My Adventures in Mabinogi: part 3
Welcome to part three of my series, My Adventures in Mabinogi. If you haven't seen parts one or two. The links will be provided above.
Today I want to continue to talk about the games story. I realized after some more several hours of playing that I might have spoken too soon in regards to the overall plot of the story and as such things have obviously changed.
Though aspects of the story have changed. I'm not quite sure how I feel about them yet. There were parts where I was painstakingly bored, running from one NPC to another just to turn in books and other quest related items. All the while not really doing anything in between other then just slowly progressing to the next bit of story that's been slowly unfolding.
It's disappointing, and that's the least to say. I'm someone who loves to be immersed in the game as well as the story. It's the story that often matters most to me in almost all circumstances when it comes to mmo's and rpg games.
okay you got me, a good story in an mmo, I must be joking right?
Well not really. The thing of it is this. Back in the good ol' days. Ultima Online and Everquest were the large pioneers of the time. Integrating massive multiplayer elements, rpg gameplay, and good well thought out plots for story quests and more. These were the games that really grabbed my attention in the mmo genre as they were the ones that pulled me in.
Many years later however, a lot of people would say that mmo's have fundamentally changed and that the aspects that made these past games great cannot be integrated in modern games.
Perhaps, and maybe this is true for a lot of cases. However, not to get taken away from Mabinogi as it is the main subject for this post. A great mmo needs to successfully integrate the multiplayer elements as well as the single player story. This of course is my opinion.
Fill free to let me know what you guys think!
Back to Mabinogi . . . The story isn't quite shaping up to be what I was hoping it would be and I cant say that I'm too surprised. The whole best story in any mmo ever played seemed too good to be true to begin with. Leave it to me to spend four hours of my time preforming mind numbing tasks only for a few extra lines of story dialogue, thanks Mabinogi!
I feel like it wont end here sadly, and I'm still trying to hold out hope. The truth of the matter is I'm probably wasting my time. Not to say that you'd be wasting your time as there are plenty of other things to do in the game to keep you busy. We'll get to that at a later date when I find time to get into life professions and more. There's just so much lacking in the early stages and I'm frustrated by it.
Here are some screenshots of main story content.
Lets get away from questing and talk more about character progression. It wasn't abundantly clear at first exactly how important character progression is when I first started playing.
I've talked about rebirthing and it's place in the game. It's more clear now that it's extremely important to rebirth as you progress. Your character is allowed to this every day while being bellow an accumulative level of 1000.
Yes 1000! Holly crap was my first reaction and apparently it doesn't stop there. While talking with a veteran player they we're describing to me some difficulties they were having in trying to defeat a monster who's level was 12,000 and their accumulative level was only 8,000.
I was definitely set back as I've only been playing for a short bit, almost a whole 24 hours to be exact and haven't managed to even scratch the surface of prestige that high!
Nevertheless though it was quite impressive and we continued to talk about progression and what it's like end game. Essentially end game is group content which is what I was hoping for. But I'm probably not going to find it in the way I want it to be.
This is likely because of the games age and that most people who play actively have already experienced most of what the game has to offer in regards to all the PvE content there is, Player versus Environment. I didn't want to completely take it at face value since I was getting feedback from one person and I haven't experienced any late game group content for myself to make any informed opinion.
I am however looking forward to it, so long as I don't somehow burnout during the process of increasing my power level over 9000! ;)
More screenshots . . .
It turns out that what you choose to spend your AP, ability points on is very important as you're only given a finite amount of these to my understanding and become increasingly difficult to get the more you level. Which is why rebirthing is very important for progression.
But how important is it really? Ive been asking myself this a lot, in fact I've purposely chosen to already gimp myself in the beginning of the game by playing a Elf warrior character. Which supposedly is extremely bad because Elf's have the lowest base strength of the three races. Okay I'm joking, I didn't purposely gimp myself. I came to this realization after getting lectures from other players.
So far I haven't had any issues so far with my character. I'm capable of clearing dungeons with little to no problems. Until then I'll continue down the path I'm going as I got some ideas for how I want to build my character which I think might work out well. Probably not.
You use ability points to basically upgrade your skills. Each class has skills from which you can use and as you use them they gain experience and eventually level up. The ability points are then used to upgrade them to the next tier. Skills start at rank F and go up to A. After rank A you then start from 9 and work your way all the way up to rank 1.
The higher you level skills the more expensive they become. Skills also increase your character stats which you keep with you always even if you decide to rebirth, resetting your character level.
Not only do you need to raise your strength you need intelligence too. Strength cannot be trained via gunslinger skills thus forcing you to spend AP in other skills that do. In the end I can see how some character builds might be better over others.
This concludes part 3, hope you guys enjoyed and as always leave your comments bellow and I'll see you guys soon!
Stay tuned for more.