ArcheAge Review
(Three out of Five Ales)
ArcheAge can be a great experience if you love grinding and like the option to engage in PvP with that gear you grinded for. But ArcheAge is not a PvP game. It is a grind game and who does better at the grind will generally determine who wins at PvP. If you enjoy real skill-based PvP this is not the game for you. If you love PVE and despise being thrusted into PvP, this also isn't the game for you.
That being said, it has a beautiful atmosphere an engaging and innovative focus on the ocean, and can be really enjoyable if you play it as a casual PvE game about grinding, that just happens to have some PvP you can engage in after your thousands of hours of grinding.
Innovation
(Three out of Five Ales)
Starting out in ArcheAge you'll pick a race that will lock you into a faction, and a skilltree that helps determine your class. You'll then grind through a series of quests most of which revolve around killing a certain enemy, talking to a certain NPC, or gathering a certain item. As you grind to max level the focus shifts from leveling to gearing with major options for gearing being the crafting economy, dungeons, or grinding certain mobs for certain drops. And if you think that sounds like most every MMO in existence then you're right, my point in bringing this up is to show where ArcheAge lacks innovation.
That is not to say that it lacks it entirely. The character customization is very different as I will cover in that section, the economy is a bit different as I will cover in that section, and a major focal point of endgame content is the ocean.
Players can build their own ships then customize them with sails, cannons, rudders etc. of their choosing. Different grades of these items exist that give increased stats for dramatically increased costs so dedicated captains may find themselves investing as much more more in their ship than their actual character.
Out on the ocean with these ships you'll find yourself exploring for sunken chests and raising old wrecks, trading cargo from port to port or stealing that cargo, fighting ghost ships or joining many other players to take on major world bosses such as the kraken or delphinad ghost ships. Overall the naval portion of this game is a large part of what kept me coming back, as it was absolutely the best out there until the recent release of Atlas MMO.
Character Control & Combat
(Two and a Half out of Five Ales)
Combat is tab-targeted with activated abilities. It's neither a particularly good or bad example of the system. Predictably crowd control is very prominent. Certain classes even possess the ability to nearly entirely lock their opponent out of the fight by chaining their crowd control abilities. Healing is also very prominent though the customization options open up the ability to add some interesting flair to the role with heavy crowd control, tanking abilities, AoE buffs etc. In the open world though, a lot of the game revolves around massively geared melee characters that aim to down their opponents in a single combo. Perhaps even a single hit.
Customization
(Four out of Five Ales)
This is one of the elements where this game really shines. Your original skilltree pick is just one of three skilltrees you will be taking. You can pick from eleven skilltree options and while some skilltrees are more synergistic than others (there is such a thing as a good and a bad class in ArcheAge) no combinations are prohibited. Your three trees determine your class, of which there are 990 options.
Once you select your class you can allocate skillpoints into your skill trees, so while most players of the same class run very similar builds, it does vary a bit from player to player, and there is the possibility of two players taking a radically different approach to the same class. Gear is also very important. For instance there is a huge difference between a melee DPS who wears leather, and one who wears plate. The former generally being higher damage and more effective against magic users, while the latter has slightly lower damage but can take considerable punishment from other physical damage classes.
Challenge / Pacing
(One and a Half out of Five Ales)
While naval combat is the largest part of what kept me coming back to this game, the grind is what kept me leaving. Combat can be pretty fun between roughly evenly geared players. Most fights in ArcheAge are decided by gear though. That is to say, if you grind 1000 on a single account hours to get good gear, you will absolutely dominate anyone who hasn't, but you yourself will still be dominated by someone who has grinded 5000 hours on multiple accounts and invested hundreds or thousands of dollars into the game. By dominated I mean, there is no chance of you winning whatsoever if that player has made semi-decent gear investment and class choices. Skill doesn't even factor in when the disparity in gear is too high.
As such, the primary challenge of the game is not how well you play. It's how long you play and how much money you spend. PvE content can be challenging, but becomes simple once you have enough gear. PvP could be engaging, but ultimately PvP in ArcheAge revolves around contesting ways to make money, and those ways to make money are generally dominated by the group that already has the most gear with "free farm" becoming a major community term to describe when one group has such a powerful stranglehold on the server that they control all the content without anyone who can legitimately contest them.
Players are left with an option of getting more accounts and playing longer, spending money on the game, or joining a group that has free farm. Generally most players who succeed use a combination of all three, especially since groups that have free farm tend to require a minimum gearscore to join you can't achieve without doing one of both of the first for a considerable time.
Monetization
(Two and a Half Out of Five Ales)
ArcheAge is free to play but it's nearly impossible to gear efficiently without a subscription. However, subscriptions can be paid for with in-game currency, and it isn't' too hard to devise ways to play the game for free. Even if you want multiple accounts, if you're making good gold on all of them, you can probably pay for all of them by buying APEX from other players with in-game gold.
The game also has a cash shop that sells a lot of good items, some of which you actually need to be fully competitive. Most of these items are sold on the auction house for in-game currency though, and APEX can be converted into cash shop currency for perks that aren't auctionable. This essentially means everything can be earned in-game.
At the general exchange rate between gold and APEX, you would have to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on the game a month to equal the buying power of someone who plays regularly and makes gold in-game efficiently. However "Pay to Win" is still a factor for two major reasons:
1. People use cash to supplement their in-game earning, not replace it.
2. Those who truly "Pay to Win" tend to buy accounts from other players and gold from gold farmers, which have a much better conversion rate.
Due to the fact that buying gold from gold farmers violates the EULA and is bannable, I won't count the second point against ArcheAge's monetization.
Immersion / Artistic Appeal
(Three and a Half out of Five Ales)
This game has great music, a great atmosphere and I think that's one of the things I found most gripping about it. In incorporates elements of western fantasy and asian culture in a sometimes whimsical and sometimes serious way. The serenity of driving a trade cart through mountain passes or lush elven forests really kept me playing sometimes.
There were elements I didn't like. Like the fact the the technology level was clearly industrial steampunk, and you could even dress in such a fashion, but rangers used bows with no option to even wield a gun. And I personally wasn't a fan of all the cutesy elements like actual houses made out of candy and ice cream sandwiches or players dressed as stuffed animals, though for some people that was a highlight of the game.
Overall though, I still really enjoyed the vibe the game gave off, and miss that element of it.
Story / Lore
(Three and a Half out of Five Ales)
ArcheAge is set in a world where mortals can become gods. Long ago a troupe of mortals found their way to a garden that granted divinity. After gaining divinity the troupe turned on eachother, and some became great heros, while others wrought great destruction. The destruction wrought was so great that the heroic gods sent the inhabitants of ancestral their home to other continents to rebuild. Great civilizations were lost in the process, and mortals divided between the Nuians (western fantasy themed) and the Haranyans (Asian themed).
Now, hundreds of years later, there is push to reclaim the ancestral lands of Auroria. Buth Nuia and Haranya, two great nations now at war, send their heros to reclaim it in their name. But as they do new independent nations emerge, as well as a faction of pirates loyal to no one.
The story is fairly gripping and explores the history and personality of these once mortal gods, their conflicts with each other, and their conflicts with gods older than themselves. If you enjoy story and lore there is a lot to dig up in this game.
Crafting / Economy
(Three out of Five Ales)
ArcheAge's economy revolves around something called "labor." Characters generate labor over time that can be spent on various economic activities. For free to play characters it generates slowly whenever you are logged in, while for patron characters it generates quickly whether you are online or offline. Labor spent in a certain economic skill is what levels your proficiency in that skill.
This system is interesting in that it helps solve the age old problem of making rusty daggers at a loss to increase skill. Because labor is a finite resource there are generally always tasks you can do that generate profit because you used labor doing them, at any level of proficiency.
Crafted is also very useful. The best potential items in the game are all crafted items. With alternatives to crafted gear being seen as the budget alternatives to high end crafted equipment.
But there is also a meta created by this that promotes the use of alternate accounts. For every account, you have a new labor pool, so players create many characters to give them as much labor as they need to accomplish the activities they want to accomplish. It makes playing the game on a single game almost non-viable when coupled with the extreme advantage given to those with more expensive gear.
Much of the crafting system is almost lottery like in nature too. Items can be "regraded" making them a better version of the same item. The highest grades are extremely valuable but the chances of reaching those values of infinitesimal. Players blow fortunes trying to get a "mythic erenor weapon." For the lucky, they'll get it early on at a small investment. For the unlucky, the gold and resources they farmed for weeks or months will be fed into failures in trying to achieve that piece of gear they want.
Finally, one of the more interesting and innovative elements of the economy is the commerce system. Trade packs are generated at various points using materials provided by other professions such as farmers. Upon creation, they can be taken to various places that will buy them, with packs that travel longer distances or go through more dangerous areas generally creating a higher profit. Profits are also affected by demand. If one pack of a particular type is run consistently, the value of that pack will fall. Packs of other types need to be run to recover it's rates. So traders need to have plans on what to do depending on the conditions of the market while they are running trade packs.
Packs can be stolen if left unattended too. In safe areas this basically just makes crashing or needing to go afk needlessly frustrating as your packs are left in the world if you log out, while in PvP zones it creates an engaging risk vs. reward system.
Stability / Performance
(Four of of Five Ales)
ArcheAge is an older and well-established game. For the most part it runs quite well. There are small bugs that come in through patching sometimes, or old bugs they have chosen not to deal with like the ability to beat certain dungeons by exploiting glitches against the bosses. But overall stability will not have a negative impact on your game experience.
