[Ether Saga Online Review Part 2: Pets]

[Part 1 is here]

Since money is pretty tight at low levels (item drops sell for only pennies to NPCs, since the game has a player shop system), some early quests will helpfully give you the basic items you need to start taming monsters. Pets can be used as stat-boosts for their owners as well as buffers/healers and tank/damage roles. Each monster 'family' has different strengths and weaknesses to other families, so knowing what you're going to be going up against helps in deciding which pets you want to use in a given situation.


Monster taming and Melding is one of those things that is simple on the surface, but can get complex if you're aiming for a specific combination of stats. I had a sinking feeling as I remembered how 'selective breeding' for the best stats in Pokemon was a serious obsession of mine, and I think ESO's pet system is similar enough to present a real threat to my free time. =P

Pets have the basic atk/def/etc combat stats, a certain number of skill slots, an elemental affinity (or not), a personality type, and a certain 'growth rate' that affects how much certain stats will grow each time the pet levels, which varies between individual monsters. Since pets can be 'Fused' to a player to serve as a type of stat boost as well as being used as a combat ally, there are different strategies involved in pet Melding depending on what you want to use the final pet for. Since their personality affects stat growth, you want those to match, too. Catching several of a type of monster, sifting through them for the best individuals, and then Melding them together in order to end up with a superior custom pet can be an entire 'endgame' in and of itself. And ON TOP of all that, is that whenever two pets are Melded, there is a chance for an Appearance Mutation to occur, which can result in you getting a monster that's impossible to tame from the wild. There are several guides on the official boards that go deeper into the min/max aspects of Melding, as well.

I'm still too low level (and poor) to get into serious high level pet development, but I'll be experimenting with some simpler aspects to get a better feel for how the system works in the meantime. So far it looks like it could be pretty fun for a former Pokemon addict like me.

Next up: my thoughts on Ether Saga's general gameplay, cash shop, community, and related miscellany.

[Ether Saga Online Review: Part One]

Leala over as Spouse Aggro was talking about how cute this game was, so I ventured over to the official site to check it out. It has tameable combat pets! So I had to give it a try. =P

Ether Saga is a Chinese F2P MMO based on The Journey to the West with a lot of neat little pet features: Pet taming (you can go out into the wilds and capture various monsters), Pet Fusion (where you combine with a pet to gain stat bonuses), and Pet Melding (mixing two pets to create a new pet with improved stats). Plus, there are special items you can get that can allow you to become a monster yourself for a time and benefit from special attributes. Sounds fun!


Character creation is very sparse, but the designs are pretty, so I didn't mind too much. There are three races: humans (Ren), demigods (Shenzu), and animals that were given humanity by the gods (Yaoh). The three are basically identical except for appearance options and starting pets. Based on your character's race/birthday, you get unique skills every 10 levels. I chose a Yaoh as my first character, because of their nifty fox pet.

Upon appearing in the starter zone, the first NPC I met gifted me with a large package of free potions, food, and a present that I can open at level 5. Nice! Plus, the NPCs speak Chinese when you click on them, which I love (the Russian emotes were something I really liked about Allods Online too).

I started exploring the UI, since that's what I always do first in a new game. I found that you can't reduce the UI scale (booo), or adjust/remove chat boxes, which was kind of disappointing since they take up a lot of screen space. But I also found that there's vanity gear slots (woot!) and that I already had a set of 'for show' clothes that I could toggle on and off from the paperdoll window. Also, you can apparently rate other players up and down (from a menu that appears when you click on them), which interesting way of giving public reputation to players. There's apparently PvP and the ability for guilds to control certain zones (going by the global messages I keep seeing) but I have yet to look into that aspect yet. Apparently, killing equally- or higher-leveled players has a chance of dropping loot for the winner, which is interesting. There are also timed server events of various kinds going on regularly, and the game keeps you posted about what's happening in the world at any given time.

The newbie zone quests are really friendly: I got a (pretty!) free armor set, various potions and +XP items, a second pet as a quest reward, and one timed kill quest even gave my 5 levels worth of xp in a single turn-in. One downside for some people may be that the countryside is literally swarming with mobs that repop almost instantly (an attempt to minimize the impact of farmers, perhaps?) -- I actually turned off monster nameplates just so they weren't such an eyesore because really, the game is beautiful to look at. The visuals remind me of The Secret of Mana's artstyle, which I like a lot. Quests are pretty much basic 'kill stuff' types, which I personally don't mind at all (I have a pretty high grind tolerance, especially when the mobs only take like 2 seconds to die). Translation is another thing that's a bit clunky in places, and the storyline is a bit hard to follow, but I doubt there's an epic novel going on here, even in the original language.


Once I hit level 15 (levels have come quickly in the first few hours I've played), I can begin taming wild monsters as pets, which is the main gameplay aspect I want to try out. I'll be focusing on that in part two.

[Two Awesome TF2 Skins: Female Medic & Heavy]

These have to be the coolest (and most thought-out) fan-made 'female remakes' of Team Fortress 2 characters I've seen! They're fully functional ingame as well, albeit without voices:
You can read the story behind their design and development here.

[P2P = Good Game, F2P = Bad Game?]

Gavin (Yogi) over at MMO Voices has written an interesting article rethinking the old stereotype many Pay-to-Play folks have that games can be neatly divided into 'good' and 'bad' based primarily on their payment designs (something that even I was guilty of in the past):

"When I first started playing MMOs I thought of the genre had two distinct sub-genres: P2P and F2P. These two were also conveniently defined also as Good MMO and Bad MMO. F2P always seemed to have less quality, more grinding, and annoying cash shop requirements to make the game fun. Call it my wow fan boy mentality (at the time) or just shrugging off of certain titles in the name of ignorance. However I or you choose to look at it, I threw the blanket statement over all F2P games. They suck.

This thought has begun to change."

He goes on to describe the changes in his life that have led him to appreciate 'having fun' rather than 'beating' a game, and how it's opened up more options in his gaming routine. The paragraph that really has summed up my own change in playstyle is this:

"I came to the conclusion that what used to make me happy while playing games, was no longer viable. Thus started my nomadic gaming style and the focus on enjoying a game rather than ‘beating’ it."

The freedom of F2P becomes clear when one stops trying to 'dominate' a single game and opens up the option of playing other games at the same time at a lower intensity. F2P, with it's choice of not paying until you feel like it, allows people to sample and try more variety in games than the would if they had to pay 50$+monthly fee to get anywhere in each title. It truly is a 'buffet' style experience, and for many people it works quite well and helps stave off the dreaded 'burnout' that happens when your primary MMO becomes more of a job than an enjoyment. I think if more people were open to at least trying out a few of the literally hundreds of different F2P titles out there, they would learn that the old stereotype of 'F2P = bad game' is really completely false. Which is good news for those of us who love MMOs, because there more choice and freedom to play how we want, when we want, and for how much we want with no strings attached.

I think too many MMO players stick to one game exclusively to the point where they burnout completely and begin to hate what they once loved, which I think can be prevented if you're open to trying something new by trying out a F2P MMO now and then. It costs nothing to give them a chance, after all!

[Keeping the Glass Half Full]

It's been a few days since I've come back to WoW, and I realized that I really need to outline to myself what aspects of the game keep me coming back, and what aspects keep disappointing me. I've decided that I need to come to terms with what the game IS and what it ISN'T and dwell on the parts I like rather than always on the weaknesses of the game. Because it's too easy to always see the glass half empty, which I think is unfair to the game.

I think I need to take a page from Beau's book and learn to let go and not treat 'fun' like such serious business.

So I narrowed down the things I like most in WoW:

1. The story/world (including quests)
2. My character and developing her (so far, that's been solely by gear and achievements)
3. 5 man dungeons
4. Collecting fluff (pets, mounts, titles)
5. Playing and socializing with my guild/friends ingame.

From now until Cataclysm, I'm going to try and get the most out of those aspects of the game. I'm going on hiatus from the gear treadmill and raiding all together, and I'm even considering moving to an RP server/guild, at least on one of my characters. It's harder in WoW than in some other MMORPGs to find things to do outside the gear/PvP grind, but I really feel I need to start focusing on that or else I'm just going to fall into burnout mode again for the umpteenth time.

[A World or a Lobby?]

I've come back to WoW after having been gone for around 6 months or so. There are many new things added since I've been away, not the least of which is the much-touted 'Dungeon Finder' cross-server LFG tool. Since I wanted to get the achievement that gives a pet Pug, I've been using the Finder pretty much constantly for the past two days.


Now, when the cross-server LFG was first announced, my first feelings about it were mixed. On the one hand, I understand how hard getting a group can be depending on a server's population and class balance. But also, I worried that it would erode the already tenuous community that WoW servers have. When you're instantly teleported from anywhere in the world into a dungeon with 4 people from different servers that you'll most likely never see again afterward, it's hard to justify the effort to get to know them, talk to them, or to even have patience with the slightest mistake. I observed people leaving after one bad pull (and why not, when many can easily get another random group via the Finder). There's no incentive to really care about the people in the group other than as efficient loot farming aids. And there's no way to blacklist the asshats.

Whereas an unsocial attitude was present in many cases even before the Dungeon Finder, whenever you found a 'cool' person when pugging you could friends them and build groups via the Friends list (the original purpose of the list). In BC, I had a long list of cool non-guildies I knew on the server, and could put together groups rather regularly. But there's no need for that kind of effort now. There's no need to even walk to a dungeon's physical location anymore. They've been basically severed from the game world. The 'world' of Warcraft is now just a graphical lobby you hang out in to pass the time while waiting for your insta-port into a dungeon with people you have no incentive to ever get to know. For PvP I can understand the benefit of such a system, but for 5-man instances I think it does more harm than good. I mean, sure it's now simpler and faster than ever to 'grind badges for loot'. But I think making that process even more mechanical than it already was, is a step in the wrong direction. It's easier and faster, but not better ('Better' would be adding some variety in content to the game besides loot treadmills). Has Blizzard's goal of increasing the efficiency and speed of gear achievement finally trumped the gameplay and original premise of the game as an RPG? How far does a game have to go before it totally loses any semblance of the 'RPG' aspect of 'MMORPG'?

Though honestly, I don't know how else (barring server transfers/mergers) to solve the problem of difficulty in forming instance groups. But even so, I still feel like this latest development has diminished even more of the 'world' in World of Warcraft.