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Role Playing (Games) Entertainment Games

A first look at RF Online 54

Posted by Zonk
Heartless Gamer wrote to mention a set of beta impressions from RF Online at GamerGod. RF Online is a MMOG that's been out for a little while already in the east, but has now been published here in the U.S.. The launch date for the U.S. service was yesterday, the 21st. From the article: "If I had to point out a single aspect that keeps the pre-30 game fun, I would have to say that it's the totally eliminated down time between fights. Potion use, or "potting" as the locals put it, is a vital part of the game and the reason why healer classes are unnecessary enough for only one faction to get them. Potions are sold on NPC vendors for bargain prices, enough that it's easy to afford to keep 99-potion piles."
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A first look at RF Online More

A first look at RF Online

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  • Rising Force Online (Score:5, Insightful)

    by generic-man ( 33649 ) on Wednesday February 22, 2006 @01:03PM (#14777929) Homepage Journal
    The game is called Rising Force Online, but from the description I thought it might have been Radio Frequency Online or something. Is it so hard to expand the abbreviations the first time you use them? Not everyone on IMBs knows what an MMOG is, for the QPFth time.
    • I was looking for a Radio Frequency game...
      Great job slaughtering all my hopes in life! >=(
    • Not everone on IMB's knows what an IMB is, either. ;-)
    • Not everyone on IMBs knows what an MMOG is, for the QPFth time.

      IMB's ?

    • Interesting... I've read previews on the game and they never expanded the name so I assumed it was an acronym without meaning, like TWAIN.
      • ...I assumed it was an acronym without meaning, like TWAIN.

        Eh, and here I though that stood for "Technology Without An Interesting Name"




        (P.S. Thanks for the straight line! :)
    • Funny enough, RF Online is the name of the game. It's on their webpage [codemasters.com], the game splash screen, and yes even on the game box [gamestop.com]. Rising Force online is the expanded version, but not what they're selling it under.

      They also have extended titles, "Fantasy and Romance" and "Episode 1: Beginning to the New World", but it's somewhat debatable about if they're really titles or added descriptors.
    • So for the first 30 levels, you don't gain squat for levelling? Somehow I don't think that's going to appeal to many American gamers, although I might be proven wrong.

      I've only really played World of Warcraft, (by that I mean I've tried the trials of, and rejected, just about every other available MMO), but I prefer what appears to be the traditional gain a level, get new skills formula. It allows a large variety of gameplay options without overwhelming you when you first learn to play a class. 30 levels
    • Heh...Rising Force Online? Heh, sounds like a total shred-fest [allmusic.com]. "You are now level 8. New Technique Learned: Hammer-On. WICKED! "
    • I agree totally. If it is too much work for the poster to expand a TLA [Three Letter Acronym] with square brackets like normal people, they could use the following format: <a title="Three Letter Acronym">TLA</a> and still appear all 1337.

      No I really do agree, I hate when the poster doesn't define the acronym he uses, and I have to read through all the posts trying to figure it out.
      • Hello - SARCASM !!
      • I think you're thinking of "abbr" and that tag annoys the crap out of me. Some people have a plugin for their blog software which replaces EVERY occurrence of an abbreviation/acronym with an abbr tag. It's so pretentious and unhelpful: Internet Explorer doesn't style the abbr tag any differently out of the box, and even if you force a style on it you'll have to hover the mouse over everything in the hopes that you'll get something half-useful like "XHTML: eXtensible HyperText Markup Language."

        Learn from t

  • Potions sound like a good idea.... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ShyGuy91284 ( 701108 ) on Wednesday February 22, 2006 @01:52PM (#14778349)
    The lack of any type of healing ability/item that could be easily/affordibly gotten by any class has always been one of my biggest gripes with most mainstream MMORPGs. I always liked being able to stock potions in Diablo and go out and fight on my own.
    • Asheron's Call 1 had this since release. I don't know how mainstream it is, but at the time it was released the competition consisted of EQ and UO and that was pretty much it, so...

      Warcraft now also has this with food, bandages, and potions. Timered, but still. Much better than the DAOC "sit for 2 minutes" deal.
    • The only thing I dont like about Diablo II is that even if you press all the potion buttons and drink potions as fast as you can, you can still die quite easliy. I dont know if its because of the way the game is coded (i.e. checking for keyboard events happens less often than running monster AI) or if its a design feature (I do notice that when you drink a healing potion the health appears as a very translucent red mark in your health bar which then takes a few seconds to "fill up to full")
    • Potting is very widespread in asian MMO's and has pretty drastic effects on PvP. It nearly always provides a strong boost to high damage characters who can kill in one or two hits and makes the high speed/low damage characters much less effective. A good example of this is Conquer Online (www.conqueronline.com). CO is a free to play MMORPG similar to Ragnarok Online that has become extremely popular in China. Pots are fairly inexpensive to buy and your only limit is inventory space. The Archer is a pop
  • I've wasted a few hours with another korean MMO called Flyff, they had the same idea with healing items, you could have any number of them and use them as much as you want. As a result, players put almost no stat points into stamina because all they needed to survive was one hit, after that you could spam healing items to survive the next hit. Can you imagine how much crying there was when the developers introduced a two or three second delay between potion uses around Christmas? It was done primarily for P
    • FlyFF still has a ways to go before it is truly ready. There are still a number of glaring bugs such as poor translation and incorrect spacing and placement of messages (e.g. You have received PlayerName penya as a reward for bounty 5000.), and while flying, attacking flying monsters will result in any number of bugs occurring. Some people can fight the monsters. Some people will appear to attack but not do damage. Others won't attack at all. On mine, the bug is really nasty. If I try to enter combat
      • I've never relied much on item use so I can't say how much the HP limit prevents foodspamming but considering all the complaints after the introduction of the food timer it seems to have worked. IMHO the biggest problem with FlyFF is that it's just awfully boring and repetitive, the bugs and lag are just the topping.
  • From the article: "If I had to point out a single aspect that keeps the pre-30 game fun, I would have to say that it's the totally eliminated down time between fights. Potion use, or "potting" as the locals put it, is a vital part of the game and the reason why healer classes are unnecessary enough for only one faction to get them. Potions are sold on NPC vendors for bargain prices, enough that it's easy to afford to keep 99-potion piles."

    If that's the best they can come up with to attract me to the game, i
    • the potion thing was designed so that 1v1 pvp would be nonexistant. You can swing away but it will take hours to kill someone and ultimately (s)he with the most potions wins.

      in RFO, there is no one-shotting. That is probably going to be the big selling point for the game.

      In all fairness though, there are far too many MMO's out there for this to work. RFO will be heavily populated, after all it is a Korean MMO and for some reason people are willing to shell out cash for it, and more power to them, but it's
      • Paladins are fine. Learn2Play.

        But seriously paladins can dish out pretty nice damage these days, They got a talent review not long ago. Also It's pretty obvious that a paladin is about defense, survival and healing, what with divine shield and their other bubble and the plate armour and the heals.
        • I quit WoW *because* of the talent review.

          the single biggest problem with the paladin is this:
          it is not possible for me, a skilled paladin, to melee in end-game pp or in raids. (wow, that's 100% of the end-game content!)

          oh, sure, it's POSSIBLE, but it is far too easy to take a paladin out of the fight. all you have to do to negate their damage is to walk away. and if I start casting a spell, if counterspell hits me I'm out of the fight permanently. because in the 12 seconds of complete spell lockdown, I h
          • The Learn2Play comment was just a joke referencing a very common comment seen on the WoW forums. It goes " is fine. Learn2" and you see it in response to basically any complaint about anything (like the soviet russia jokes). I wasn't acutally suggesting you didn't know how to play. Sorry about that. I also thought you quit prior to the review, I guess the review didn't address the things it was meant to, that sucks :( Anyway didn't mean to cause an argument, was just making a (stupid) joke and informing y
  • I found the game to be visually beautiful, but I hated playing it. The one "plus" discussed above, the potion thing, really pissed me off, because I always play healers, and they didn't balance for the healer playstyle at all. It's entirely a solo game. Heals and buffs from the beginning of the game really suck.

    Example: when you play as a group, there's some amount of shared XP for killing things, but a much larger portion of the XP is given based on the amount of damage you dealt. Furthermore, quest credit
    • >the potion thing, really pissed me off, because I always play healers, and they didn't balance for the healer playstyle at all.

      Go play Lineage 2 then.
      No healers mean Everyone can fight in PvP, Everyone can solo, Anytime.
      There are no healer classes per se in RF. As a Bellato mage (the only race to have a mage that can heal), you have access to ALL offensive spells like a damage specialized mage would.

      >It's entirely a solo game

      you don't need to party at the first levels. It is much needed later, and a
    • Killstealing being possible in the game is pretty inexcusable and amateurish. Even UO fixed this by having it as the player that did the largest %age of damage. And WoW have it right where it's simply the first person to damage the mob, then if someone else attacks it they are just helping you get the kill. Also means people help each other out more without worrying about being chewed out about it.

      Getting rid of healers and splitting exp in a group based on damage done also sounds very silly. Healers mak

  • Limitless Potting = Screwed up Economy? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nevergleam ( 900375 ) on Wednesday February 22, 2006 @03:05PM (#14778957)
    I played Ragnarok Online a while back on a private server with about a few thousand players. On this server, MP potions (a.k.a. grape juice) were sold dirt cheap, so magic such as healing spells and special attacks could be used indefinitely and levelling runs could go on for a long time. This was good because levelling went relatively quickly.

    Unfortunately, this was problematic for the economy. The problem was that every enemy in Ragnarok drops at least some sort of trivial item that can be sold to NPC vendors, so when a player amasses hundreds of these items, their stash of gold gets pretty high. Since a lot of the trade in the game goes through player characters of the merchant class, and large sums of money were being collected, the merchants could continually raise prices to maximize their returns; inflation went through the roof. All the while, grape juice was held at low prices because they were easily fabricated by merchants and flooded the market unlike rare weapons, armors, and other items.

    The adminstrators of the servers eventually had to institute a money wipe, where every player's fortune was cut by 90%. I stopped playing at this point.
    • That's a problem in other MORPGs as well. I used to play a game where the nifty items could be bought (from other players) for 20,000 gold. A few years later, it was up to 2 million. A few months later, it was up to 2.5 million. Etc. OTOH, gold shouldn't be limited to repairs and potions (Diablo). If you wanted to buy anything instead of trading, it had to be done with hard cash off of Ebay.
    • To an extent, I think that limitless potting can be a good thing for the economy. Why? Money sinks. RF Online's potions are affordable enough at lower levels, but as you level up further you encounter a need for increasingly more potent potions. Loot drops off a bit under higher levels too. The potions actually keep people scrambling for cash higher up, and sloppy play inevitably results in a broke player. If it weren't for potions, there'd be nothing to spend money on but equipment, which actually
    • On a private server perhaps.

      In an official server, due to the realistic drop rates of items, the grapes for grape juices don't flood the market, the basic loot from monsters doesn't flood the economy, and the pricier items don't inflate to infinity. Though there are very rare items that are worth millions (and apparently over a billion for a GTB card on iRO once) this is because there are only a couple on the whole server, and perhaps 2,000 to 10,000 people that would love to have it.

      The economy problem to
  • I also I knew where this game had been, and so I set my expectations on a very painful grind. Thus, when I discovered that the grind, while existent, was considerably less painful than I thought, it was a welcome relief.

    AAAAAAnd that's the point where the game should have been thrown back.

    I swear, any MMPORPG that can be described as a "Grind" this late in the game, should have the entire development team shot. Four years ago they should have been fired. Two years ago they should have been deported. Tod
  • After seeing what goes all wrong in allowing them in on Lineage II, they best be on their toes to keep botters away from this game. Drop them out of the game fast, discourage botted grinds, and enforce a 2-region world - one for the botting nations to boil in, and one for the Rest of Us.

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