Please summarize your experience with AO

Game Discussion
1

Is it good? Is it bad? Is it mid? Is it peak?

Imma make this list as compact (not short) as possible.

What I like:

  1. The overall atsmosphere. The theme of the game.
  2. The variety of build accessible. I just wish I can find friend who as easily entertain as me. Moving thing = fun (im not joking)
  3. Attention to detail. Almost similar to 1.
  4. The ability to headcanon. While the story is dogwater (execution-wise), the open world element lemme headcanon stuff that happen in game.
  5. The dopamine hit everytime I finally found enemy in Nimbus Sea. Also build testing on Ravenna Ensign in Rubica. (Spent 2 hours running around Rubica alone)
  6. Seadiving. Good stuff. Shark no threat. Shark dead.
  7. Tower. Just wish I can dismantle it how I dismantle tower in World of Magic.
  8. Fishing. It seem to be slower than before though. Could be me.
  9. Making unstable strong harming-bleeding burst potion and throw it at anyone I can.
  10. Imagine I actually do something that gonna help me in the future
  11. I just like the community. Luv you all forumer
  12. Women

What I dislike:

  1. Performance
  2. Inability to create engaging, or heck even proper story.
  3. You cannot interact with anyone from your group (morden, iris) outside of quest. Blud this is not genshin.:sob: lemme talk to my friend.
  4. Balancing. I actually find that making everything op is more fun than making everything underpowered. Just don’t make one thing too overpowered. Right now only size, power and defense seem fun to play with. Like dont get me wrong, you can play how you feel but beside those 3, and prolly regen with some doubt, ya.
  5. This is personal. Why the heck berserker can only damage sea monster using axe slash only? :skull:
  6. I don’t feel like piecing the lore together. Dont get me wrong. I love lore. I piece lore in Genshin like a lot. I never use wiki for genshin, nor interact with community. I literally learn all the lore myself. I literally have fun knowing Inazuma underground contain certain tech used by certain race to fight celestial or something like that. Been a while but I still remember it. AO? Nah bro. Idk why but it dont manage to capture my attention. I am the guy who like to deep dive stuff. AO is bad at promoting it.
  7. Uneventful journey. I dont mean we need randomize boss everytime we walk. No. I dont mean we need ultra rare super labubu randall level graphic too. Imma use Genshin as example again. I literally walk from Monsdadt to Liyue back and forth for fun. Literally same route, just for the sake of enjoying the walk. AO sailing dont have that “enjoy the journey” feeling. Rather it felt like I need to quickly reach my destination. Occasional bird strolling at evening, random dolphin (please add dolphin) following our boats, or whatever event to spice up the dull journey. Random Tornado that reduce your visibility very hard is not it btw. BUT, AO can improve on this. I see Vetex vision.
2

That being said, the final score gonna be 7/10.

This game need more QoL, and prolly some optimisation. Its pretty good as it is now.

3

Yeah sailing is just Point A-to-B journeys. Tornadoes are just annoyances ever since the spawn rate was increased than last time. I wish there are like some organized fleets sailing around in formation but I doubt it considering that it might tank performance more.

As for the lore I was hoping for more but it barely delivered. Pacing was too fast imo but I would think it might because they only have two chapters to work with instead of three. But since vetex didn’t want to delay any further this is the best we got. I was hoping we delved more in to Skyhall and helped Allanon with kingdom duties more before they killed off Liara. Maybe even see what his skyship innovation was before it blew up (Vetex add skyalis modules on large sea ships and my life is yours!)

We are literally the opposite lol, I use the wiki for their lore (I refuse to play ANY gacha game, even with good lore). But I do see the problem as well. Considering how tedious the dark sea is now, I am almost losing the will to collect the remaining pages for Athena’s Wisdom, for I only got 9 as of now. I do feel we are barely piecing lore naturally by ourselves.

Anyways, one thing I like is people talking about the world. I especially liked the guy who called rats as crawling wingless birds. And also environmental storytelling. I wish I saw the villages before they were destroyed but it is on me for going head on with the quests instead. The refugee camps for the next update is nice touch.

The combat in this game just tickles my brain just right. I don’t pvp much but the potential builds you can make here is insane. I do wish the balancing wasn’t so heavyhanded though but oh well.

Overall, its good but it could be better.

4

If you’ve ever ganked a freshie who begged you to stop then you know it’s a 11/10 experience which makes this game a 10/10 PRE full release, we can no longer kill random low levels so the game is easily a 0/10 now

5

It’s a very romantic game with postmodern literary style of writing and the way vetex tackles the love triangle is pretty interesting. 4/10

6

Never compare ao to genshin again.

7

This sounds like the most bullshit review one could write

9

Help me on this but I find it hard to enjoy AO Enviromental story telling. Imma just use genshin again because thats like the best example I got for comparison (and yes, I used to be genshin addict, for good reason).

The Grey Ones were stated to be “Fierce, cruel, cannibal” but I find random boar more menacing than these guys. I mean for normal people, sure. For us? At least show us the nitty gritty part of The Grey ones.

I would love if The Grey Ones have like some kind of stuff they do instead of standing around doing nothing. Prolly dance or something. Just a routine. Maybe some event where random idiots from Ivoris decided they want giant stratos apple and got kidnapped.

Genshin is very damn good at telling the story, hence why I love explore and piece together the lore. I think it was in Sumeru where lore become info dump, being dumped on me so hard I was like “lemme chill”, even then I have fun with mushroom guys. Stalking Hilichurl also show that they are not like emotionless monster. They just good guy of another side.

Like I said, I believe Vetex have this planned and still looking to refine his art in these aspect. I mean Rosehenge kinda have that “show dont tell” vibe. There are lot of cool places in AO like Drakos Arch. Bro its literally dragon bone.

Its like they giving you 20 answer for a question and say we can choose any we want, but in actuality only one answer is the right one.

10

The biggest issue is that mageskin disease supposedly makes you capable of having a much bigger energy capacity but literally the only mage we see afflicted with it is Allanon

11

Coolest thing the Grey ones did was eat that one lady’s son

12

I mean I actually dont want to but there is lot of similarity as player of both game (or ex-player for genshin).

Similarity:

  1. Heavily focused on Single Player Experience (thats why Genshin player dont really have friend. Teapot is still goated though)
  2. Both focus on story as main selling point.
  3. Require grinding to really get a grip in the game.
  4. Open world rpg (different mechanic but my point still stand)
  5. Both have “old civilization gone to dust” kinda lore.
  6. Illusion of choice

The main difference is AO is free while Genshin is F2P. Gambling is central part of the game sadly.

I know people hate Genshin but it was a very good game. I literally spend zero money on it, minus bills and prolly sleep deprivation.

13

They also left the bones so we can have a nice bone broth :stuck_out_tongue:

14

I just wish Vetex can make us care for NPC.

15

Holy overreaction

you must be one of those people who call their government fascist when they are hit with a minor inconvenience

16

Depend on where you live​:sob:

Not going politic but at this point it just worldwide issue

17

Potential game soley because there’s a lot of good goin for it but the devs have a lot to work on before it reaches a point I’d say it’s really good

18

Well, you’re sad when someone you love dies, so death must be sad. So if we kill people, we can make you sad!

19

It’s downright awful, theorized that StreamingEnabled (an incredibly popular optimization setting) is disabled due to a lack of scripting knowledge.

The cutescenes don’t make it better, they feel… blank in a sense, rigid movements, nothing really interesting happening, etc.

you WILL only interact with them in certain quests and you WILL enjoy it.

Blame mostly the balancing team, they destroy PvE when balancing PvP because there’s no way to efficiently determine what balances to apply when in combat against an NPC or Player.

They probably tested with ranged stat builds only (so every other build)

collect the athena’s pagesss ooooo
I hate the lore gathering so much, there’s so little explained when actually just exploring the seas, there are no notes, no tellings of what happened (except the no-words storytelling of blasted rock, battle lost, bla bla.)

I have crashed into so many things, which may seem irrelevant, but are completely due to the fact that it’s so boring going from A → B.
In games like GTA 5, there’s shit happening, you see the pedestrians, other cars at close proximity, and other things, basically your example with ‘details around your journey.’

This is best seen in Nimbus Sea when you are travelling from Sameria → literally anywhere; it’s multiple kilometers of nothing, just water, with the faint ship here and there and a whale to randomly block your path (does not count as ‘details around your journey’ if it specifically blocks you for no reason)

Overall, your takes are pretty well said, and I couldn’t agree more, though unfortunately, it’ll likely be months or years before any of these are addressed. I hate to be pessimistic, but it’s just the truth at this point.

with my bum ass with a decade’s worth of experience in roblox studio (holy unnecessary flex), I would decide to build the inbetweens of the islands, then build the islands around that, making the journeys more exciting whilst not entirely ruining islands.

for the performance, it would be difficult, but i would try to convert the code to satisfy StreamingEnabled so I can efficiently have LoDs of islands, boats, etc. whilst getting higher FPS.

but in the end, I’m a bum with no job that has to do with roblox studio, so my words are merely ‘what ifs’.

20

Arcane Odyssey brought me through my depression, and gave me a purpose which was to draw, over the span of around 1.5 years my art has grown drastically. I’d say the game itself needs fixing, yeah like optimization, maybe some easier configurations with some stuff or more islands to explore in each update.

Moving on, I think Arcane Odyssey is pretty unique in the modern games on roblox, sure it has it’s faults, like not much thematic scenes (although you can make it thematic in some way :eyes:). Or even the fact there is barely stuff to do endgame, you can probably add ganking to it and balancing to it here, but honestly tbf if you don’t mind all that it’s pretty alright. I think some people have ranted a ton about it, mainly getting pissed at some points of the game but this game is made in a way where… You would come back to it like eventually or most of the time.

I’d say the community is another reason that might reduce my rating of AO, I’ve had some ups and downs, and even downright weird moments. But it doesn’t remove the fact of the toxicity and doomposting, I know why they are the way they are.

To be fair, pre full release wasn’t so bad, although my hopes were too high. I hoped that I would get less lag, some days I even prayed to god himself that I’ll be able to play Full Release because I love this game that much. But here we are, and I did get to play it… But not really enjoy it fully. Although I pulled an all nighter to finish the story up until level 175 and I would say it was worth it, worth all the lag, worth all the pain.

But all in all, I would give this experience and 8.5/10, and the .5 being the fact I had met some really great people, and my overview on life kinda changed for the better. But anyways this is my opinion, and if you have anything against it, fire away.

21

i think more than 50% of my time “playing” AO is spent scrolling twitter while sailing.

the only time im dead locked-in is during dark sea and even then 50% of the time i can’t see cause i’m constantly sensing for giant krakens (until one just spawns under me anyway)