If you're a dedicated Allods Online player, you've got something to be very excited about. The game's next expansion, Game of Gods has been announced for release in February, bringing what's being described as a year's worth of content to players in North America and Europe. This announcement is concurrent with the release of a corresponding mini-site previewing some of the upcoming features while still leaving teasers. Players will be able to explore over 100 new quests, take part in a new 10-boss raid, and enjoy the new Bard class.
But in true TV-product-announced style, there's still more, including a bump in the level cap, and epic quest to improve your character permanently, and expanded astral space to explore. There's also a teaser trailer and gameplay trailer just after the break to drum up further excitement. While an exact date in February hasn't yet been announced, considering that the month is nearly over it likely won't be too long.
This game is still around? I thought it destroyed itself long ago with the cash shop and pay to win strategy. I still have a level 38 cleric that I stopped playing due to the strength of same level mobs...
@Braiks Changed the ''terminator'' mobs? The normal mobs that took like 10 mins to kill? I kinda liked this game, killing 20 mobs for a quest is ok, but not if those mobs take forever to kill. Didnt even played long enough to live trough the cashshop scandal, too bad tho the game had some real potential in my opinion.
@Trololol No, they changed the cash shop. Now is nothing like it was at release. Theres no pay-to-win items. Sadly that killed the game anyway. Population is very low.
@Wamimaster The same level mob strength was one of the things I loved about Allods, (as well as the graphics); not since EQ have even con mobs been done correctly.
Sad to see a basically good game wither and die, due to misguided bean counters.
It ran well on my sub-average computer, was relatively fun, and has nice art design. But the cash shop debacle, and the lame damage control afterward, made me uninstall.
I wouldn't say the game isn't pay-to-win (runes), but it's possible to level without spending a cent now, although if you have runes you can passively modify your damage taken and damage done to the point that you can solo group quests of the same-level while leveling... So obviously, paying will make your leveling easier, and at the end-game level you have to pay some to do/take enough damage, but if you want to compete in PvP, that's where the real dollars are spent. People with level 10 runes will just kill you if you don't have close to what they've got, and leveling runes is a bit pricy later on.
It's is too bad. I really liked this game early on, but the cash shop crap and changes that were solely based on brute-forcing wallets open was enough for me to call it quits.
I've been curious: is there a good write up that covers exactly what they did with the cash shop that was so bad? I played the game before that had happened, apparently, and I've never been totally clear on what exactly they did.
Note that the author states that the item cursing was actually the lesser of the patch's problems (for me, 2 deaths got me 2 cursed items, but sometimes I'm 'lucky' with RNG like that) and highlights the universal damage debuff all players received... reduced to around 1/3 their original DPS, and then to match the then epically slow combat, the Allods team increased the amount of XP needed to level, making unaided gameplay more like sloughing through mud.
You could 'cure' all of this by limited duration cash shop items, yay! And this was during the games 'beta' phase. I had been playing w/ a friend and we are both the types that do in fact spend money on cosmetic fluff items... but paying a game maker to unbreak the game for you was crossing the line for the both of us, we left around the same time.
Now, prior to Gipat Allods was actually a pretty cool game. But part of what was going on is that development costs had been huge, and ownership had changed hands. The game was developed by Astrum-Nival, but that development company was later bought out by Mail.ru.
G-potato is often blamed for the horrible changed, but those were really Mail.ru's doing. Mail.ru btw is a large conglomerate that got its start as an email service provider, if my information's correct... so their formal background isn't really in MMO management. They made some pretty flawed decisions. G-potato is the games' overseas publisher, and they've been working on smoothing things over where they can.
The population is actually OK, at least on Empire side. I haven't given my League character a whack yet.
The good news: You don't need the stupid incense any more to kill same level monsters. Also Holy charms, the cash shop item that prevents you from having your items cursed on death are free now, but you still have to load up on them in the Cash Shop, but the price is zero, so it's a 5-finger discount.
The bad news: You can still receive cursed items as mob, boss, and chest drops. For those not familiar with the cursed items concept, this means that randomly you will have items with flipped stats. That is, stats in the negative. So wearing these items actually brings your stats /down/. You need a Cash Shop item to 'cleanse' this 'curse', and these 'Scrolls of Purification' are a one use thing, and are tiered by item quality, and thereby also cost.
This would be mitigated by the fact that you can sell the items you get in the CS on your faction's Auction House, but honestly the amount of gold you get as quest rewards or from mob farming is pitifully low, so you're really better off just buying the items
There are some fun things on their Cash Shop, but frankly I'd consider Fallen Earth's CS to be more worth your money... that whole cursed item thing just rubs me the wrong way.
The gipat thing is over. They took that out and you can get holy charms for free in the Item Shop. So constantly bringing it up isn't constructive. This is something new and not related to that issue.
3.0 brings back the epic astral, and makes it 10000times better than beta. PvP-zone, new pve-zones, more balance, easier for non-payers/low-payers. etc etc.
For the most part, a lot of the points that people bring up to explain why they dont like the game are entirely irrelevant. Lots and lots of that crap has been fixed for a long time.
I started playing Allods about a month before Gipat hit, and the way the whole thing was handled really bothered me. The way G-potato spent more energy deleting and locking threads than they did actually trying to communicate with their players really disappointed me. (And yes, I fully realize that G-potato is only the distributor of the game, not the maker).
The forums raged on and on for days and the responses from their community rep team were brief statements of a few sentences. I later found out that they had been waiting for permission from their higher-ups to formulate a more detailed response that entire time. What kind of company ignores their customers for days at a time like that? Talk about feeling disrespected.
The final straw for me was when their Lead CR person was interviewed and made the completely false statement that she hadn't really heard many negative comments from their customers about the new patch (Gipat), that it was mostly just people saying "Check out my sweet mount!" (or some such similar quote). It was so completely and intentionally misleading that I could no longer stomach supporting a company that would treat me like that.
I had never in my entire life actually deleted all my characters from an MMO before uninstalling the game (and haven't since, either) but I did exactly that before uninstalling Allods.
And you know the crazy truth of it all? You know what would have brought me back to the game, even after all of that?
A simple, sincere (and therefor incredibly powerful) apology.
Someone just stepping up and saying, "Hey, you know what? We really screwed up here, and we realize it, and we apologize."
Why don't companies understand this simple concept?
But no, immediately following the Gipat patch the CR team spent a great deal of energy trying to convince us that we were wrong to feel the way we did, and even after they were *forced* to change things to prevent the further degradation of their player base, they never actually came out and said "We screwed up. We're sorry."
Allods is a technically good game. The art is fantastic. It has a lot to offer. But I won't play a game offered to me by a company that doesn't respect me and is incapable of admitting wrongdoing or apologizing.
I think it's incredibly funny that folks want to sweep the past under the rug. When folks spend a great deal of time developing their characters and investing time and money into a game they want to know that the developers will be consistent and be something you can count on. If their past actions are any indication of the future I would rather not be part of it. I think this is the sentiment of a lot of former players of the game. It doesn't matter if the game is so uber sweet now, for the most part they killed their reputation by doing such incredibly dumb stuff to the game. If they left it just like it was in early beta they would have an incredible success on their hands and I would likely still be playing it.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - Socrates
