ArcheAge Unchained Review
ArcheAge Unchained has had a turbulent launch full of ups and downs and everything in between. Gamigo swept in and purchased ArcheAge when Trion Worlds was struggling to keep its feet on the ground, reinvigorating the mmo’s playerbase and inviting back old friends with warm, open arms. The primary feature of Unchained was meant to be its “Buy-to-Play” model with the absence of any “Pay-to-Win” features in the cash shop. With a passionate crew at the forefront vehemently condemning any Pay-to-Win items, things
If you work a typical 9-5 job and come home at 5, sit in a queue until 8, only to crash at the login screen and have to start all over again, you more than likely aren’t going to make any progress that night if you have work the next morning. This was my experience for the first solid week and a half of launch. I did attempt to remote into my desktop a few times at work, but at the beginning of launch that still wasn’t enough to save me from the inevitable queue crash that would send me all the way back to the end of the line. However, in between all of those problematic issues, I have still managed to push through and log in almost every day to an entertaining and incredibly enjoyable game. Almost every day.
What keeps bringing me back to play ArcheAge Unchained is the vast amount of autonomy you have as a player. In a sandbox MMO, you have the freedom to do whatever you want, whenever you want. Most of my time spent in the game has revolved around establishing my beautiful rustic home and rose garden to fund my fishing addiction. Working on those specific goals that make me happy still ended up netting me experience that could help my character progress to the next level. Oftentimes, it came as a pleasant surprise when I earned a level and realized that it came from doing something I enjoyed. The beauty of ArcheAge Unchained’s sandbox element is that it rewards you for pursuing those things you love, be it crafting, exploring, trading, fishing, or PvP’ing. Unfortunately, some of the newest features that Unchained brought ended up creating more problems than they solved.
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A primary feature of ArcheAge Unchained was meant to be the introduction of a system that would allow you to earn items previously thought to be Pay to Win, by completing tasks in game and earning them through your own blood, sweat, and tears. This system came to be called the ArchePass. Within the first week, I actually enjoyed what the ArchePass brought to the game. Being a lazy gamer who loves to spend every last bit of silver on teleport stones called Hereafter Stones, the ArchePass gave me a pretty steady stream of reliable gold to fund my laziness. There were four tracks you could choose from: basic, vocation, combat, and equipment. I chose the vocation pass, because I was more interested in earning vocation badges and establishing myself as a crafter in the world.
Daily missions popped up everyday in your ArchePass that allowed you to complete them for gold, progress through your chosen ArchePass track, and after finishing a level in your track earn special items. Nevertheless, the missions were the only way to complete levels in your ArchePass, so it felt very strict and and went against that wonderful feeling of autonomy I grew to love about ArcheAge.
Some missions felt like they required too much, while others just involved teleporting all over the map and killing random quantities of enemies. For example, if you chose the vocation track there were usually missions that required you to earn 1,000 vocation badges. If you were lucky enough to be in a family like I was, you could easily complete this requirement by completing the family daily quest which rewarded 3,000 vocation badges. If not, you would have to go out and manually farm 1,000 resources that yielded one badge a piece. If you had land, you could take care of and harvest animals to meet this demand, but animals take up a lot of space. If you only have an 8x8 farm you probably won’t have enough of your own resources to complete the quest. You weren’t forced to complete the ArchePass, but with that system being the only way to gain some of the more desirable items in the game for character progression, it felt like a daily requirement if you wanted to stay relevant. While this seemed to solve the pay-to-win issue that I had with the first iteration of ArcheAge it became very apparent, very quickly, that this system was not going to work in its current iteration.
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Less than a week into launch, I woke up to the official discord and subreddits for ArcheAge Unchained on fire. In the few days we had been able to log into the server and get our footing in the world, a major exploit had been found in the ArchePass that allowed players the ability to swap tracks and abuse the amount of times you could complete the world boss quest that awarded 50 gold per mission. Large guilds started to abuse this exploit and passed off the thousands of gold they had made to alternate accounts and friends.
Much of this gold ended up being invested into the Explorer’s set that all adventurers start with in the game, creating an impossible gear gap between opposite factions because of the gold sink required to upgrade your gear to its endgame Hiram status. I am all for one-on-one PvP and even fighting someone that has a small level advantage on me. However, when you have hostile players running around with impossibly high-tiered armor ganking players who are nowhere near that level of strength, you have a problem. We’re talking about hundreds of gold that you’d have to pour into this gear to get it to the extent that some players now flaunt openly in chat.
Gamigo’s response to this issue was to ban hundreds of players and “disable” the ArchePass until they find a proper fix for it. However, just as quickly, I watched with a heavy heart as news poured in that many streamers and obvious offenders were unbanned and allowed to keep playing without punishment.
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With the ArchePass now disabled, and the difficulties I faced just completing my basic quests because of high-level griefing, I turned to my home along the river and my humble farm. The ArchePass had rendered trading absolutely null and void - one of my previously favorite pastimes in the pay-to-win version of ArcheAge. Why would you waste your time creating the packs for trading when you could just farm the daily quests over and over again? I wasn’t aware of it in the beginning, but the ArchePass completely wrecked the economy from the outset, making many crafting proficiencies obsolete and tons of resources worthless. No one needed to run trade packs with the amount of gold they had pouring in from the daily missions, so there wasn’t a large demand for resources.
Not really sure what to do with my spare time or how to earn gold, I turned to decorating my home and placing down a few livestock. A pleasant surprise I encountered in building my home was that there is a small space around your home that you can use for farm land. Every bit of land counts when you’re trying to scrape by. ArcheAge has a pretty freeing decor system that lets you place items wherever you wish in your house. You can even double up items on top of each other, like placing a candlestick on a bed or statues on top of your fireplace.
With this knowledge in hand, I decided to set out and see if trading would become relevant again. Depending on whether or not I was trading through territory during wartime, I found a new love for the vocation that actually brought me a hefty pile of gold and allowed me to enjoy some downtime with my friends. One of my favorite parts of trading is that it can be a group activity, and the shared paranoia and hilarity in a voice chat when people keep looking over their shoulders for enemies that are looking to sweep down and kill us.
To our extreme relief, you can earn a donkey of your color of choice through the blue salt quest line that speeds along your trade runs. Eventually, if you can acquire some higher tiered materials, you can also construct a farm wagon that will allow you to quickly carry more trade packs at once. Since I didn’t take advantage of the gold exploit when the ArchePass was available, it would be a long time before I could replace ole’ Biscuit the donkey with a farm cart.
My joy of trading hit an incredible speed bump, when I and two other friends found ourselves traveling through a zone that was “At War”. Zones under this buff encourage PvP, and as a result increase the value of a trader’s trade packs should they dare to risk their lives for the chance to profit. I have to reiterate at this point, that if you don’t like PvP, ArcheAge Unchained may not be for you.
One of ArcheAge’s more interesting features is called “bloodlusting.” If a player “bloodlusts,” they change their player’s status from friendly to hostile, and can murder you and steal your trade packs. This is exactly what happened to our group, a mere 100 feet away from the turn-in point. This is absolutely a crime (you’re killing a member of your own faction), and the player who committed it leaves behind a bloodstain for each kill that can be reported and potentially send them to trial to await a jury of players that decides their fate. Unchained implemented an increase to the amount of crime and infamy points you earn from murdering a same-faction member, but it will never really be enough to hinder those who have decided early on that they want to pursue a life of crime.
What troubled me the most about the conflict, was that the player that jumped on us melted us all in one shot. I had no time to react or defend myself before my body collapsed on the ground. Part of me couldn’t help but wonder if this insane difference in power level had something to do with the exploited gear gap as well.
