Official trailer for PHANTASY STAR ONLINE II (PC)

[Deef]

Ah I see. So if the real friend arrives, can they drop in and replace the NPC? That would be cool. They could screw with your mind lol.

[Deef]

Aww... all over. Big dance off in the 2-20 lobby heh.

[Deef]

A few days until the open beta - June 21st.
Don't wipe the old client.
Open beta characters carry over into the full (JP) release.

http://pso2blog.wordpress.com/category/pso2-beta-test/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Pointy Cat]

I'm hoping the English menu patch still works. I also hope it has been improved and expanded upon by now. Though I doubt they'll ever get it to work with item names since I believe they're all handled server side. I'd love to be wrong on that though.

[Talez]

It's not working with the PBT. They're going to try and have one working for the OBT and Sega have also been making noises about a localized version of PSO2.

[Pointy Cat]

Noises? I haven't seen anything from Sega on that. Care to fill me in?

[Pointy Cat]

Oh I see, I assume you mean the thread on it on the PSOW forums. Not much to go on though.

[Talez]

http://forums.sega.com/showthread.php?4 ... 60-Players" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

There is more news yet to come for Phantasy Star, and there will be much to be excited about in the coming weeks and months.

There's only two things in the Phantasy Star pipeline right now; Possible localizations of Phantasy Star Portable 2 Infinity and PSO2.

[Pointy Cat]

Ugh, Sega of America though. If they run the servers themselves it'll suck. The PSU servers they ran were always many months or even years behind Japan in content.

[Deef]

Mmm I'm glad I don't have to go through the signup process again.
Updating now, according to PSOW it takes ages and can't resume, so fun fun.

New Star Control 2 and new PSO, happy days for me.


Does anyone know a little more about the classes? More specifically, does anyone know if I can have a RA that can resta? That appeared to be the class for me. Oh the ironing, seeking the equivalent of PSO's RAmar. My RAcaseal looked cool but I want resta because it was really a fun thing to use.

Sculli get on board already.


Edit - Seriously this update is slow, like 25 minutes already and it doesn't appear to be even a quarter complete. I wonder if simply downloading a complete updated client would be faster.
Edit 2 - Sigh. 90 minutes in and the router craps out. Yep looks like it's starting again, it was about half done. For the record this is a 50Mb connection.

Edit 3 - Finally done, it's really a set-and-forget thing. Remember when you log in that your SegaID must be all lowercase. Man I remember with PSO1 v2.0 I was stuck on that mistake for like half a day and I was more annoyed than half an hour of the last level of Rayman Origins.

After the password screen I got a new prompt. No idea, so I typed in the name of my CBT character and the number of characters allowed matches perfectly. And THEN... no idea again. Damn all this Japanese, wtf is going on.

[Deef]

Double post for the bump.

Thanks to Talez clearing it up, ship 2 is simply too full so we can't even get to character creation. That screen I got confused on before was the new character name, which it seems is locked in before I've even picked a class.

I've made a character on ship 10 (Orange Tec Meek) and have an account on ship 2 that never made it to the character creation screen. I played a little on 10 last night, only through the tutorial and then some time in the lobby to whine about the tutorial.

Gotta say this whole ship restriction business is not fun. One character stuck in 1 ship for life, and if the ship is down you've got no game. That's what WoW does as well, no?

[Deef]

Anyway as of this post the servers are back up.

[Pointy Cat]

Things seem all sorts of borked at the moment. Lag fests and full servers. I know it's still in beta but I would have hoped Sega would be more on top of this by now.

One thing I hate about PSO2 is how they now tie your character to a ship. The old PSO/PSU method of select your character then easily jump from ship to ship was way better. It seems like such a backwards step to me. I don't see the point of doing it this way at all. Well unless they want to do a Blizzard and turn server transfer into a nice little money maker. Bleh.

Also no sign of a new English patch yet.

[Deef]

Agreed, it's all been a bit s***; a block shouldn't run like turd even if it is full.

My uneducated guess is that not linking the servers has some impact on maintenance costs? It's hard to imagine that the profit of transfers could be enough to motivate them to do something so annoying for the whole game. Dunno, but yeah this system sucks. I'm hanging out for an English patch too.


Just dropping this here for translating: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3lndnXjpFA" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Pointy Cat]

Dan, Talez and whoever else - you guys playing the JP release?

[Talez]

I haven't been playing as much as I should but I will be getting heavily into it in the later half of the year once things get ironed out and perhaps a patch makes it a tad easier to naviagate.

[Talez]

Sega just announced PSO2 is coming to NA/EU.

[Pointy Cat]

Pity about the eight or so month wait. I'll still be on the JP version until then at least. No point in not playing it just to wait.

[Pointy Cat]

The unofficial English patch finally got released today. It's pretty much as good as it was back in the closed beta.

While I'm posting here I may as well post some videos of recent content updates.

They've been releasing new content at a good pace, every few weeks. There should be a big update next month where they're apparently going to add sub classes. No details on how it'll work but it should allow for a good mix up of classes to make various hybrids, or simply more powerful pure classes.

[Deef]

Good to hear on both counts. I wasn't impressed with the class system TBH and for RA at least the skill tree wasn't mixing things up. Once my laptop is working again I'll try it out.

[Pointy Cat]

Well it's clear now that the class system was incomplete. My guess with sub classes is you will level them by s-ranking missions as opposed to mob exp. There will apparently be three sub classes, so one of each type I guess. That will make a nice mix available of main and sub classes.

I'll personally probably go HU-HU to make the most powerful melee class possible. I assume going HU-FO would create what we'd remember old HUmars to be like.

[Deef]

Yeah that sounds suitable and hopefully will let me have some resta antics on a RA; though I imagine that's what every guy and his dog will be doing. Maybe this change will also provide some locked-in aspect to class selection because really I'd prefer that.

Scuba rappies ftw but I don't know why they bother showing off the environments lol.

They really need to bring back the proper RAcast outfits; it's cruel to shun old RAcast players like that.

[Seraph]

With the patch's release, my interest has returned (slightly) to PSO2.

Unfortunately the situation is not perfect. The English release is next year, and the English servers will not be linked to the JP ones.
So, just like PSOBB and PSU, the English servers will suck. Some content will take months to appear, other content will simply never materialise.

The JP version wll have better support, better content, and its servers will stay around longer.
However, even the translation patch leaves a lot of stuf in JP, and there's no guarantee that Sega will let the patch continue to exist.

[Deef]

Gweh.

[Pointy Cat]

That's all correct Seraph. Sega of America did quite a bad job with PSU. So much content took six+ months to show up on US servers and some content never made it at all.

As for the English patch, we'll just have to wait and see. That said I had played a lot without the patch and whilst at first it can be a challenge it does get pretty easy. You first remember where everything is and then you start to recognise small bits of Japanese and it gets even easier. There are a lot of very good guides now too so even if the patch was to break don't let it put you off.

It's not ideal but there's nothing stopping you from playing JP for now any seeing how things pan out. Remember it is free, and you can avoid the paid content 100% and not miss out on a shred of gameplay. If the patch dies or if Sega of America somehow gets its act together (HA) then it's not like you have to buy the game again if you decide to jump servers.