Thanks for the review, come check Arcfall out after next update as we are busy with a major new action based combat system update which should fix the lag problems.
@@Alqha Seriously, a Wow clone with stolen and prebuilt assets, non fonctioning combat and endgame, but you can bet that the Cash Shop is lag free and easy to access. It really show the priorities of the Devs.
I think they came up with it after playing smash bros ultimate online, jumped into a time machine and it's the one feature they stole from Nintendo thinking it will make their game a hit.
Fun fact: Those models aren't theirs, that's an asset pack in the unity store I myself have and worked with, you can buy it for like 70 bucks each, male and then female
My main issue and concern would be micro transactions of paid assets. If the free or paid game includes paid assets that is legal to me. But say they paywall assets on their store, imo that is reselling your project, not their own. That would be like reselling mp3s you bought from an artist.
@@notatrollll no, they're free to sell it cause they bought the rights to include it in their game...then are free to provide a purchase option to access the assets in the game. They are not selling the rights for the player to extract the asset from the game files to use outside the boundries of the game. So it's legal. Game is shit tho, but that's for Josh to elaborate on.
These episodes really are a masterclass on game user experience design. I’m over here just pen and paper “write that down, write that down!”. The details to which you’re able to pick apart the background functionality that usually goes un-identified is great.
Exactly ..potential mmo creators should be watching his whole library before designing their own game.. all the answers of how to make it work, are in here
yeah, I'm genuinely amazed by how well this dude knows good game design. He also notices a lot of really subtle stuff that I'm not sure I would have ever considered otherwise!
I was actually thinking a few days ago, that if I ever made an MMO, I'd start by watching the entirety of this series first so I could figure out what not to do
"cicada noise" reminds me of several old Flash games that had chirping bird noises...VERY LOUD BIRDS! seriously, they are louder than GUNSHOTS! and YES, the games i'm thinking of DO have GUNS! one of them is called "Storm the house 3"...a really silly name, since the player is DEFENDING the house!
Once an early access game starts charging money whether it's directly from steam or a cash shop in game, when you expect people to give you money it's open for critique
I totally support that idea. Once they want money, they thing the game is good enough that people pay something. It's a different thing if they ask nicely for donations on their website. Just a liittle button or something. They can't even cover behind the "but we're still working on content" excuse, because that is something that all MMOs do. They constantly add new content, that you can play with your existing characters. It's one of the appeals of a persistent world.
I mean, it should always be open to critique since early access should be about getting feedback for developers who can't afford a tone of beta testers. It's just how that critique should be taken that should change. "Games a jankie mess" can mean something very different when its in early development vs finished.
@@Bustermachine I think there is a difference between feedback and critique. One is possitive to make the product better while the other is more negative.
@@Krasshirsch I was going to post something about there being nothing wrong with adding more Polish to a game early on, but everything I wrote wasn't funny. Just leave the Czech out of your critiques, though.. k?
This is so frustrating because my initial response to the weird bug like the map button not working and the crafting system being unintuitive is "Dang that sucks but they're trying and maybe they'll figure it out one day!" But then I remember there's a cash shop with $50+ bullshit in it and i instantly hate the developer.
The logo looks like it's for a Swedish heavy rock band who are heavily influenced by Magnum. The band Magnum from Birmingham, not the chocolate covered ice cream on a stick.
IMO the logo looks like it was made by a 12 year old who just found a can of spray paint in his dad's garage and thinks he's going to be the next banksy
The logo looks unbalanced, the l in the end would need to be bigger. There is a massive A at one side and the capital F right in the middle, but then there is nothing on the right. Oh, and don't forget magnum ammunition
At 12:35, when talking about the weight limit it appears underneath the hunger bar. The bar with the anvil icon says 200/200 and when he switches the character page it says he is currently carrying 200 weight
@@WiseOwl_1408 Welcome to journalistic review, just like active players he won't be perfect as if watching a video and can control playback at your leisure.
I was going through this and thought to myself "It does not look that bad" until I saw the grid equipped items menu THAT'S where I draw the line... Heresy.
I can't believe they didn't purposely shuffle the slots. This almost takes more effort than doing the right thing EVERY other MMO does. It's like setting up for a career as a lawyer, but not only are you very bad at understanding law, you always wear your pants on your head, and your blazer on your feet
I was thinking that most of the way through the video. "Okay, so they use WoW style player bodies... WoW's art style copied as closely as possible... the bandits look almost exactly like those Defias guys in WoW..." And so on and so forth. It's like they just said "This game is successful, so we will make a game that looks identical and it will be successful." Without realizing that a lot of WoW's appeal was that it _works as a game._ It has its faults, to be sure, but also a lot of strengths... or, it used to, anyway. Peaked around the Lich King expansion if you ask me. Cataclysm was a lovely world update... too bad it utterly demolished the talent system and any semblance of individuality in your character. Or was that the Worgen expansion? Or the panda one, maybe? There are entirely too many, and they definitely lost the plot _hardcore_ somewhere along the way. Methinks the main misstep was the talent slaughter though. Going from like... 40 or 50 talent picks, to 4? That's what we call "excessively dumbing down a core game mechanic".
I wonder if Josh has ended up saving any of these MMOs, either by bringing an audience to it or just by laying out all the biggest flaws in one place for developers to look at
Arcfall. It's like RuneScape if you stripped out nearly every quality I love about it that makes it unique and fun. You can grind skills. Generic MMO skills. Poorly explained systems. Slow-paced combat that's of the "almost die to one mob, heal, take on second mob, die if you pull 2" variety. It's a grinder without a reason to grind. A somewhat sandbox with not enough sand or tools. Perfect MMO for someone with insomnia that needs to fall asleep. Meg didn't like it. I felt like there should be a game here for me but after 25-30 hours, it didn't change. Curious to see Josh's take. I don't see him enjoying this one.
I do like the die if you pull more then 2 mobs at the same time. that said you need other player for it to work because when any mobs that can group you will kill you, you will go out of your way to try and team up this is a MMO after all. Played Star wars the Old republic beta when it came out and I did not team up like every because I did not. the only reason why I knew I was online was because there was peaple in the General chat and my wow guild (I think our Guild leader got some keys or something). that was trying the game was chatting about in /guild chat. the only thing I remmber from that was when our guild leader said in /g everyone type /facepalm everyone typed /facepalm and across the universe 100 of peaple facepalmed for no reason (whit animation wow did not have a facepalm animation at that time if they have one now).
@@Zack_Wester It's not so much that the needing to group to take on multiple mobs mechanic is an issue.. I agree that an MMORPG shouldn't be something a single person blitzes through. It's when the game is designed in such a way where the focus shifts from interacting with a virtual world to the game mechanics themselves. Arcfall felt less like a dangerous world where I needed to be careful while exploring and engaging in combat and more a waiting game where I hoped RNG went my way and no extra mobs respawned or walked over to ruin my already tedious leveling experience. Even when bringing along others, combat felt like it interfered with exploration and learning crafting skills and no lore or story elements were present anywhere to give me a reason to overlook the slow-paced combat. I really, really wanted to like Arcfall, but it was a case of everytime I would start to get immersed in the world, questionable design would pull me back out. And as I watch this video, I'm reminded of all of the reasons outside of combat I gave up on this game after 3 separate tries and my wife gave up after about an hour.
Booty Bay and Stranglethorn, right down to the troll architecture scattered around. I think the devs decided to make their own Warcraft, but with blackjack and hookers, and then realized that making an MMO is really hard--as you frequently mention in this series. I occasionally daydream my own MMORPG ideas, but in the end I know I couldn't do it myself and it's mostly a creative writing exercise.
Why not dumb it down, lower your expectations and try anyway? I know I can't make 3D world but 2D is a possibility. I know making huge open world is hard so I decide to go for instances. I know that making a lot of content at once will be hard without any support so releasing with vertical slice as well as having idea how entire game will look like and how to spread updates is manageable.
I visit my family in Mississippi about five times a year, and in the summer, the cicadas are SO LOUD. I live in Florida so they aren't that bad here but is there more in Mississippi or something???
I'm not even from the US and those cicada noises were pretty familiar to me, very accurate actually. Here we gently call those sounds as ''summer sounds''.
and the insanely obvious use of just a PIG's snort for the imps... nothing to process it in anyway to be less recognizable.... lazy sound design at best
"... a Hunger mechanic, because _they've_ always been known to make games consistently more fun" lmao (^-^) I thought I was the only one who hated those things! Boy, it is so nice to hear someone else rail against them and the useless busywork they add to anything.
I absolutely hate hunger (and stamina most of the time) because people say they add ~realism~ but I refuse to believe that a superpowered chosen one would keel over and die because they didn't eat bread in two hours.
I do enjoy food mechanics, though I vastly prefer a buff system to hunger mechanics, unless it's thematically fitting. Like the game Fear & Hunger. Yeah, it's in the name.
@@siegwardinspirit Even a minor debuff system wouldn't be too terrible. Losing one or two points here and there for not eating for the last ten hours sounds like it'd just make sense honestly. Losing health though just seems silly.
To paraphrase Pinhead: "Oh, how uncomfortable that word must feel on your lips, "evil", "good." There is no good, Monroe; there is no evil -- there is only shit MMOs, and the patterns to which we submit it."
...when the preview showed us that they'd forgotten enemies, I internally groaned and knew *exactly* what I was in for. Or I thought I did. I mean I knew my expectations were low but holy fuck.
@@shammydammy2610 Well they just said that they paused adding enemies because theu are updating the combat to action combat. Adding enemies which need to be recoded to an action combat style would be a waste of time.
I think it would be great to make a mini series where you make a tier list of all these MMOs you have covered to crown the worst of the worst. Loving this series btw thank you for going through hell on our behalf lol
The combat with the sheep reminds me of when I got Resurrection Sickness in WoW (many years ago) and punched a sheep to death, which took roughly 3 minutes. Don't ask me why; that's a question for past-me to answer. And the past-me thought that was a good idea, so there you have it.
bro that wasn't just similar to the Zandalari port, that was literally the Zandalari port. I almost died laughing, they even got the little building on the left where you que up for island expeditions lmao
The buttons are small and have a lot of wasted space around them too. So there is no reason for them to be this small. Not to mention that good games have automatic text size scaling so the text always fits when the container size is fixed. Developers figured this out years ago.
I would legit check this out if it was made by a proven MMO company and y'know...not in this bad of a state. The graphics don't look bad and it actually feels like they are trying instead of shitting out an asset flip.
At the beginning when you were criticizing the logo design I was like : come on Josh you're just being petty. But by the end of the review I disliked that logo too lol
The sad part is that someone took the time to do something w/ this. Then they got lazy and probably picked the wrong genre to do anything with their time.
Hmm neojac is a name I havnt heard in awhile. He was a dude selling a unity3d mmo framework called atavism back around the time this was launched. I wouldn't be surprised if this was a proof of concept or something.
I thought i recognised the name too. Just looked up Atavism and appears its been bought by another company in 2017 and only one post on MMORPG.com from Neojack exists about it. Bit weird if that's what this game is based on.
"Pre-alpha" always gets me. Alpha means in development. So, this is... pre development? There wouldn't even be an application to launch at this stage unless it was a prototype.
Pre-watch comment: I tried Arkfall once. I liked the crafting but the game is pretty boring and theres not much land to explore. I gave up after a couple nights.
There's something very sad about seeing high level zones in an MMO where basically no one is ever going to get to end game. All of that work put into something, and no one is there to appreciate it.
Can you look at foxhole, pls. Its a bit special, but they call themself a MMO and i like the game. I think it would be fun if you play the game. Maybe not in this series but in general.
Foxhole is a super fun and unique experience but Josh isn't a fan of sandbox MMOs and that game needs you to be involved in the community to have a goal.
@@JoshStrifeHayes Like the copyright thing they do on maps? A master stroke - that way you'll know if someone from IGN watches your stuff! I'll also bet its a test to check that your viewers are paying attention 😉 _(BTW I'm gonna start doing it from now on to make sure my manager is awake during meetings - the video is usually off on conference calls - I might randomly say we all work at McDonald's or call myself "Kevin")_
@@JoshStrifeHayes Seems like a cop out, but a clever one. This way, if you do make a mistake/missed something in future videos then you can always say you did it on purpose. I really don't believe you will miss seeing the weight bar since you noticed the hunger bar immediately.
It was a good concept, on launch it was packed and we were all stoked, a few missed and botched updates later and it crashed, it still is a great idea for an mmo that doesn’t hold your hand constantly and throw stuff at you left and right, actually had to do stuff to progress
I used to have cicadas outside of my apartment and trust that the game is not doing them justice it is unreal how loud they can get. Like you would have to shout to be heard over them to someone right next to you. When i learned thst the noise came from bugs i almost shat myself
11:20 hmm an OP spammy stabby sword thing you get right when you start? Sounds like Flurry in ESO 👀 14:58 Enemies that run away from you in the middle of a battle? oh wow this game is taking a lot from ESO.
didn´t enemies in old wow do that too. almost all Humanoid enemys including Murlocks (why everyone hated classic Murlocks) because. 1: they are almost always in groups of at least 3. 2: they got individual patrolling between/close to each group so you will pull that one if you take to long. 3: for some reason, randomly when you pull one group and for some reason you will pull one other murlock from the next group that group is to far away to be pulled yet he agrood whit the first group and when he is 1/3 of the way to you the rest of the group he was part of agross and comes running towards you. 4: when low on health they will always try and run away and 7 out of 10 they will beeline towards the nearest non agrood group and pull them. 5: there agroo range was fluctuating. 6: they chase you far when you run away.
@@Loderyod the Bandit NPC you fought in the Human starting zone Elwyn forest and westfall (after level 7 I think or around there). Had the same deal minus a few things they. they was not always in a group and as far as I remember they never when you pull one did not magically randomly pull one from another group. they was a lot more lenient whit the groups (further apart so you got space to maneuver for combat) and patrol was not a real thing.
I assure you that cicadas in the south of France during summer are DEAPHENING. You can't hear anything else. So props to the game for acknowledging that.
it's death sound of the skeleton at 23:21 from the death sound of zombies from Terraria? It sounds like it! And I already saw the icons for the skills, Foundry VTT with the d&d 5e system use the same icons, maybe it's a royal-free pack or something?
Almost 2 years later, based on the developers comment, i tried to look it up again and turns out they delisted it and nothing every happened about their plans to re-release it on the unreal engine in 2022. Oh well.
Took them longer to port to Unreal as expected, because these guys are amateurs. They are also switching to an action based combat system, so I'm looking forward to unpolished janky animations and hit detection problems. I highly doubt they can polish or optimize anything.
Over-encumbrance works fine in single-player RPGs. But in an MMO I'd rather just have a limit on how many items I can carry separately from what I have equipped.
While I do understand the frustration with post-facto telling you you've broken the name character limit, doing it this way lets you KNOW what the character limit is and that the name you've typed won't fit in it. If the text box just stopped you at 15 characters and let you hit 'Create', people would type the name and proceed without thinking and be stuck with names like "JoshStrifeHaye". A better fix would be to label the maximum character limit clearly above or below the box, allow more than 14 characters to be input, but highlight the box and additional text in red once you pass that threshold.
Or...OR...how about they still impose the hard 15 character limit but have a little, pervasive message under the text box that tells you the limit to avoid confusing inattentive fuckwits? It should be a self-evident solution, but the people who made this were too busy huffing paint to implement this feature, homie.
Or just make it so you can only type the maximum and have info showing its the maximum. There's no reason to be able to type more than the maximum when you can make it so they can't do that
@lunaeons45 I covered the reason to allow you to do that in the second half of my first paragraph. So that people don't accidentally put in weird cut off versions of their name without noticing, while still giving a visual indicator of how much shorter the name has to be.
Josh: Hello ladies and gentlemen and today we're checking out Arcfall, an MMORPG in early access for nearly 4 years with an expensive in game shop. You might be asking Josh why are we playing this game? Well ladies and gentlemen this game is filled with bugs and exploits and today we're becoming a god by training archery to the max.
I love how the spirit of Jim Stirling's series on Steam Greenlight is alive and well! No, wait... That series is almost a decade old. The prevalence of plagiarism and complete lack of oversight means that the stuff on Steam is still as scummy as ever. Basically Steam have refined plausable deniability online almost into an art. On another note, I wonder if DigiHom are still going? Last I saw he was also trying to make a cartoony-style MMO dungeon crawler thingy...
I feel I gotta point out, that pretty much all of the ability and item icons are from asset packs, and something tells me they aren't being used as placeholders.
The spell icons are identical to some of the spell icons from MMORPG Tycoon. The bleeding sword on his 4 button and the arrow on 5 are the exact same icon.
“Arcfall is a total balance game with no exploits” if fun when 1 of your favorite content creator shouts out another 1 of your favorite content creators 💯
Dang.. that empty world with no enemies reminds me of when I was barely a tween and the WOW alpha.. not beta.. Alpha.. got out. I remember my buddy and I exploring from Theramore, to Thousand Needles and then all the way up to the shores of inaccessible Teldrasil Isle... while riding a frozen glitched out model of a NE Hippogryph that slid along at ground level. Good times.
Ironically there looks like there could be a good game there. It's as if the developers started with making a crafting game, and then decided halfway to make it something else, so they ended up never finishing it. Sad really.
Thanks for the review, come check Arcfall out after next update as we are busy with a major new action based combat system update which should fix the lag problems.
wow can't wait
Thanks for addressing the issue! I am definitely gonna try it out, looks promising:)
Will it also include the removal of numerous Terraria and Wow sounds used illegaly?
@@Darkflo23 GET THEIR ASSES LMFAO
@@Alqha Seriously, a Wow clone with stolen and prebuilt assets, non fonctioning combat and endgame, but you can bet that the Cash Shop is lag free and easy to access. It really show the priorities of the Devs.
Interesting balance idea. The more you level-up, get skills, and better equipment the more laggy the combat is.
I think they came up with it after playing smash bros ultimate online, jumped into a time machine and it's the one feature they stole from Nintendo thinking it will make their game a hit.
Sounds like Path of Exile
I thought he started to lag because of new weapon
*cough* risk of rain 2
AY thats already every game on my laptop! (i play life on hardmode)
I love how his first instinct was the "quit" button after he took a look at the shop.
Yh noticed that subtle joke haha.
"It's like Orion's Belt, a big waist of space."
That was great. I have to remember that line.
im ashamed it took me a few seconds to understand the joke lol
Honestly that joke is only 3stars
It's a stellar joke!
Oh, it's a pun. I'm ashamed I didn't notice that.
@@goodtimesgivecancer1 Your mom is 3 stars (outta 10)
This is a dumb joke btw, don’t take it seriously lol
"A perfectly balanced game with no exploits"
Indeed. *sips Yorkshire Tea*
You rich people!
I'm drinking Typhoo, from Poundland.
Original, or the divine Biscuit Brew? (Although I'm not dissing the other flavours, they're all good ;-)
@@PhilBoswell This is a Spiffing Brit(UA-camr, Game-Exploiter-Extraordinaire, Gentleman-Tee-Lover and Joker) reference.
Have a good one, cheers:)
@@dieSpinnt thanks, I vaguely recognised the reference, but I was also curious about the tea ☕
Ah, you beautiful sausage. Let us toast to Reanu Keeves together.
Fun fact: Those models aren't theirs, that's an asset pack in the unity store I myself have and worked with, you can buy it for like 70 bucks each, male and then female
At least they bought it (I hope) and didn't go with free assets like so many hobby "projects" that try to sell themselves.
My main issue and concern would be micro transactions of paid assets. If the free or paid game includes paid assets that is legal to me. But say they paywall assets on their store, imo that is reselling your project, not their own. That would be like reselling mp3s you bought from an artist.
Also a few of the death sounds have been literally ripped straight from Terraria. I 100% recognise one as the Zombie death sound.
Jim Sterling: Why the F*** do I hear Gate's bloody theme from Mega Man X6?
@@notatrollll no, they're free to sell it cause they bought the rights to include it in their game...then are free to provide a purchase option to access the assets in the game. They are not selling the rights for the player to extract the asset from the game files to use outside the boundries of the game. So it's legal.
Game is shit tho, but that's for Josh to elaborate on.
These episodes really are a masterclass on game user experience design. I’m over here just pen and paper “write that down, write that down!”. The details to which you’re able to pick apart the background functionality that usually goes un-identified is great.
Exactly ..potential mmo creators should be watching his whole library before designing their own game.. all the answers of how to make it work, are in here
haha, i'm doing the same thing. even the silly stuff he mentions i've been writing down
"Note to self. less cicada noises"
yeah, I'm genuinely amazed by how well this dude knows good game design. He also notices a lot of really subtle stuff that I'm not sure I would have ever considered otherwise!
I was actually thinking a few days ago, that if I ever made an MMO, I'd start by watching the entirety of this series first so I could figure out what not to do
"cicada noise" reminds me of several old Flash games that had chirping bird noises...VERY LOUD BIRDS!
seriously, they are louder than GUNSHOTS!
and YES, the games i'm thinking of DO have GUNS!
one of them is called "Storm the house 3"...a really silly name, since the player is DEFENDING the house!
I hate that my brain just has to read every CAPITAL word in a SCREAMING voice
It's quite ANNOYING
@@Ikxi I think that's intentional.
@@Ikxi I think that's because the way we see caps we think "jeez, they must be trying to get a point across."
@@Ikxi just change it to a guy screaming from very far away.
@@siegwardinspirit Quick fix, you're a genius.
Once an early access game starts charging money whether it's directly from steam or a cash shop in game, when you expect people to give you money it's open for critique
I totally support that idea. Once they want money, they thing the game is good enough that people pay something.
It's a different thing if they ask nicely for donations on their website. Just a liittle button or something.
They can't even cover behind the "but we're still working on content" excuse, because that is something that all MMOs do. They constantly add new content, that you can play with your existing characters. It's one of the appeals of a persistent world.
I mean, it should always be open to critique since early access should be about getting feedback for developers who can't afford a tone of beta testers.
It's just how that critique should be taken that should change.
"Games a jankie mess" can mean something very different when its in early development vs finished.
@@Bustermachine Everything is always open to critique, the entire reason for early access is to polish the game which requires critique.
@@Bustermachine I think there is a difference between feedback and critique.
One is possitive to make the product better while the other is more negative.
@@Krasshirsch I was going to post something about there being nothing wrong with adding more Polish to a game early on, but everything I wrote wasn't funny.
Just leave the Czech out of your critiques, though.. k?
I love this series, most people probably have no clue how valuable game design videos are where you are clearly told what not to do in game design.
Aaaand he's back to the eternal cycle of suffering
Stay strong Mr. Josh
i totally forgot about this game
@AntiochEtherealwhat?
This is so frustrating because my initial response to the weird bug like the map button not working and the crafting system being unintuitive is "Dang that sucks but they're trying and maybe they'll figure it out one day!" But then I remember there's a cash shop with $50+ bullshit in it and i instantly hate the developer.
The logo looks like it's for a Swedish heavy rock band who are heavily influenced by Magnum. The band Magnum from Birmingham, not the chocolate covered ice cream on a stick.
What about Trojan Magnum?
IMO the logo looks like it was made by a 12 year old who just found a can of spray paint in his dad's garage and thinks he's going to be the next banksy
The logo looks unbalanced, the l in the end would need to be bigger. There is a massive A at one side and the capital F right in the middle, but then there is nothing on the right.
Oh, and don't forget magnum ammunition
I prefer my Magnum's in big flowery shirts driving a Ferrari 308.
@@AxeGaijin I am so glad that someone said that.
At 12:35, when talking about the weight limit it appears underneath the hunger bar. The bar with the anvil icon says 200/200 and when he switches the character page it says he is currently carrying 200 weight
Great catch!
to be fair it’s very poorly done and shows the oversight of the devs haha
@@jjohnorrea to be fair guy nitpicks everything but misses lots
@@WiseOwl_1408 Welcome to journalistic review, just like active players he won't be perfect as if watching a video and can control playback at your leisure.
That jump animation. The greatest jump animation of all time.
Yeah pure quality!
I was going through this and thought to myself "It does not look that bad" until I saw the grid equipped items menu THAT'S where I draw the line...
Heresy.
I can't believe they didn't purposely shuffle the slots. This almost takes more effort than doing the right thing EVERY other MMO does. It's like setting up for a career as a lawyer, but not only are you very bad at understanding law, you always wear your pants on your head, and your blazer on your feet
"We've got Warcraft at home" might be my favourite rating yet
I was thinking that most of the way through the video. "Okay, so they use WoW style player bodies... WoW's art style copied as closely as possible... the bandits look almost exactly like those Defias guys in WoW..." And so on and so forth. It's like they just said "This game is successful, so we will make a game that looks identical and it will be successful." Without realizing that a lot of WoW's appeal was that it _works as a game._ It has its faults, to be sure, but also a lot of strengths... or, it used to, anyway.
Peaked around the Lich King expansion if you ask me. Cataclysm was a lovely world update... too bad it utterly demolished the talent system and any semblance of individuality in your character. Or was that the Worgen expansion? Or the panda one, maybe? There are entirely too many, and they definitely lost the plot _hardcore_ somewhere along the way. Methinks the main misstep was the talent slaughter though. Going from like... 40 or 50 talent picks, to 4? That's what we call "excessively dumbing down a core game mechanic".
I wonder if Josh has ended up saving any of these MMOs, either by bringing an audience to it or just by laying out all the biggest flaws in one place for developers to look at
Fallen Earth seems to have gotten a player boost since his video. Its how I found out about it
Wurm online got a balance change and a reply from the devs
@@dutchandtheleftlanders9499 that's wild and I love it
Pretty sure the skeleton apocalypse one got a boost of people after the video.
@Jokoko2828 Yeah, after Josh reviewed it, Animyst got updates despite development having been dropped prior to that.
Arcfall. It's like RuneScape if you stripped out nearly every quality I love about it that makes it unique and fun.
You can grind skills. Generic MMO skills. Poorly explained systems. Slow-paced combat that's of the "almost die to one mob, heal, take on second mob, die if you pull 2" variety.
It's a grinder without a reason to grind. A somewhat sandbox with not enough sand or tools.
Perfect MMO for someone with insomnia that needs to fall asleep.
Meg didn't like it. I felt like there should be a game here for me but after 25-30 hours, it didn't change.
Curious to see Josh's take. I don't see him enjoying this one.
I do like the die if you pull more then 2 mobs at the same time.
that said you need other player for it to work because when any mobs that can group you will kill you, you will go out of your way to try and team up this is a MMO after all.
Played Star wars the Old republic beta when it came out and I did not team up like every because I did not.
the only reason why I knew I was online was because there was peaple in the General chat and my wow guild (I think our Guild leader got some keys or something).
that was trying the game was chatting about in /guild chat.
the only thing I remmber from that was when our guild leader said in /g everyone type /facepalm
everyone typed /facepalm and across the universe 100 of peaple facepalmed for no reason (whit animation wow did not have a facepalm animation at that time if they have one now).
@@Zack_Wester It's not so much that the needing to group to take on multiple mobs mechanic is an issue.. I agree that an MMORPG shouldn't be something a single person blitzes through. It's when the game is designed in such a way where the focus shifts from interacting with a virtual world to the game mechanics themselves. Arcfall felt less like a dangerous world where I needed to be careful while exploring and engaging in combat and more a waiting game where I hoped RNG went my way and no extra mobs respawned or walked over to ruin my already tedious leveling experience. Even when bringing along others, combat felt like it interfered with exploration and learning crafting skills and no lore or story elements were present anywhere to give me a reason to overlook the slow-paced combat.
I really, really wanted to like Arcfall, but it was a case of everytime I would start to get immersed in the world, questionable design would pull me back out.
And as I watch this video, I'm reminded of all of the reasons outside of combat I gave up on this game after 3 separate tries and my wife gave up after about an hour.
Booty Bay and Stranglethorn, right down to the troll architecture scattered around. I think the devs decided to make their own Warcraft, but with blackjack and hookers, and then realized that making an MMO is really hard--as you frequently mention in this series. I occasionally daydream my own MMORPG ideas, but in the end I know I couldn't do it myself and it's mostly a creative writing exercise.
Why not dumb it down, lower your expectations and try anyway? I know I can't make 3D world but 2D is a possibility. I know making huge open world is hard so I decide to go for instances. I know that making a lot of content at once will be hard without any support so releasing with vertical slice as well as having idea how entire game will look like and how to spread updates is manageable.
I admit i'm petty, the most infuriating thing about this entire game... the progress bars going full to empty (or black / blue inverted).
Yes! That was bugging me too.
Hard mode: inscribe the names of every Patreon on a single grain of rice.
im from the US south and the cicada noise is accurate to where i live
honestly i can hear some of my thoughts still so it might even be too quiet
For real, I’m in Texas and when I’m outside for a while and go inside my ears are still ringing from the damn Cicadas.
I visit my family in Mississippi about five times a year, and in the summer, the cicadas are SO LOUD. I live in Florida so they aren't that bad here but is there more in Mississippi or something???
I'm not even from the US and those cicada noises were pretty familiar to me, very accurate actually.
Here we gently call those sounds as ''summer sounds''.
horny insects go brrrrrrrrr
good thing this is a living in south us simulator o wait
This series is seriously so therapeutic & I have no clue why
This game LITERALLY ripped assets. so far I've heard Terraria and seen multiple WoW assets. They stole them.
Oh thank god, I thought I was hearing things when I heard a terraria zombie dying.
Wait Terraria? Isnt that a 2D Pixelstyle game? Wth did the steal from that?
and the insanely obvious use of just a PIG's snort for the imps... nothing to process it in anyway to be less recognizable.... lazy sound design at best
100% it did it screams WoW to me and I swear I heard some terraria sounds too. the icons are clearly WoW icons.
@@billyparker1896 I think sound files
"... a Hunger mechanic, because _they've_ always been known to make games consistently more fun" lmao (^-^) I thought I was the only one who hated those things! Boy, it is so nice to hear someone else rail against them and the useless busywork they add to anything.
I absolutely hate hunger (and stamina most of the time) because people say they add ~realism~ but I refuse to believe that a superpowered chosen one would keel over and die because they didn't eat bread in two hours.
I do enjoy food mechanics, though I vastly prefer a buff system to hunger mechanics, unless it's thematically fitting. Like the game Fear & Hunger. Yeah, it's in the name.
@@siegwardinspirit Or in, say, Don't Starve. It's obvious.
@@siegwardinspirit Even a minor debuff system wouldn't be too terrible. Losing one or two points here and there for not eating for the last ten hours sounds like it'd just make sense honestly. Losing health though just seems silly.
00:36
Maybe it is time to make a blue-marble wall with names on it?
That sounds like a DREAM come true!
I think it may be the best idea in the WORLD!
Kal-Da Moor sounds conspicuously close to Kalimdor...
Totally. WoW clone for sure. Similar graphics, similar item/ability icons, etc...
I had the same feeling. Especially with the heavy WoW style/aesthetics.
Glad to see i'm not the only one who noticed
To paraphrase Pinhead: "Oh, how uncomfortable that word must feel on your lips, "evil", "good." There is no good, Monroe; there is no evil -- there is only shit MMOs, and the patterns to which we submit it."
I have a theory, they forgot to implement enemy respawning for those areas and the players just killed all of them already
...when the preview showed us that they'd forgotten enemies, I internally groaned and knew *exactly* what I was in for.
Or I thought I did. I mean I knew my expectations were low but holy fuck.
to be fair, the game isnt finished yet so they will maybe add them later. But then again its been 4 years..so maybe they wont
@@KankaWasTaken Hahahahaha...no.
Their COMING! The dragons are coming! Just wait for another four years!
@Caleb Comer All I said is they may still add them. Thats just a possibility. Im not even defending them lmao
@@shammydammy2610 Well they just said that they paused adding enemies because theu are updating the combat to action combat.
Adding enemies which need to be recoded to an action combat style would be a waste of time.
I think it would be great to make a mini series where you make a tier list of all these MMOs you have covered to crown the worst of the worst.
Loving this series btw thank you for going through hell on our behalf lol
(UN)Fortunalely isekai demon waifu wont be on the list
I can't wait for the patreon name to be in a ridiculously small font size like 5.
oh, just today i read a fan-story where the "fine print" on a company contract was font size ONE.
i think it was a parody of Amazon.
I can't wait for 0.5
I was thinking the same thing when he said that
The combat with the sheep reminds me of when I got Resurrection Sickness in WoW (many years ago) and punched a sheep to death, which took roughly 3 minutes.
Don't ask me why; that's a question for past-me to answer. And the past-me thought that was a good idea, so there you have it.
I feel like the game models were rigged by someone who has never seen a biped move.
0:14 why must you seek enemies where there are none!?
-Arcfall philosopher devs.
You need to rename this series "the second worst mmo of all time" because Dreamworld will always be the worst mmo of all time.
dreamworld doesn't even have proper multiplayer so i dont even think it counts as an MMO
It's a scam and it isn't an MMO. They haven't developed an actual MMO, only a broken demo without working multiplayer.
@@Crypted112 indeed, scamworld does NOT and will NEVER count as an mmo. because just claiming one is an mmo... does not make one an mmo
At least Dreamworld physically exists, Elyria was an even worse scam lmao
Day of Dragons can get slipped into that list! Assign it to whatever position on the board you like!
bro that wasn't just similar to the Zandalari port, that was literally the Zandalari port. I almost died laughing, they even got the little building on the left where you que up for island expeditions lmao
It looks like a ripped model just different shaders and lighting
Just getting caught up on this one, I keep having to pause on the brutal one liners LOL "NO. We've got Warcraft at home."
I lol’d so hard ‘bandit starting the fight in the traditional form of vibrating rapidly’ lol
I really like how the "Complete" clips outside of the boundaries of the button as well.
The buttons are small and have a lot of wasted space around them too. So there is no reason for them to be this small. Not to mention that good games have automatic text size scaling so the text always fits when the container size is fixed. Developers figured this out years ago.
Ahh yes, the good old days when you could actually read the names on Josh's patron list
The game looks really cozy and so on, but gameplay is also important...
I really like the island setting tbh
I would legit check this out if it was made by a proven MMO company and y'know...not in this bad of a state. The graphics don't look bad and it actually feels like they are trying instead of shitting out an asset flip.
The style just makes me want to jump in to RS3 honestly
6:32 I nearly died at "marvel at how much the zoom changes with each click of the *wrong* button!" :'D
At the beginning when you were criticizing the logo design I was like : come on Josh you're just being petty. But by the end of the review I disliked that logo too lol
I instantly felt like the logo was off, unbalanced.
The sad part is that someone took the time to do something w/ this. Then they got lazy and probably picked the wrong genre to do anything with their time.
Hmm neojac is a name I havnt heard in awhile. He was a dude selling a unity3d mmo framework called atavism back around the time this was launched. I wouldn't be surprised if this was a proof of concept or something.
And for that it would be pretty good.
I thought i recognised the name too. Just looked up Atavism and appears its been bought by another company in 2017 and only one post on MMORPG.com from Neojack exists about it. Bit weird if that's what this game is based on.
In the top comment the developers said that they sold it to a bigger company.Since 2 people only work on this project.
A totally balanced game with no exploits? - Well Someone's been watching the spiffing Brit ;)
"Pre-alpha" always gets me. Alpha means in development. So, this is... pre development? There wouldn't even be an application to launch at this stage unless it was a prototype.
Pre-watch comment: I tried Arkfall once. I liked the crafting but the game is pretty boring and theres not much land to explore. I gave up after a couple nights.
12:15 I haven't played the game, but I can see the weight limit on the top left, below your hunger bar (it's 200/200 at that time).
There's something very sad about seeing high level zones in an MMO where basically no one is ever going to get to end game. All of that work put into something, and no one is there to appreciate it.
Value or worth has nothing to do with effort or time involved
@@WiseOwl_1408they didn’t say anything about value or worth. They just said it’s sad nobody is going to see the hard work the devs put in
Can you look at foxhole, pls. Its a bit special, but they call themself a MMO and i like the game. I think it would be fun if you play the game. Maybe not in this series but in general.
Foxhole is a super fun and unique experience but Josh isn't a fan of sandbox MMOs and that game needs you to be involved in the community to have a goal.
when i look at this game, i realize how the developers meeting for this went: Sooo how many assets can we copy/steal from WoW without getting sued?
Arcfall: Dev puts it on early access for 4 years
7 Days to Die: “I’m about to end this man’s whole career”
at least 7 days to die is fun with friends and doesn't have microtransactions
Arcfall has long been delisted and no new news have surfaced for the past two years.
"Josh killed yet another mmo!!!"
The carry limit I think is shown under your hunger bar. The little anvil. I noticed that bar went up whenever you picked something up.
Im not sure but im pretty sure the sound of the skeleton dying ( 23:17 ) was taken from the terraria zombie death sfx, could be wrong though
Correct me if i am wrong, but the weight limmit is shown under the foodbar, wher also you healt is shown.
in every video, i make 1 mistake on purpose because I KNOW people cant help but comment on it, it works every, single, time.
@@JoshStrifeHayes I am the living proof :D Love your Videos.
@@JoshStrifeHayes Like the copyright thing they do on maps? A master stroke - that way you'll know if someone from IGN watches your stuff!
I'll also bet its a test to check that your viewers are paying attention 😉
_(BTW I'm gonna start doing it from now on to make sure my manager is awake during meetings - the video is usually off on conference calls - I might randomly say we all work at McDonald's or call myself "Kevin")_
@@JoshStrifeHayes Seems like a cop out, but a clever one. This way, if you do make a mistake/missed something in future videos then you can always say you did it on purpose. I really don't believe you will miss seeing the weight bar since you noticed the hunger bar immediately.
It was a good concept, on launch it was packed and we were all stoked, a few missed and botched updates later and it crashed, it still is a great idea for an mmo that doesn’t hold your hand constantly and throw stuff at you left and right, actually had to do stuff to progress
I used to have cicadas outside of my apartment and trust that the game is not doing them justice it is unreal how loud they can get. Like you would have to shout to be heard over them to someone right next to you.
When i learned thst the noise came from bugs i almost shat myself
Let alone a pretty good sized flying bug.
Cicadas are definitely nightmare fuel if you don’t like creepy crawlies
I took it to mean that they are a) very loud and b) that the cicada sounds looped every 2 seconds (you can hear the track stop and restart)
I love cicadas sound at hot summer evening.
Its like they paid an external map designer but then the lead dev left the company and they pressed the release button
14:22 You know it's a good sign when your game's enemies animate as if they're a player with a ping over 600.
3:38 the mouse pausing over quit before clicking resume told me everything I needed to know
11:20 hmm an OP spammy stabby sword thing you get right when you start? Sounds like Flurry in ESO 👀
14:58 Enemies that run away from you in the middle of a battle? oh wow this game is taking a lot from ESO.
didn´t enemies in old wow do that too.
almost all Humanoid enemys including Murlocks (why everyone hated classic Murlocks) because.
1: they are almost always in groups of at least 3.
2: they got individual patrolling between/close to each group so you will pull that one if you take to long.
3: for some reason, randomly when you pull one group and for some reason you will pull one other murlock from the next group that group is to far away to be pulled yet he agrood whit the first group and when he is 1/3 of the way to you the rest of the group he was part of agross and comes running towards you.
4: when low on health they will always try and run away and 7 out of 10 they will beeline towards the nearest non agrood group and pull them.
5: there agroo range was fluctuating.
6: they chase you far when you run away.
@@Zack_Wester sounds like Murlocks are smarter than humans 😅
@@Loderyod the Bandit NPC you fought in the Human starting zone Elwyn forest and westfall (after level 7 I think or around there).
Had the same deal minus a few things
they.
they was not always in a group and as far as I remember they never when you pull one did not magically randomly pull one from another group.
they was a lot more lenient whit the groups (further apart so you got space to maneuver for combat) and patrol was not a real thing.
i just love that you made a nice reference to the spiffing brit i love his "X is a perfectly balanced game." series
Dev logic: "we don't have to script many quests if one quest takes you two hours to complete" lol
I assure you that cicadas in the south of France during summer are DEAPHENING. You can't hear anything else. So props to the game for acknowledging that.
I thought I might actually give this one a try for a laugh... until I saw the combat lag... that would be just too irritating.
it's death sound of the skeleton at 23:21 from the death sound of zombies from Terraria? It sounds like it! And I already saw the icons for the skills, Foundry VTT with the d&d 5e system use the same icons, maybe it's a royal-free pack or something?
Almost 2 years later, based on the developers comment, i tried to look it up again and turns out they delisted it and nothing every happened about their plans to re-release it on the unreal engine in 2022. Oh well.
Took them longer to port to Unreal as expected, because these guys are amateurs.
They are also switching to an action based combat system, so I'm looking forward to unpolished janky animations and hit detection problems. I highly doubt they can polish or optimize anything.
@@fonesrphunny7242 I heard they are making other game now and this is abandoned.
Little Boat "Help me!, I have fallen and can't get up"
But Mom that isn't warcraft it is just wallcrap
Ahh... "Where quests start, and where quests end"...
I feel like Baldur's Gate must have been before your time.
That Orion Belt joke hurdled my stomach more than it should. I'm glad I subbed to you long time ago, Josh.
I backed this game early. Its still in the same state basically,
great idea you have excellent taste
Over-encumbrance works fine in single-player RPGs. But in an MMO I'd rather just have a limit on how many items I can carry separately from what I have equipped.
While I do understand the frustration with post-facto telling you you've broken the name character limit, doing it this way lets you KNOW what the character limit is and that the name you've typed won't fit in it. If the text box just stopped you at 15 characters and let you hit 'Create', people would type the name and proceed without thinking and be stuck with names like "JoshStrifeHaye".
A better fix would be to label the maximum character limit clearly above or below the box, allow more than 14 characters to be input, but highlight the box and additional text in red once you pass that threshold.
Or...OR...how about they still impose the hard 15 character limit but have a little, pervasive message under the text box that tells you the limit to avoid confusing inattentive fuckwits? It should be a self-evident solution, but the people who made this were too busy huffing paint to implement this feature, homie.
Or just make it so you can only type the maximum and have info showing its the maximum.
There's no reason to be able to type more than the maximum when you can make it so they can't do that
@lunaeons45 I covered the reason to allow you to do that in the second half of my first paragraph. So that people don't accidentally put in weird cut off versions of their name without noticing, while still giving a visual indicator of how much shorter the name has to be.
"There are other players around (amazingly)." Classic
Josh: Hello ladies and gentlemen and today we're checking out Arcfall, an MMORPG in early access for nearly 4 years with an expensive in game shop. You might be asking Josh why are we playing this game? Well ladies and gentlemen this game is filled with bugs and exploits and today we're becoming a god by training archery to the max.
"Gordens Mine's"
That...hurts my brain.
Ah yes, World Of Warcfall.
27:27 Skeleton death sounds awfully similar to the Terraria skeleton death XD
I love how the spirit of Jim Stirling's series on Steam Greenlight is alive and well!
No, wait... That series is almost a decade old.
The prevalence of plagiarism and complete lack of oversight means that the stuff on Steam is still as scummy as ever. Basically Steam have refined plausable deniability online almost into an art.
On another note, I wonder if DigiHom are still going? Last I saw he was also trying to make a cartoony-style MMO dungeon crawler thingy...
You can't own an art style fyi.
Game studio owner here; I use these for reference lol. Bad design is not implemented ever if I can help it.
I just own a studio that develops and publishes indie games.
I feel I gotta point out, that pretty much all of the ability and item icons are from asset packs, and something tells me they aren't being used as placeholders.
At 23:23 was that a Terraria skeleton/zombie death sound? I don’t know if it’s a stock sound since I hadn’t heard it anywhere else before.
I don't know if it is the same but it does sound EXTREMELY similar.
The spell icons are identical to some of the spell icons from MMORPG Tycoon. The bleeding sword on his 4 button and the arrow on 5 are the exact same icon.
I think some of those are from some kind of icon pack, because I have seen the same ones used all around quite often.
It almost look like all arrows have feathers attached to the sides. From how many points of view can you take a photo from an arrow? GTFO.
@@HeroLanding found the arcfall fan
@@HeroLanding ok fanboy
@@RaphielShiraha64 I've never played that game, I don't even know how it look like 😆
I literally got an ad about swim suits right after you said swimming. 9:06
“Arcfall is a total balance game with no exploits” if fun when 1 of your favorite content creator shouts out another 1 of your favorite content creators 💯
"Is there voice acting?"
*Hello*
"Yes, there is!"
Some aspects of this game are really interesting... also that Dragon mount
"What do you think the '+' icon does?"
...
"That's right, it zooms you out."
That's all you need to know about this game.
I'd love to see this guy review Minecraft as if it was an MMO for April Fools
won't surprise me, he's done the same for tinder... a truly horrible mmo, who thought a dating sim mmo mixed with pokemon go was a good idea.... ;)
Yo, I recognize those skill icons. I, too, am the proud owner of Spellbook Megapack and currently working with them lol
Dang.. that empty world with no enemies reminds me of when I was barely a tween and the WOW alpha.. not beta.. Alpha.. got out. I remember my buddy and I exploring from Theramore, to Thousand Needles and then all the way up to the shores of inaccessible Teldrasil Isle... while riding a frozen glitched out model of a NE Hippogryph that slid along at ground level. Good times.
The worst thing for me has to be the shark doing a generic swimming animation on the hook.
Ironically there looks like there could be a good game there. It's as if the developers started with making a crafting game, and then decided halfway to make it something else, so they ended up never finishing it. Sad really.
25:35 Abandoned temple completely as advertised.
The "early access" nonsense is just being used as an excuse for not having enough content.
19:18 You discovered why all blacksmith lose their hammer in every video game! Marvelous