Now that the 2nd day of the alpha is over, I can offer some more insight about the PSO2 alpha.
I got to play from level 5 to 14, played through a bunch more quests from the forest area, tried a bit of the forest free field, and played a few quests from the volcano area.
First to Rarrappy questions, I enjoyed some things about PSU but the game had too many big flaws, and it was poorly managed in the west.
When it comes to the combat, it's possible to just button mash the attacks, they even added an "hold attack button and the player attacks automatically" feature due to requests from japanese players. ._.
But, timing the attacks properly with the "just attack" system will provide better results than those who just button mash or hold the attack button.
When it comes to strategy during combat, PSO2 is alot better than PSU. Not only players get some defensive or evasive elements (the guard skill for hunters, and the different dodge skills) instead of the only means of defense being a random number generator (there seems to be no accuracy or evasion stats in PSO2), some enemies have their own defensive methods (for example, one type of enemies has a shield in one arm, if the player attacks from the side where the shield is or from the front, that enemy will block the attack).
Anyway, here are my impressions from what I played today.
Areas:So far I played mostly in the forest area, but also played a bit in the volcano area.
Other than the first quests, the stages are quite open, unlike the stages in PSU. I had to look at the map quite a few times to know where I was going or where I went to previously, since there's quite a few branched paths, and most of the paths end in dead ends, so I have to go back and try a diferent path (when going back, most of the times new enemies appear in the way).
Environmental Hazards:Other than traps, there's some environmental hazards, like the lava in the Volcano area.
One hazard that surprised me, from the volcano area, I'm not sure what exactly happened since it was so fast, I probably went through a small place that had vapour appearing or something, the only think I saw was fire appearing in the place where I was and my character being thrown away a few meters, haha.
One thing that I've heard from another player but I haven't experienced myself, in the forest area sometimes it randomly starts raining, apparently someone was struck by lightning during the rain. o_o;
Free Fields:Finally got to try the free fields, got access to them after either the 3rd quest, or after another quest that appeared in a second section of quests, a quest that ended in a boss.
Anyway, the free fields are a bit like the non-quest areas from PSO, but there's one big difference. When I was first playing through the Forest free field, suddenly some players from a different party appeared and started helping me, that was a surprise, but basically this means that the free fields are multi-party areas (basically these fields allow for up to 12 players).
Interrupt Events:These are events that appear randomly throughout any quest or free field, they include killing a number of enemies, inflicting enough damage to rappies to capture them before they escape, protecting a NPC ship from enemies that start attacking it, or even having to defeat a boss that randomly appears throughout a normal area instead of the specific boss area.
I thought these would be annoying at first, but they're actually rather interesting and keep things fresh, plus SEGA plans on having more varied interrupt events in future tests or in the final version of the game.
Photon Sensitive Effect:These happen rather often, but due to language barriers, I don't really know how they work or what bonuses I was getting with these, the only thing I know is that the PSE levels up by defeating enemies.
When I played during a free field I had a PSE Burst happen (according to the Phantasy Star fan blog the PSE Burst is the final level of the PSE), several waves of enemies started appearing to attack us while a timer was going down. After we killed enough enemies, a Cross Burst happened and the timer went up a bit, so we had more waves of enemies to kill. This part was quite fun.
Pictures:Here are the pictures from the day. First pictures from Gizonde:
Gizonde Razonde -
http://img819.imageshack.us/img819/6876/pso2032.jpgCharged
Gizonde Razonde -
http://img546.imageshack.us/img546/6734/pso2033.jpgAnd a bunch of random pictures:
http://img252.imageshack.us/img252/4462/pso2034.jpghttp://img69.imageshack.us/img69/3009/pso2035.jpghttp://img543.imageshack.us/img543/6867/pso2036.jpghttp://img31.imageshack.us/img31/9997/pso2037.jpghttp://img718.imageshack.us/img718/2236/pso2038.jpghttp://img15.imageshack.us/img15/5321/pso2039.jpgUnfortunately I didn't record any video today after all. I was planning on making a video of the free field, but seeing as how it's a multi-party area, I'm going to make a video of the forest quest than ends in a boss in the next test (which is wednesday).
Also, some misc news about the first 2 days of the alpha test. The peak number of concurrent connections in the first day of the test was a bit over 19000, and in the second day it was nearly 23000 (and it wasn't more than this because of the limits of the server, both ships were nearly full).
