What’s Wrong With These Games?

A list of things I found wrong with some of the games I’ve tried.

LotRO – The entire interface feels laggy. It doesn’t matter if they intended it that way or not – when I push a button to use an ability, I expect some sort of instant acceptance – an error message or the ability to go off. Instead, it seems like my character will finish their current attack animation, THEN use the ability. There’s also a number of general ‘feel bad’ features – like how your characters slide when you let go of the movement keys, looking like they’re skidding to a stop. You also can’t strafe on a horse. Debuffs also aren’t readily readable, despite they’re very important! The interface doesn’t respond well (particularly the unit frames) to mouse clicks, making healing a PITA. Also, mounting a horse takes an additional 1/2 second in addition to the cast time. I though the cast time represented the time it would take to get onto a horse, not the time it takes to go, “Wait, where’s my horse? OH YEAH ITS INVISIBLE DUH".”

Atlantica Online – The chat sound plays even when a player on ignore says something. The in-combat ability display doesn’t stay minimized between log-ins. The quest-tracker arrow automatically turns on when you use auto-run (WHY!? The point of autorun is that you DON’T CARE where the quest is!) Auto-run in general is a bad idea. If there are parts of the game the player should skip, then let them skip it altogether. Holding down the left and right mouse buttons to move around sometimes locks your characters direction. The quest system… why? Just why? The ‘world’ doesn’t seem to matter – there probably shouldn’t even be one. There’s not a forum for people to congregate to form groups, so it takes a while before you can legitimately group with strangers and start making friends. The random “player has purchased an epic item” spam is way annoying. Some of the time-sensitive popups don’t fade automatically. It’s really difficult to tell what some of the debuffs afflicting you are. Stupid logon method (for ANY nexon game!) I also can’t figure out how to rebind zoom in/zoom out, or even if there is a choice, since I don’t have a scroll wheel.

Dofus/Wakfu – Getting into and out of combat takes a while. Battles should be bigger but less frequent. The questing system is also somewhat silly. Turns could be shorter, and characters in the fight could respond quicker. Keybindings definitely could use an overhaul to help speed things up.

Grand Fantasia – The camera controls are bad. The refresh rate setting keeps falling to 30 for no reason. Kill –> Loot game play is uninspiring. The pet system is very nice but hits a roadblock too quickly. Launching the game from the patcher crashes on my Windows 7 PC, so I have to run the patcher, exit it, and then run the actual game exe.

4Story – When you try to run forward with a loot window open, your character will run towards the right, because when they kneel down to loot the corpse, they face right. Jarring, but adaptable. Dead targets aren’t automatically dropped from your target frame. As such, live targets aren’t automatically picked up when you try to cast a spell while targeting a dead enemy.

Grand Chase – Controls respond verrrry slowly, making combos difficult to activate. Characters also move way slow, so collecting the coin drops is a pain.

Lunia – I can’t figure out what was wrong with this. I just got stuck early. Gameplay is simple but so is the tutorial, so you get lost early if you don’t read the quest. Which I don’t, because readable quests are stupid. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with the game at all.

Microvolts – This game is great and could be the engine for an actual shooter if it had an AI enemy for PvE content. It’s just that I have 200ms latency (ONLY in microvolts, <100 in other games) so when I think I’m hidden behind a wall I’m actually already dead.

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