So Xenoblade X is Straight up an Passive Online MMO

[Bebpo]

-Lvl.60 cap (to be raised in expansions?)
-Guilds (all online players connected like MMO; Guilds compete for daily challenges; game auto-pairs with 31 other players for completion of daily quests; think Chromehounds sorta)
-Can see other players in the world, but they're just standing around.  But you can recruit their "character" into your party and control their character.
-Huge open world, no real direction, just sort of "strong enemies here, avoid until you are stronger"
-Mostly focused on gameplay and questing, not much of a directed story focus.  To do story missions you have to meet requirements (have done this and this sidequest, have completed this % of continent content)
-Lots of junk quests
-Lots of useless loot
-Probably some other stuff I'm forgetting.


Game is neat, and combat is real good, but it's almost Destiny-ish.  In the last Iwata Asks interview they talk about how halfway through development they decided to add the online portion, at which point they killed the main story character and replaced him with a silent user avatar and changed around story/cutscenes and then changed the game direction to be more this passive MMO game than a single player FFXII-style jrpg like the original.  Interesting experiment.  Not entirely successful from what I've seen, but definitely pushing the envelope on some of this stuff for Japanese developers like the Souls online interaction does.  Also makes me wonder what they have in store for the future.  There's already DLC party members and DLC quests coming.  Wonder if they'll go for an expansion pack and focus on the online game.

[TakingBackSunday]

sounds neat

[thisismyusername]

So Xenoblade X is Straight up an Passive Online MMO

So, FF12-2: Online then?

*fap fap fap*

[Rahxephon91]

All my fears have been realized. Why did they go this route? This all sounds terrible.

I knew when they announced that it was going to have a silent protagonist that that was a bad sign. I don't. I don't want an offline MMO. Much less a passive online one. No, I want an actual story focused JRPG. The big environments, mmo combat, and shallow side quests of the original did'nt take away from that. This though? This sounds like it does. Now we have something that hardly has a main character. I hate silent protags when they really are just a player avatar. It always means there's going to be a lack of story. I knew that's what would happen here and well it sounds like it has.

I knew when we hardly saw party members that there was going to be some kind of Dragon's Dogma pawn system. Which I don't want. I wan actual party members who are characters.

I wanted the game to feel like a huge journey like the first one. Not a mission structured MMO.

I wanted them to actually have meaningful side quests. Not cheapen out and say "fuck it" to the flaw of the first one.

The game sounds very disappointing.

[Bebpo]

All my fears have been realized. Why did they go this route? This all sounds terrible.

Yeah, it's not ideal for my personal tastes, but I've accepted that it's not a story-driven single player tightly designed jrpg and I'm enjoying it for what it is.  It's a fun game and it's doing some interesting stuff, just yeah, keep your expectations in check if you're looking for Xenogears 2 (or even Xenoblade 2).

[Bebpo]

Also the music is hip-hop vocal stuff like FFXIII-2 wannabe Persona.  I like it, but it's not Mitsuda or Xenoblade ost.  And the soundtrack is about half as many tracks as XB (55 tracks vs. 91), main story is shorter than XB, and there's fewer towns/cities/unique locations than XB.  HD is hard and all that.

Not trying to be negative, just like HD is hard, they can't do as much as they can by making a big budget game in 480p in 2010.  So keep that kind of expectation in check.  Game is still good.

[Positive Touch]

well this doesn't sound that ba-

Also the music is hip-hop vocal stuff like FFXIII-2 wannabe Persona. 

jesus god no NOOOOO


anyway as long as the world maps interesting I have no problem with this. walk around a big ass world, kill a bunch of giant monsters and get some loot, and every once in awhile do a story mission. basically I'd pay it like a Bethesda game.

[cool breeze]

so if I dropped xenoblade after ~10-14 hours mostly due to the mmo side quests and other fat, this game really isn't for me?

is the mech stuff at least cool?

[Mr. Nobody]

Also the music is hip-hop vocal stuff like FFXIII-2 wannabe Persona.

 

[Bebpo]

anyway as long as the world maps interesting I have no problem with this. walk around a big ass world, kill a bunch of giant monsters and get some loot, and every once in awhile do a sorry mission. basically I'd pay it like a Bethesda game.

Yeah, you should enjoy it.  The world feels a little like a Bethesda world.  Kind of more primitive.

so if I dropped xenoblade after ~10-14 hours mostly due to the mmo side quests and other fat, this game really isn't for me?

is the mech stuff at least cool?

If you only make it 10-14 hours you won't even get a mech lol.  They want it to be a big build up to getting a mech, like saving up for a car.  I'm 12 hours in and no mech in sight.  Might be like 20-30 hours until you get a mech.

[naff]

sounds more like the second half of ffxii and leaning towards even more terrible filler content than the first Xenoblade 

At least it looks kinda cool...

[tiesto]

Damn, that's a shame... was hoping for a story-driven game with a large world but also direction like the first game. Still gonna play the fuck out of it but this hurt my hype a bit 

[Trent Dole]

This sounds ...really weird.

[BrokenVerses]

-Huge open world, no real direction, just sort of "strong enemies here, avoid until you are stronger"
-Mostly focused on gameplay and questing, not much of a directed story focus.  To do story missions you have to meet requirements (have done this and this sidequest, have completed this % of continent content)
-Lots of junk quests
-Lots of useless loot
-Probably some other stuff I'm forgetting.

Wow, it's almost like I'm playing Dragon Age 3 again ahahaha.

[Cerveza mas fina]

Is this that game all wii u people were drooling over?

The one that spawned that mech gif?

[Bebpo]

About 35 hours in now, halfway through the story have my mech and jumping around.  Game is good, but it really, really is a gameplay-driven open world game.  You even have a ton of AC Tower's to unlock viewpoints all over the map.  There's a story, but the main story is probably like 12 hours out of a 70-100 hour game like a main story in an AC game.  It's all about exploring, questing, building up your party, building up your mech party and the sidequest stories.  I dunno how the story will be at this point.  It's ok, but it's lacking any of the real interesting Takahashi-isms like mysterious dudes in cloaks and masks (or in FACE robots in XB), or crazy religious gods and wave existences and stuff (although the latter is still possible).  It's a very straightforward plot so far that feels like Rogue Galaxy/Star Ocean with better writing; but again there's just very little plot in the game so it's hard to make a big discussion of it, when 90% of my time has been exploring fields and doing quests.  It's the kind of plot progression where you do a 1 hour story mission, then do other stuff for 3-5 hours, then do a 1 hour story mission, repeat.

Will be interesting to see where the game ends up after all is done.  Best experience I've had was spending 10 hours running through a giant continent exploring it on foot and discovering all sorts of cool little things.


I also have the feeling the game is gonna be a lot shorter than XB (400 hours my ass), because the world is bigger but with mechs you get around so fast it's a pretty small world at that point and you can blow through quests and continent completion pretty quick.  The endgame/post-game might be were a lot of the meat is since party level caps at 60, and mechs cap at either 50 or 60 and so going around beating all the lvl.80-99 high mobs might be where you'll get a lot of hours.  And there's the multiplayer too.  But the main story is way shorter and the world is more quickly traveled with mechs.  That being said I'm totally fine with this being a 60-80 hour 100% completion game vs. the 120+ hours of the original.  That's still a good length for a good rpg.

[Bebpo]

Been having detailed gameplay arguments on the GAF OT today now that I'm getting towards the end and burned out just like an Ubiworld game.  I do feel like this post gives an overview for anyone wanting to know how it stacks up:

Reading the Dragon Age Origins v. Inquistion thread on the front page, I think XBX will be fairly similar in a Xenoblade (DA:O) v. Xenoblade X (Inquisition).  Just like Inquisition, XBX while good, goes to an open world MMO-design and becomes bloated and more bland compared to Xenoblade.  But like how Inquisition won all the game of the year awards, I wouldn't be surprised if XBX won most of them too and then a year later people start talking about how it wasn't as good as the original.

XBX is a really beautiful game world.  I haven't really talked about it but the weather and environment effects are incredible and second to none at making the places feel cinematic and gorgeous.  From snowstorms to heatwaves to lightning and rain, to butterflies and fireflies swirling around.  It's a great, great looking world (even if the characters look pretty generic).

Right now the game still feels like about an 8/10 game at 70+ hours in.  Unless something drastically changes in the last 2-3 hours of story that's left, I don't really see that changing.  It's a good game, but it's not a great game imo and that makes it disappointing coming from the team's pedigree, especially since Xenoblade was truly a great game.  It's no Xenosaga ep2 disaster, as Xenoblade X isn't a bad game by any means, but a lot of the time it's just kind of average one while only some of the time it's truly a great game and that's disappointing.

I have the feeling that the first focus of Xenoblade X for Takahashi and his team was "Let's see if we can make a gigantic open world where you can transition from a character on foot to a mech boosting across the sky at anytime seamlessly" and they did it and pulled it off in spades.

I just feel like "let's make an rpg to go in that world" came second.

[thisismyusername]

Whoops, wrong thread.

[Human Snorenado]

Open world rpg of the year comes out tomorrow