).
The big "wut" comes when you realize that your characters do not use any of these skills, unless you manually add them into what I'll call a skill palette. It's a fully editable menu of combat commands, 8x3 entries deep. You can (and probably have to) create combos, which chain together multiple attacks into a single entry. This is how you make battles go by faster, but it expends "action chips", which act as a slowly recharging super-move cooldown. And it's not just the controlled main character, it concerns the computer-controlled party members all the same. You have to regularly go spend skill points and rework the skill palettes for all your characters if you want them to do anything but "slash".
This is a huge amount of effort. You also basically start over every time you want to try out a new weapon class for one of your characters. Physical skills from one skill tree only work when a corresponding weapon is equipped.
Apropos "all your characters", I still have no idea who's supposed to be my main. I have my custom avatar and Leonard basically synched in all aspects now, because at certain points the game will force Leonard into your party, but all the sidequests are played with the custom avatar alone. So to get my style of play, use my favourite weapon on my main, and fill the other two slots with complementary roles, I made them interchangeable. You can go Leonard+Avatar+Support of course, and control the avatar. The game has two main characters, basically. I know they did it for the online mode, but it's weird nonetheless.
Another super-janky aspect is how the game discards the information you gain about enemies (resistances, weaknesses) immediately after battle. You always start at zero. Even after defeating dozens of them, even after using the "inspectables" to "figure them out", come the next fight, your AI comrades will again happily use fire magic on fire elementals.
This is particularly noticable in direct contrast to FF XIII, where the full log of enemy data is used not just for lore, but forms the basis to the automated skill selection of your party members.
To summarize, so far this feels to me like Level 5's take on FF XII. Out with the blazing fast action combat system (Rogue Galaxy) and in with editing and management and ... distance.
I wish it was faster. If only the "ATB" circle filled a little quicker, it would give the combat a proper pace. As it is, I feel detached, not in control, forced to wait a lot for things to get going.
Story is "save the princess", traditional fantasy, fair enough. Gave me a FF IX vibe for a while.
Very easy game, huge timesink nonetheless, and rough edges galore.
I don't really know how I feel about recommending this, but I'll keep playing. Maybe things will fall into place eventually.
Now I'm really down on the game. The sidequests are garbage. You run past enemies for 20 minutes to collect two key items, run back to the starting spot and trigger a boss fight. Garbage!
The towns add nothing to the game but empty hours of dragging along. It's a layer of obfuscation for the georama residents, or a pure waste of time, take a pick.
Actually, the georama and the crafting feel completely pointless as well. They don't complement the traditional game systems, but just duplicate it. I.e. to get bronze armor:
1)Farm ingredients until you can donate 3000 points of worth of stuff to the binding posts to unlock the recipe, then get base armors, upgrade them to certain degrees, get more materials to add, and then bind all that stuff together.
OR
2)Farm 30k+ worth of gold to upgrade your georama to lvl 4, recruit georama residents from across all the towns, build housing for miners and warriors and whatnot, assign foremen and workers to make the armor available FOR PURCHASE in your georama's weapon store.
OR
3)go to Albana and buy it from the store.
Which one of these avenues sounds worth pursuing?
If there's any special stuff that would require going through the arduous upgrading process of either georama or binding post (or god forbid both), I'm not seeing it now. Feels like a lost opportunity and/or trophy considerations gone wrong. These auxilliary systems should complement the wares I can purchase in the mainline towns, not be an impossibly long-winded way to get the same things in different places.
I can warp around the world anyway. Warping to my georama town is not even easier than warping to a story town.
Speaking of which, I noticed that (unlike Rogue Galaxy), I can't warp to any savepoint I want. I can warp to a given area (which may be large and contain many savepoints), but can't control where.
More jank: quest markers don't always work. Completely breaks in Greede (town with multiple districts and multiple floors with elevators and trains). Have to consult a FAQ now to progress with the story. Have no idea which of the 200 NPCs (I kid you not) I have to talk to to trigger whatever comes next.
Minor bonus jank: elevator doors don't automatically open after the ride. Oh Level 5.
=========
And here we are, another week later, another try to go on. Jank first:
1)You can't switch targets when knocked off balance. Like many Japanese games, WKC features a thing where you can get stunned completely for a very long time by certain heavy attacks.
2)Your companions are impervious collision entities. You can actually get stuck when three of them (usual party+guest) stand in front off you, occupying the full width of a corridor in whereveritscalled-underbelly. No hopping out of the way, like seen in many modern games these days.
3)I've just managed to aggro a group of three spiders through a closed door. While they charged me, they clipped right through the (still closed) door. During the exchange of blows, one of them ran back through the door (which was, of course, still still closed closed). But not to worry, the attack I had already dialed in went and connected straight through the door as well. I made it a point to try and run up to the door after the combat, and sure enough, I did have to open it properly to pass through.
So I was playing this dungeon where I have to find switches that open vents, then drop down the same vents to lower levels, do things in otherwise unreachable areas and backtrack (through one-way gates) to a central elevator, rinse, repeat. My feelings have passed. I can't go on. The game is a slow, piss-easy time killer. This is what it must feel like to be in an early beta of a second-tier MMORPG, playing with semi-functional AI sidekicks instead of real people.
Rogue Galaxy was longer than it had any right to be, wasn't all that hard, and the story went off the rails, deep into madness. But still, it was a lot of fun. If White Knight Chronicles was just that, but in HD, with more swords and less spaceships, it would be great. Unfortunately, it's not.
I am officially disappointed to the extent of committing the cardinal sin: I'll pass the game on to the next sucker before finishing it myself. Meh!
The towns add nothing to the game but empty hours of dragging along. It's a layer of obfuscation for the georama residents, or a pure waste of time, take a pick.
Actually, the georama and the crafting feel completely pointless as well. They don't complement the traditional game systems, but just duplicate it. I.e. to get bronze armor:
1)Farm ingredients until you can donate 3000 points of worth of stuff to the binding posts to unlock the recipe, then get base armors, upgrade them to certain degrees, get more materials to add, and then bind all that stuff together.
OR
2)Farm 30k+ worth of gold to upgrade your georama to lvl 4, recruit georama residents from across all the towns, build housing for miners and warriors and whatnot, assign foremen and workers to make the armor available FOR PURCHASE in your georama's weapon store.
OR
3)go to Albana and buy it from the store.
Which one of these avenues sounds worth pursuing?
If there's any special stuff that would require going through the arduous upgrading process of either georama or binding post (or god forbid both), I'm not seeing it now. Feels like a lost opportunity and/or trophy considerations gone wrong. These auxilliary systems should complement the wares I can purchase in the mainline towns, not be an impossibly long-winded way to get the same things in different places.
I can warp around the world anyway. Warping to my georama town is not even easier than warping to a story town.
Speaking of which, I noticed that (unlike Rogue Galaxy), I can't warp to any savepoint I want. I can warp to a given area (which may be large and contain many savepoints), but can't control where.
More jank: quest markers don't always work. Completely breaks in Greede (town with multiple districts and multiple floors with elevators and trains). Have to consult a FAQ now to progress with the story. Have no idea which of the 200 NPCs (I kid you not) I have to talk to to trigger whatever comes next.
Minor bonus jank: elevator doors don't automatically open after the ride. Oh Level 5.
=========
And here we are, another week later, another try to go on. Jank first:
1)You can't switch targets when knocked off balance. Like many Japanese games, WKC features a thing where you can get stunned completely for a very long time by certain heavy attacks.
2)Your companions are impervious collision entities. You can actually get stuck when three of them (usual party+guest) stand in front off you, occupying the full width of a corridor in whereveritscalled-underbelly. No hopping out of the way, like seen in many modern games these days.
3)I've just managed to aggro a group of three spiders through a closed door. While they charged me, they clipped right through the (still closed) door. During the exchange of blows, one of them ran back through the door (which was, of course, still still closed closed). But not to worry, the attack I had already dialed in went and connected straight through the door as well. I made it a point to try and run up to the door after the combat, and sure enough, I did have to open it properly to pass through.
So I was playing this dungeon where I have to find switches that open vents, then drop down the same vents to lower levels, do things in otherwise unreachable areas and backtrack (through one-way gates) to a central elevator, rinse, repeat. My feelings have passed. I can't go on. The game is a slow, piss-easy time killer. This is what it must feel like to be in an early beta of a second-tier MMORPG, playing with semi-functional AI sidekicks instead of real people.
Rogue Galaxy was longer than it had any right to be, wasn't all that hard, and the story went off the rails, deep into madness. But still, it was a lot of fun. If White Knight Chronicles was just that, but in HD, with more swords and less spaceships, it would be great. Unfortunately, it's not.
I am officially disappointed to the extent of committing the cardinal sin: I'll pass the game on to the next sucker before finishing it myself. Meh!
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