(I guess now this blog will be the Shitty Things About Good Videogames blog for now)
MMOs are a tough enough proposition when they're subscription-based. The more you play, the less fun the game becomes and the more obligated the player begins to feel. This is why I don't take them up for longer than a few days: I have fun at low levels, and once the game starts to look boring, I can leave it alone forever. The twist with Dungeon Fighter is that it's an MMO beat-em-up in the style of 90's arcade games: the closest comparison is if somebody were to make Capcom's classic Dungeons and Dragons arcade games into a full-fledged MMO.
This is key for me: the big thing MMORPGs miss, in their scrambling over stats and loot and meta-gamey stuff, is that the key activity isn't any fun. Clicking a monster and sitting back as my guy fights it is neither very involving nor very exciting. Actually punching hordes of monsters? In their faces? Sounds to me like somebody's made the fun connection.
So Dungeon Fighter and I had a pretty good run, especially when my character became Dudley from Street Fighter 3. My character was getting noticeably stronger, new stages to fight on came fast, and I always had a side quest to take care of while I juggle comboed goblins and golems and knights for days.
Unfortunately, like many MMOs, the rate of progress eventually hits a brick wall. Quests stop appearing, new maps stop showing up so often, and the only way to level up is to play the same stage over and over again. On the next level, you hope the game gives you a sidequest or a new map or something, but nothing ever appears and before you know it you're stuck grinding.The game is satisfying enough to play for its own sake for a little while, but you try running the same long level in Streets of Rage five times in a row and tell me if you're still having fun, because that's what happens in Dungeon Fighter.
Something felt wrong and unnatural about the way the game had just quit on being fun, so I decided to do some research on the game's boards. Here I found out that it wasn't just me. The entire player base was livid about two things in particular: the tedious rate of leveling up and the ludicrous costs of cash items, both of which have been adjusted substantially from the game's Asian versions. I'd only been getting half the experience points all this time!
There were no quests because aside from turning down the dial on XP, the people running the game didn't bother to think about how such a major change would affect the game flow. Of course, it throws a wrench into the whole thing, crippling advancement and leaving the player with nothing interesting to do for long stretches. Goes to show that game design changes are best left to actual game designers.
As for the cash items, this is the same burn that every "free-to-play" game performs: it's free to start, yes, but if you want to use certain basic functions that every regular player is going to want, it will cost you. "Free-to-play" really needs a relabeling: it's not that it isn't possible to play for free, it's just extremely impractical to actually do so. Selling items to other players (a major source of income) costs a little bit of money, extra storage space costs a little bit. It's nothing backbreaking-- you can get a perfectly good setup going for $10-- but the higher up you go, the higher the costs rise. And, of course, buying items for this game costs way more than in its Asian equivalents.
Clothing items, for example, are bought via an in-game gashapon machine that gives you something you may not even want for your $2.50. (Korea gets to choose, Japan does not.) Unwanted items can be sold to other players, which is funny, because paying a huge amount of gold for the item you want is the better choice by a mile than throwing real money at the game in hopes of getting it at random. In the highest-level fuck-you, endgame players are charged a shocking $25 to go back and tweak their skills for player vs. player play: this is an essential step for the PvP player and they charge what they do because it's a "gotcha by the balls" situation. Free-to-play is dangerous, man.
Players complain about these issues, but the staff engages them infrequently, if at all. When they do, the results aren't encouraging, as seen in this GM thread, where GMs acknowledge that the problems exist while not actually displaying any intentions of fixing them. These guys seem to have been complaining for a while to no avail, so I don't expect things on DFO to get better any time soon. I'll probably come back in a few months and see if anything's been fixed, but Nexon appears kind of greedy and incompetent. Doesn't exactly inspire any confidence. Maybe I'll give the Japanese version a shot.
These are things that I figured would stop me from playing the game well before reaching the level cap, but actually, I've been plugging away at it all the way up to that point (only 22% left to go). I figured the terrible questless levels (26, 31, 33 being the big offenders) would very well be the end for me, but I got through those without too much frustration thanks to being on some fun, talkative parties. Of course, that was really a matter of luck on my part (I could've just as well ended up with a bunch of obnoxious douches), so yeah, it's still something of a lame oversight.
After a while, it really does become a lot more dependent on the party dynamic (I was actually able to solo all the way up until Sky Tower), so how much of a difference it makes to you to do the same stage with a different set of people with different jobs will definitely impact how much you continue to care.
I see what you mean about the skill reset thing (holy gloizer is that expensive), but after it got reset automatically upon getting a job at level 18, I figured I should be more careful with my skills from then on, so it hasn't hurt me that much (although right now, I'm not spending any skill points I get while on 39 until I reach 40).
So yeah, while this game definitely has some annoyances, I've still had a grand time with it overall and keep coming back for more.
Posted by: Captain Crotchspike | October 29, 2009 at 03:16 PM
I soloed the whole way and was out at 26: you already grind not quite as hard through the levels before, but I was still having fun with Sky Tower so it wasn't really a thing. Once I hit 26, and realized that no, no quests awaited me yet again, I just quit on the spot. A party might have been nice, but like you said, it's a matter of luck, and in my experience free-to-play MMOs are even more packed with kids and idiots than the usual ones.
If I start again (this is unlikely: I feel like the game's completely out of my system now), it'll probably be on Arad Senki.
Posted by: David Cabrera | October 29, 2009 at 07:27 PM