ArcheAge – It’s The New Black

Remember how I said I talked myself out of buying the ArcheAge Archeum Founder’s Pack? That only lasted through Thursday night, Friday, and Saturday. Then I bought it Sunday. I hadn’t even published my post about how I wouldn’t buy it before I bought it.

Stupid peer pressure.

Stupid ArcheAge RU not being in English.

Stupid ESO not being addictive enough.

Warning: I didn’t feel bad about spending the money because I already knew that I liked the game. If you’re not sure, and you want to try the game before spending $150, I highly recommend finding a way into the Russian version. Or the Korean version, for that matter.

Because it plays exactly like the Russian version, except most of the text is in English, most of the voiceovers are in Korean instead of Russian, and most importantly, you get 5 Labor Points every 5 minutes (online or offline).

But if you just want to take the plunge, rest assured Trion’s alpha is nothing like the Landmark or Trove alpha. ArcheAge is a finished game, it is only lacking English voiceovers and the occasional English text. And, well, it only has one server so it’s pretty crowded. It seems that tons and tons of people paid $150 to get into the game. The starter areas look just like a launch day. The housing areas aren’t quite gone yet, but it’s getting close.

I found a spot for my scarecrow way in a back corner.

Most of what I’ve previously written about ArcheAge still stands (see Foreign Invasion, Growing On Me, and Flailing Around). Now, however, I will be able to experiment more with gathering, crafting, farming, and trade runs, because I can actually read the tutorials that explain how those things work.

For example, I’ve now been able to build a farm, if you can call a piece of land the size of a postage stamp a “farm.” In a nutshell, the farming is exactly like Farmville (or at least, the ten minutes of Farmville I played before never playing it again). It’s a huge micromanagement time sink. You’re probably going to want to quit your day job in order to fully maximize the efficiency of your farm, because you’ll need to harvest and plant on precise schedules. This part of the game is very interesting, but over the long run I doubt that I will be able to keep up with it.

(As a side note, I have always wondered why more MMOs didn’t insert Farmville into their games, because it seems like a natural fit.)

Now the challenge will be to avoid playing ArcheAge too much. After all, you’ll have to start over again on launch day. (However, I think I heard that the alpha server will be transformed into the test server after launch, so it’s possible you’ll still get to keep your alpha progress in some form. Don’t quote me on that, though.) Ideally, I would want to time it so that I get sick of ArcheAge at precisely the end of the third month after launch. :)