Archlord Comments by Alec Meer

I keep reading this as Arschloch.

Great review. Crap game.

The Ultima Online 9th Anniversary collection is out in the US soon, includes all the expansions. Good chance to catch up on that if you missed it first time round.

http://www.progressquest.com/

just as rubbish as I expected.

I disagree that Guild Wars has "world design and character self-expression is short on charm" it's better than that saccharine sickly shite bad cartoon look of WoW ffs. it's probably the best looking fun MMO around. Nightfall takes it so much further.
Almost criminal that NCsoft don't charge a fee.

Isn't Archlord a free mmo in Korea anyway? What sort of stunt are Codemasters trying to pulll..

/ is glad he's not a cube of jelly just a jellyhead.

Incredible, this makes The Matrix Online seem attractive. Many thanks for suffering on our behalf, noble reviewer!

I agree with Darkedge - GW's world is far more beautiful than WoW. In regards to the review, Im surprised this even got a 4. i played the beta for like a day, and felt ripped off that i spent £1.99 on the pre-order box. I feel sorry for the poor ppl that spashed out £30 for it and a monthly sub on top of that to boot.

I said sometime ago that I couldn't believe that Codemasters were venturing into the MMO market when WoW, Guild Wars and Everquest already dominated, followed by the likes of SW Galaxies and Final Fantasy........is there really room for yet another MMO?! It'd have to be something pretty bloody special in order to take even a thin slice of the MMO pie at the moment........and by the sounds of the review (and I only actually read the conclusion bit) it sounds like Codies have failed miserably, YET AGAIN!!!!

Somtimes I think being a games reviewer would be my dream job. However games like this would force me to turn the PC off after 15 mins and write a 3 word review along the lines of "SHIT, SHIT,SHIT".

/takes another month off the Codemasters life expectancy chart. Wobbles, jelly like, in satisfaction.

it's funny, I remembered the preview of this on EG earlier as being quite positive, and wondered what had gone wrong. Then I just re-read it, and realised that it sounded shit then too.

After reading the review, I was expecting something a little lower than a 4. However, I was expecting nothing more from the game.

It might aswell be called Jelly Slayer....sounds and looks pretty damn awful, but then that doesn't surprise me tbh

Although...didn't RF Online suck ass aswell? I can see a bit of a trend starting here ;)

These Korean MMORPGs cater to very specific players who like extreme PvP and don't mind grinding like crazy. Not recommended for sane people.

That's precisely why I scored it 4, not lower. There is indeed a certain caste of people who are going to be totally happy with this wretched thing despite its total lack of charm, because all they want to do is grind and PK. As regards the sanity of such people, I couldn't possibly comment...

- Alec

"/takes another month off the Codemasters life expectancy chart. Wobbles, jelly like, in satisfaction. "

that makes you happy?

""/takes another month off the Codemasters life expectancy chart"

To be honest I think Codemasters have a low investement in these games (after all they just translate them and run a few servers) and they probably have a good enough user base of interested players here in Europe to make them some money. Like I said before, there *are* people who really prefer this kind of game instead of a carebear WoW. One of my buddies quit WoW because it is too soft and not rewarding for extreme PvP-ers.

Well, thanks for that review. At one point I was interested by the concept - but I'll stick to WoW. If SOE decided to just somehow roll Galaxies all the way back to pre-CU, then I'd be back playing that. ='[

All MMORPG's are like this. Waste of money and time.

"I said sometime ago that I couldn't believe that Codemasters were venturing into the MMO market when WoW, Guild Wars and Everquest already dominated, followed by the likes of SW Galaxies and Final Fantasy........is there really room for yet another MMO?!"

Well we've got a lot more coming and some potential big hitters as well - Lord of the Rings Online, Age of Conan, Vanguard (from ex-Everquest people), Star Trek Online, Star Gate Online, various pirates games and countless others. With games like these which will attract the hardcore, as well as the casual nmasses, because of their probable high popularity, there will be no room for the poorly thought out Korean MMORPGs in the west.

So's life ultimately Yeevle!

Forgot to mention that Everquest 2 has cubes of jelly - but not so many.

A bloke I met in Midmotheringhay
Was half an orc and half...can't say
A cask he tapped and our flagons filled
And singing proud his mead we swilled!

A lad met I last Mostmotheringrath
Was half an orc and orc by half
A cask he stove and our flagons topped
And singing loud his mead we quaffed!

Hooray for screenshots that show the game as it's played. Now if only this was the norm.

I demand screenshots of crotchless panties!

Amazed it got a 4 after that review :) Was excpecting a 2 or a 3 at best.

Ghey-Lord

Heh, on another note: play Guild Wars, it is plum.

And when is the Guild Wars: Nightfall review coming? The game has been out a week...

Nightfall hardly needs reviewing.. You should all own it anyway ;).

GW is by far my favourite game in it's class. Especially where competitive PvP is concerned, there is no better MMO in that regard. The player customisation is pretty decent and the PvE in GW:NF is largely improved over it's predecessors.

Yeah, I second that...

Have been playing it solidly since it came out and liking it very much so far. I never bothered with Factions because I didn't believe it was offering me enough new stuff and I still had a lot of play left in the Prophecies Campaign at the time.

What I like about this one though firstly is the heroes. They add a lot of new interest for me on the PvE side of things. Being able to kit them out with their own runes/weapons whatever has prompted me to start putting many more hours in trying to unlock skills and stuff for them. A few problems are that the AI doesn't seem to handle maintained enchantments - they will only cast these on themselves. There is a work around though in that you can disable these skills at any time so that only you can manually order them to use them... Bit fiddly and it take a bit getting used to operating more than one skill bar at once :) Sometimes feels like playing Baldur's Gate without a pause button :)

Oh and the new campaign is ace as well. I've found a new green weapon already :D

Codies did DDO as well, or at least were involved in it in some way - there were about 6 company names on the loading screen on that one. Considering the saddening lack of content in that one and the way it pretty much died on its arse, I'm surprised they're launching not one but 2 more MMORGS. I'm yet another of those people that sincerely doubt there's room for another game in the market - but maybe they are hoping to cash in on an expected wave of people who get bored with WoW?
I don't know how many people for whom WoW was their first MMORG would be interested in a more traditional 'horribly painful dull grind' game though - even though I cut my teeth on Everquest, now I've tasted the brightly coloured delights of WoW I am not sure I could go back.

I'm surprised people seem to think there's no more room in the market for other MMORPGs. Just take a look at the forums for Lord of the Rings Online and Age of Conan to see the keenness on these games.

Lord of the Rings will undoubtedly be massive and will take away people from other games and bring in new ones to the genre. Having said that there probably is too many people chasing the limited sized cake.

I picked this up on a complete whim a few weeks ago. Since I was visiting a friend at the time, we installed it on his computer and signed up. Accidently used the 7-day buddy code to sign up, but that shouldn't have been a problem.

In the end, the only compliment we had for it was that the music in the installer was nice.

Highlights included...

logging in and finding out that you can't pick your gender (gender is set by race and class)
encountering incredible lag in the newbie zone even though there were about four people around me
having a character who did not animate at all until I restarted the game (a common problem according to the others in the newbie zone)
doing the first quest and finding that there were not any more quests anywhere nearby, leaving nothing to do but... KILL RATS! (woohoo...)
Killing enough rats to qualify for a change of armour for my Moon Elf hunter, and finding out that it's the most ridiculous and awful looking armour I've seen in any game ever.
Moving on to kill deer in exactly the same way I killed rats.

I logged out at about this time and my friend and I played CoH.

When I returned home, I decided to install on my own computer and give the game another try. I put the disc in the DVD drive... and it started whirring, and whirring, and whirring...

To cap it all, disc doesn't work in my computer so I can't try it again. I can't help but feel like I dodged a bullet. I'm just glad I never gave them my credit card details.

Now all I need to do is get rid of this game. I've tried giving it away to three people so far but no-one will take it. Any suggestions for disposing of it?

I played the beta a month or so back. I assumed the cubes of jelly were placeholders. SURELY. But no.

The developers for this game must be very cynical people

"Now all I need to do is get rid of this game. I've tried giving it away to three people so far but no-one will take it. Any suggestions for disposing of it?"

The bin?!!! ;)

And they were making Dragon Kingdoms. Which looked good.

And then they stopped. And made this.

"Now all I need to do is get rid of this game. I've tried giving it away to three people so far but no-one will take it. Any suggestions for disposing of it?"

The microwave oven should nicely dispose of optical discs :)

That was one of the funniest reviews I have read on Eurogamer. Well done, sir.

Agreed, fantastic review. :D

Bought it, installed it, played it, gawked at the generic blandness, whimpered at the content-less-ness, thought to myself "it appears it is possible to release a MMO worse than Horizons", uninstalled it, resubscribed to WoW.

Moon-elf boobs is the game's only saving grace.

Quite the opposite of what they advertise on their website: "more fun, more happy" and that's a direct quote!

"thanks to a magic necklace dropped by a cube of jelly"

lmao....

Great review! :)

Excellent review, genuinely funny too.

One thing I didn't make totally clear in the review, incidentally (so many factors to deliver a brutal kicking to, so little space...), is that the endgame content (i.e. the Archlord and the castle stuff) isn't actually in the game yet - it's just promised for the near future. Though, given that I've since heard that Korean players have had the game for two years now, and they still don't have Archlords turned on, clearly it's not something anyone should hold their breath for...
- Alec

Totally 100% great review.

Ah so, Alec, the Archlord you thought was somewhere in the world, isn't! SO even the one cool thing about the game, where a powergamer can call himself the ultimate player on the server isn't there.

This game isnt that bad at all, sure things doesnt look exactly like what u want it too, and ppl seem to have a problem with comparing one game to another, which is plain dumb, 2 diffrent publishers means 2 diffrent games, and 2 diffrent ideas of whatever that game looks like, storylike, whatever..

I player wow since it got published, ye even beta, and just quitted, it isnt much diffrent, the thing i like about this one, is that u actually have to work for it to get far,
while u just had to pick up a quest and do it then redo that again and again till u ding 60 in wow..

Give it a try id say, find it quite fun already, and the chat system, atleast u dont meet tons of kids spamming about penises and alike in it :) and if u really wanna chat, then start a chat :)

Anyway, its worth a try and i wouldnt recomment ppl not to try it just from this Review...

And, if u dislike jelly's, pick orcs, there are jellies there, but not a massive population :p and btw, they are kinda cute, with a little skeleton sitting inside, poking you with a spear and a shield!! :D

I now have zero interest in becoming a game reviewer.

I hope you were intoxicated,drugged and/or have mental problems, I have to say on a 0 to 10 scale you get 1 for giving such good support to the theory of the human stupidity being bottomless.Nothing personal,but can you tell me did you actually know the purpose of a mmorpg? It's to make your character powerful,want pretty go play Barbie dress up.I'm not one to troll,however you can't tell me you weren't totally bought or have another excuse,this is the 2-nd worse review I've ever read, only Advent Rising game had a more unjustified,meaningless,proofless and humiliating to read(also i feel sad for you).Have a nice day :D!

I have to say I actually quite like this. Though of the numbered list, that 3rd one is the most blatant. Not one person in chat can type. But I'm liking this more than Guild Wars at the monet, though I have a feeling I may fall out with this game when it gets too samey.

EDIT: Having re-read the review, it's clear the reviewer hasn't understood some things, or somethings have been patched since then, since it's easy to tell the insta-kills from the rest now. Plus with all the extra content now, and it being better value for money, I recckon the reviewer would give it 4.5 now. That rounds up to 5.