Phantasy Star Online 2 - Official Pre-Release Topic

[ezodagrom]

Pre-Open Beta Starter Guide:
http://bumped.org/psublog/pre-open-beta-starter-guide-for-phantasy-star-online-2/

[CrazyT]

Sucks that im at school. I may have to leave a little earlier 

[tarpmortar]

I would jump into this pre-open if I knew we could switch to the American servers, tough decisions.

[ezodagrom]

According to the PSO2 twitter, the pre-open beta today is going to last 2 more hours than previously announced.

The revised times:

Japan:
- 19:00 ~ 26:00

UK:
- 11:00 ~ 18:00

USA East Coast:
- 06:00 (AM) ~ 1:00 (PM)

USA West Coast:
- 03:00 (AM) ~ 10:00 (AM)

[ezodagrom]

Pre-Open Beta is over, and Open Beta starting date has been annouced:

Phantasy star Online 2 Open Beta will start on June 21st at 16:00 JST

- 6/21/2012 @ 8:00 AM London
- 6/21/2012 @ 3:00 AM US Eastern
- 6/21/2012 @ 2:00 AM US Central
- 6/21/2012 @ 1:00 AM US Mountain
- 6/21/2012 @ 12:00 AM US Pacific

If you live on the Pacific Coast it is essentially a Wednesday night. The Open Beta data will carry over into the official game!

About the Pre-Open Beta, it reached a peak of around 41500 concurrent players and there was little to no lag (in the Closed Beta and Alpha 2 tests, the peak was around 23000).

And here are a few pictures I took during the test:

http://img534.imageshack.us/img534/74/pso2pob01.jpg
http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/6733/pso2pob02.jpg
http://img840.imageshack.us/img840/1788/pso2pob03.jpg
http://img707.imageshack.us/img707/8661/pso2pob04.jpg
http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/2708/pso2pob05.jpg
http://img857.imageshack.us/img857/7595/pso2pob06.jpg
http://img35.imageshack.us/img35/6197/pso2pob07.jpg
http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/4351/pso2pob08.jpg
http://img708.imageshack.us/img708/7254/pso2pob09.jpg

Tomorrow I should have a video ready from the Desert area quest.

[ezodagrom]

The Pre-Open Beta Desert quest video is uploaded:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Kk49HjwRjg

[ezodagrom]

The Open Beta has begun, so here's a bunch of important guides from bumped.org.

Registration guide:
http://bumped.org/psublog/phantasy-star-online-2-pre-open-beta-registration-guide/

Client download and launcher:
http://bumped.org/psublog/phantasy-star-online-2-pre-open-beta-site-and-download-begins/

Login, tutorial and important menus:
http://bumped.org/psublog/pre-open-beta-starter-guide-for-phantasy-star-online-2/

In-game options:
http://bumped.org/psublog/pso2-options-guide/

Buying, selling, equipping and grinding:
http://bumped.org/psublog/pso2-basics-buying-selling-equipping-grinding/

Mags and matterboards:
http://bumped.org/psublog/phantasy-star-online-2-open-beta-begins-and-mini-guide/

[ezodagrom]

Character creation has been locked in ships 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, there's way too many players online. In a few hours things should start to quiet down as japanese players go to sleep, and character creation should be unlocked by then.

To those who haven't been able to create a character, I suggest waiting for a better time instead of creating a character in the less populated ships, since the game is kinda laggy due to the big population.

As I mentioned before, ship 2 is the ship of choice for english players, most english players can be found in blocks 20, 21, 22, and so on.

EDIT: Looks like character creation has been unlocked:
http://twitter.com/sega_pso2/status/215798518374338560
SEGA will continue to monitor the situation, and if necessary, they'll lock it again.

[Radrappy]

I played from 12 - 3 am last night and had a blast.  There was some pretty severe lag at times but given that it was the first few hours of launch, it's impressive that I never disconnected or had any trouble logging in (which I heard was in fact an issue later).  I played the closed beta as well as the pre open beta so I have a pretty good feel for the game at this point.  That said these are the things that stuck out to me and need addressing

-enemies are still too weak.  A party of 3 low leveled characters can absolutely decimate everything thrown at them in the first missions.  There isn't the sense of accomplishment or risk that there was in the original PSO.   

-the mission progression isn't the best.  It's not as bad as it was in PSU but my party and I still had to replay one mission 3 times before we were able to move on.  PSO handled this better by letting you go anywhere you had earned but made you realize very quickly that some grinding was needed to do well in those areas.  As opposed to this where the game just flat won't let you go there until you're at a certain level.  And by the time you ARE that level, the mission is once again too easy.

-Rangers are amazingly strong.  I wouldn't say they are OP but their rate of fire and power is certainly fearsome to behold.  It got to the point where as a hunter I barely made it to the enemy before they were killed.

that's it though!  Pretty great so far.  Hey ezo we should play together!  Segabits meet up anyone?

[ezodagrom]

According to their latest tweet, character creation for ships 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 will remain locked for the rest of the night (it's currently 4:25 on Japan).

[ezodagrom]

There was an emergency maintenance and now it's possible to create characters in any ship, let's see how long it'll be until a new lock is put in place. :\

EDIT: Someone on Neogaf mentioned that there won't be any more locks to character creation, but when a ship is full, it just won't be possible to login, it'll still be possible to create a character.

[Happy Cat]

I'll be joining you guys eventually, don't know if I'll be in time for this beta, but I'll be there for the official opening! xD Hopefully getting the hardware this weekend, will have to see how things go.

This time I got the money locked down, it's not going anywhere unless theres an emergency, this is what ive decided on, will probably order tomorrow. This is going to be a beast machine, its going to tear photoshop apart, and ive seen videos of HD4000 running games much more graphically intensive then PSO2 just fine!

http://i250.photobucket.com/albums/gg261/Shadiwulf/computer3.png

oh, needed a SD card reader, too ;p

[Happy Cat]

Upgrade complete!

now I'm trying to get onto PSO2. Tried updating my client from the closed beta, wasn't getting anywhere, so I'm trying to download the client again and see if that works.

[ezodagrom]

Upgrade complete!

now I'm trying to get onto PSO2. Tried updating my client from the closed beta, wasn't getting anywhere, so I'm trying to download the client again and see if that works.

The closed beta update seemed like it was getting nowhere, but it actually was updating. The update is just really big, slightly more than 2.5GB.

[Sharky]

The graphics in this game look so hit and miss, sometimes I'm impressed and other times I'm underwhelmed.

Here is a video of the game looking pretty damn flash though:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czaY3PPldik