Granado Espada: Translators Wanted

[schild]

Ok, so Fabricated (I think) told me about this game like 6 months ago or something. I came across it again while looking through the MMORPG.com website. It seems to be some sort of bastard child of the Baldur's Gate party system, Pokemon, and your everyday modern MMORPG. The art direction is fantastic - some sort of victorian era stuff with sprinkles of steampunk. It's all very well done. It's published by a company called Hanbitsoft (who also published about 5-6 other games, one of which is available in English - I think - Engrish is hard.). Anyway, Granada Espada has something of a brilliant solution to forced grouping, holy trinities, etc. You can adventure out as one of your toons and gain max xp or take 3 of your own toons out or go as one and group with friends. Or at least that's what I think it says. Anyway, relevant links:

Main Website
Gameplay Trailer, seems early alpha-ish.
CGI Trailer

And now this, if someone could translate it into English (Yoru and I have had some issues with it) that would be awesome. Nearest I can tell, there's some pretty profound shit said in there about the current MMOG market. Anyway, enjoy...this.



I think "mega-fast calculation" is a scientific term.

[Strazos]

You mean I can bring the Trinity with me? That's...something....

[schild]

You mean I can bring the Trinity with me? That's...Baldur's Gate and every other group based RPG....

I agree. It's new to MMORPGs though.

[Strazos]

Well, if I can bring a group with me, I'd really rather it be 4 members.

You have you tank, and healer, and whatever you want to use as a damage dealer. But that just seems too vanilla. At least with a 4th, I could add an oddball class in.

Then again, it would start to REEK of Dungeon Siege 2.

Sorry, but I'm not going to read that Engrish right now. Maybe later.

[Trippy]

It'll be interesting to see how good the AI and the UI is for this game. Depending on how fast-paced the combat is (still downloading the gameplay trailer) there could be issues. As for this sort of thing being new to MMORPGs, that's what multi-boxing is for :-D

Edit: Alright I watched the gameplay trailer and it looks like the combat AI wasn't in place except at the very end when they were all shooting guns. Otherwise the rest of the time only the leader was doing anything the other two were just following along so things are still too early on to judge. The combat reminded me of Tales of Symphonia with that rapid thrusts and finishing move attack and the italic damage numbers.

[Raph]

Hak-Gyu Kim is a smart guy -- I was very impressed with him when I met him in Korea. He was the designer of Ragnarok as well, btw.

[Shockeye]

I love the art.

[Fabricated]

Hak-Gyu Kim is a smart guy -- I was very impressed with him when I met him in Korea. He was the designer of Ragnarok as well, btw.

I loved Ragnarok's look and feel, but I really hope this guy had nothing to do with designing the miserable grind, and I REALLY hope he had nothing to do with the game's management.

Gravity kinda screwed up...well, everything they did. My absolute FAVORITE screw up was when they accidentally uploaded their server binaries to the public FTP for the whole world to use.

Yes, they actually uploaded their server binaries. The one thing they need to make their money, the one thing you DO NOT WANT in the hands of the enemy. Also, as a bonus, their servers consisted of unpatched, unfirewalled Win2k boxes running MSSQL with absolutely no unneeded services disabled. I don't even know if they had a network password on it, because someone basically just remote desktopped the server and copied the unencypted txt file that contained everyone's name and password, and then proceeded to clean out every "well known" player.

Then there were the emotionally unbalanced GMs that didn't speak English and liked to summon the most powerful bosses in the game to slaughter everyone in an area for fun...

[Yoru]

From what I've read/translated, this is something I'll be keeping an eye on. They're working around a lot of the problems with the current Dikus via their multiple character control system; they're even taking on the secondary market. You can, apparently, trade characters between accounts just like you'd trade items in current games. (It's towards the end of the section headed by the bit about "enjoy to play for recruit new party member".

My main concern, as has been echoed elsewhere, is how grindy/twinkable the game will be. In Ragnarok, it was completely possible (when I tried it, circa 2001) to give a new character a few hundred thousand credits and get them pretty much the best weapons and gear they can use.

[Der Helm]

to give a new character a few hundred thousand credits and get them pretty much the best weapons and gear they can use.

Which is a bad thing because ?
(seriously, I never played a MMORPG where "twinking" would have a negative influence on the game-play, never played Ragnarok, though)

[Sky]

Someone show that last screenshot to EQ2's art team. They need a lesson in style. Ok, they need an entire undergraduate curriculum.

[Yoru]

Which is a bad thing because ?
(seriously, I never played a MMORPG where "twinking" would have a negative influence on the game-play, never played Ragnarok, though)

I should've cleared that part up.. I mated grindy with twinkable because the latter partially alleviates the frustrations of the former once at least a few people have climbed up past the grind crap. From what I've read, some folks feel that any outside influence that significantly alleviates the amount of time/work necessary to level up 'cheapens' the achievement of getting to a high level.

My preference is for grindy games to be twinkable so that the grind can be circumvented. Indeed, 'twinking' produces a positive social relationship between players of different levels. It can foster a sort of mentorship relationship; a theme common in the "Hero's Journey" framework. It also ensures you're not poking rats with sharp sticks for too long. :)

[Strazos]

I don't like twinking, because often, it becomes not only (practically) mandatory, but also because players (particularly newbs) who get twinked are in essence forced up along the learning curve faster than they would normally be. This leads to high-level, heavily-equipped players who don't know anything about the game - the kind of players we all hate.

[Murgos]

I like twinking because if I've already played the lowbie experience as a gimp once, I don't freaking want to play it as a gimp again.

My primary problem with the anti-twinking crowd is that thier stance generally comes down to trying to force me to play the game the way they think it should be played instead of the way I want to play it or what the designers actually intended/implemented.

[Velorath]

I don't like twinking, because often, it becomes not only (practically) mandatory, but also because players (particularly newbs) who get twinked are in essence forced up along the learning curve faster than they would normally be. This leads to high-level, heavily-equipped players who don't know anything about the game - the kind of players we all hate.

Most of those kinds of players aren't going to learn to play their characters no matter how much time they have to spend leveling.

[Tebonas]

Thats the reason I don't group with strangers in MMORPGs anymore.

Twinking indeed changes the pace of the game. I saw it in several games (namely Everquest, Daoc and WoW), people didn't go for the level-appropiate content, but with maxed-out twinked gear they went and did higher content because it was faster xp/better loot. You weren't able to find groups with untwinked characters anymore, because you were behind the powercurve. Not the powercurve as envisioned by the designers, but the one implemented by the Min-Maxers.

I extensively used alts as manequins for the gear I couldn't use on my main. Like a Plate/Chain and Cloth Alt to my WoW-Druid. I just never play my alts beyond the level cap to wear my gear. For me its boring to play the same game twice.

If everybody is a twink, there is no problem. It just sucks for non-twinks in a "buy up on gear or quit the game" way.

[Yegolev]

I like twinking for myself, but not for other people.

[Typhon]

If I understand the article, this game has built in bots and character trading.  While not specifically innnovative (after all, botting and character trading has been around awhile), it will turn the current MMO market in a new direction if the game does well.

I personally like the single character focus that the current MMO games use.  I don't miss the "party control" of RPGs (I played Dungeon Seige 2 with one character for as long as possible).  If understand the thinking (not making the player wait to get in a good group).  It seems like a decent approach, I just know that I personally hate playing a group of people at the same time (I dislike pet classes for the same reason).

[schild]

Only thing that scares me is how many hotbars I'm likely to have. Three fully realized character classes controlled by one person? Yeouch.

[Typhon]

That's alot of hotbars to remember, even if you only see that characters set of hotbars at one time.  Altaholics will have a slight edge, because they likely put the same function in the same position on all their character hotbars.  Still, that's gonna be alot to remember if each character has many skills... if each char has a limited number of skills, they are basically making a game where an important sub-game is getting/trading characters.

Sounds like it's going to be different, I'll give it that.  With a system like that, you might even be able to do some variation of perma-death.

[Nebu]

Until someone can make AI that can do something as simple as follow logically, this concept will be doomed.  I hate henchmen and hirelings.  If they would give me enough interesting content to do alone, I wouldn't need to drag along 2-3 NPC's with the sole purpose of aggroing every mob in the zone.

[Typhon]

That is what the 'Path Engine' part of the article is focused on - assuring you that they have done the bestest path finding evar.  The also seem confident that they have the bestest AI evar.  Would be nice, eh?

[Nebu]

That is what the 'Path Engine' part of the article is focused on - assuring you that they have done the bestest path finding evar.  The also seem confident that they have the bestest AI evar.  Would be nice, eh?

You can guess that I'm a tad skeptical (as I'm guessing you are too).  Wish actually had some of the better pathing that I've seen in a game. Unfortunately, it was also married to PnC movemement.  We'll have to see what these guys come up with. 

[schild]

Pathing means nothing if it's not PnC movement. I would SUSPECT that while moving, the 2 extra characters are tightly teathered witha  tiny amount of free space to the main characer you'll control with WASD.

But that's just me thinking out loud.

[Nebu]

Pathing means nothing if it's not PnC movement. I would SUSPECT that while moving, the 2 extra characters are tightly teathered witha  tiny amount of free space to the main characer you'll control with WASD.

But that's just me thinking out loud.

I'm guessing that you've never played a pet class in name_any_mmog_here.  Hell, the NPC's in GW and CoH/CoV can barely follow.

[schild]

That's why I said that these are tightly teathered as opposed to the freedom Arena.net gives the henchies in GW. In that video they showed above, the two teammates moved in tandem. Controlling one meant controlling all 3. In other words, while there are formations (from what I can comprehend), your party will move at one toon. Easily the best way to solve the problem.

[JoeTF]

Uhm, Korean mmo that isn't item/skill based?
They must be impostors, or side effects of Hwang Woo-suk research:P

Seriously, strategy based, ingame bots(it's going to be PQ with more shiny graphic?;-), ingame character trading, nice looking, and all of this done by a guy who cannot master something as simple english?;-)

It's either going to be another Mourning thing or I'll have to redo my entire POV on Korean game developers.

[Sairon]

This is all old news to me, saw this game ages ago when I was trying out random korean MMORPGs ( which all pretty much sucked immensly ). A few things which can pretty much guarantee from the start:

Horrible grind which very soon hits the point where your character gets EXTREMLY little advancement in any area for time spent.
Some brutal exploits/bugs at launch, while these are common in western MMORPGs as well I'm yet to see a Korean MMORPG holding up well in this department.
Hawt females with over sized boobies. I don't consider this a bad thing though 

Also, while it does sound like it has a couple of strong innovative features, there's a very high chance that it will still play and feel like our old dikus.

[schild]

You could've said all that if you'd only played RO.

In other words, I'll reserve judgement until I play it.

[Sairon]

Oh, and on the account of twinking, I think AO solved that perfectly. If you don't have a very large knowledge of the game in general and items available to you it's almost impossible to do anything decent with twinking. However if you have the knowledge, time and will you can twink like crazy, especialy if you're a pet class. Nothing beats having a deep red pet 60 lvls higher than yourself 1 hiting pretty much everything.

[Typhon]

Everyone by now should read "AI like you've never seen" claims as pure marketing bullshit until played.

The game sanctioned bots and character collecting and trading is new (at least the "game sanctioned" part).  The shots I saw do look pretty.  If the AI is decent enough, and if it allows  a group to hire a healer instead of waiting for hours to get things crackin then it's a MMO improvement in my book.  Pretty tired of fantasy/mideaval worlds, kinda wish something different would be given a chance.