Recent reviews by mobeywan

Tl;dr - Pay-to-win cash grab that weaponises your nostalgia against your wallet.

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Years ago I put thousands of hours into the original game. I've thrown over 100 hours into this "updated" version of the game over the last 6 1/2 weeks, and I am very disappointed. Many MMORPGs are pay-to-win cash grabs, but GFO really takes the biscuit in my eyes as you can directly pay premium currency for stats increases. Most games of this ilk at least try to hide this behind some kind of probability/RNG system (as M-Alch clays do in this game too), but there are so many intrusive ways in which the publishers are trying to drain cash from players for the privilege of playing the game.

This game is dripping with nostalgia. Playing through this game, the cheap jokes in the achievements, I was transported back to my childhood. Some of the textures have been updated, so it's nice to see a really sharp floor and some pretty water in Ilya - though that's about all I noticed.

That's about it.

The text in the game. It's an MMORPG - there's meant to be a story. The story from the original game exists, but it's impossible to read 30% of it due to the awful text formatting. Many of the font errors have been corrected as players have reported them, but one of the overarching issues since release has been that text reflow just doesn't seem to be automatic? This means that the end of most lines of text, whether in a dialogue box or even the description of a "premium" item in the Item Mall end with ellipses, and you miss a significant number of characters. This is also true for communication/chat channels in the game, though it's nice that they've built-in a simple translation tool (though its usage was a mystery to me for weeks). On the topic of communication, the censors are still ridiculous; someone can use "gay" as a slur, but you can't call them "homophobic" in response because the first four letters are censored. Go figure.

Kind of on the same line, the translations in the game are ROUGH. There were some minor translation issues in the original game, but it seems that much of this version of the game is copied from the China release rather than the original international release. As such, there are instances where the same thing is referred to by three different names (all synonyms of each other) in different menus. Dungeons are a prime example of this, with the dungeon (originally called) Roaring Maw being referred to as Mouth of Roar or Maw of Roar seemingly interchangeably. Some item descriptions are also objectively false due to poor translation, for instance the lower-percentage SKBs which still state that the next crafted item is guaranteed to be successful, only in the next line to say that the chances of success are increased by 10% with this item...

Some of the advertisements about this game seem to be objectively false - in my amateur opinion, that is. The publishers claim that the game has been rebuilt in an "updated engine", but in practice they just seem to have updated some textures on a couple of maps. You still skip a frame or two every time you open up a menu like the backpack or adventure log, the game seems to only run on a single CPU core (according to Task Manager), and you still get the map music randomly playing sometimes when you've turned the music down in the settings. These things were all true and present in the international release of the game 15 years ago, which leads me to think there's absolutely no difference in the underlying engine.

The in-game economy is a car crash, and has been almost since release. X-Legend have brought in artificial caps on dungeon runs (2 per dungeon per day), and repeatable quests provide reputation but no money. As such, your only way of being able to pay for your skill upgrades is by digging out your credit card. You can't grind dungeons for items to sell to players or materials that NPC merchants will pay you a small amount for, you can't craft and sell the highest rarity weapons as they're now non-tradeable (with a couple of exceptions, which don't seem to be intentional), and with the lack of established player base there is simply no viable market for your looted or crafted gear. With the low number of players and fairly low level cap, most folks already have what they need or they just can't afford to buy it.

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I could go on and on, but I've already wasted enough of my time on this "updated" version of the game. If you're looking for a nostalgia hit, and you have sufficient willpower/deep enough pockets that you don't need to worry about spending silly amounts of cash on a "free" game, then go play. Everyone else, please steer clear of this game and let it drift peacefully back to 2009.