My Planet Calypso MMO review (Entropia Universe)

[Taxi]

Running out of MMOs to try, i tried this MMO that ive put off trying for years because i thought it would be terribad to no end.

The bad:

Its partly true. With a real money economy, you can be sure that MindArk (the company that owns it) isnt gonna throw away money at its players. So when you are hunting/mining/crafting, its mostly sure that you will lose money and not make it.

New players have it hard, because the only way they can make money without depositing is doing what is called "sweating". You use a tool on a mob that gathers sweat. It takes about 3 hours to gather 1k of sweat with noob skills that you can sell to other players for 3-4 peds (currency of game).

As a reference, the best noob rifle costs 3.8 peds and 200 shots will cost you 2 peds. 10 peds = 1 US dollar. 200 shots will last you about 30mins if you hunt in a group.

Dont really expect to go far without depositing, although with time on your hands, you could. It can be a long grind if you dont deposit money, and even if you do deposit 20 dollars like i did (193 peds) if youre not careful you can burn it in 2 days.

Some avatars clothes have a bad second life vibe to them, feeling out of place in a scifi MMO. Some of the armors/clothes look decent though.

I dont think there is some dungeon-type areas in the game, something that could add quite alot of flavor to the game. Abandoned cities, caves, etc... i havent explored that much though, i could be wrong, but thats also the feedback i get from other players, that there is none of that.

The good:

Like i said, i expected this game to be very bad, but its actually a decent sandbox. Lots of skills, lots of different resources people craft with, buy and sell etc...

It plays like a FPS, and the aiming is quite precise. I always hated that in eve online you couldnt hide behind an asteroid because incoming fire goes through it. With this game aiming is precise and terrain will block you, at really precise range. The hitbox for player characters is a bit big though, making PVP a little less challenging that i would like it to be.

And the thing that surprised me the most, is the graphic engine. Part of why i thought this game would suck badly is the feedback i had read on MMORPG.com. With 90% of people having nothing good to say about it, nobody ever mentioned the terrain, which is the best ive seen in ANY mmo, and ive played dozens. Its not so much that the graphics are stellar, more that the terrain feels realistic. Ill never forget the first time i climbed a mountain exploring, coming across the top and seeing this huge expense of terrain, for kilometers with a river leading to a huge lake. The aptest comparison i can think of is a flight simulator. The engine is that good. It is my dream engine to make a next gen MMO right now.

Also, each areas has its own fauna and flora. When i first logged into the game, i saw some tropical/alien style large stalks that i thought was ok, but nothing to write home about. I expected the whole game to have only a few of those that are different, and the whole place to feel generic. I was wrong. Every large areas has different vegetation, and some quite creative. You can compare it to the feeling you had in Morrowind when moving across different areas if youve played it. You have deserts, forests, plains and all areas like i said dont feel generic, it makes you think someone put work in it, not press a random terrain generation button. It is also huge, with 2 continents. There is also 3 areas i havent explored, an asteroid field, some place called rocktropia and another one called crystal palace. Its the biggest world ive come accross, bigger than Darkfall.

I have mixed feelings about the creatures in the game. Some are some of the best ive seen in scifi games :

Combibo: [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Daikibas: [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Berycleds: [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Some feel atrociously generic. The names escape me, but there was some sort of medieval cyber crusader that felt really ugly.

I havent touched crafting, so i cant talk about that.

Ive tried a bit of mining, and its the most fun ive had mining in any game. Every resource gathering ive done in any MMOs has been boring, off the top of my head, clicking on a rock in WoW and looking at a bush for hours in darkfall.

How it works is you drop a bomb or probe (ore or energy matter finder) and you either get a result or dont. The system is quite sophisticated, as you have different depths where some ores are found. So as a noob you can only find ore/energy that is lying 1-200m below ground and also have a max range of 54m with the starter mining tool. Its a mini game all its own. When you find a small deposit, you know that there might be some bigger deposit around, what miners in the game call a "vein".

Its similar to that minesweep game:

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Theyve added a noob island recently, and vehicules, so the game is friendlier to noobs than ever. (Because people will sometimes take you on teleport runs in a car, where before all that was to be done on foot. There is teleports in towns all over the planet)

There are some pvp zones in the game, yellow and red. Yellow cant be looted, red you can lose the items that stack (like ores, fruits, electrical components, etc).

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The game is basically a big virtual casino. And... the house always wins. But after a while i thought, i usually pay 15 a month for any other MMO, so... you also lose money in any MMO. Difference is that sometimes, you can hit big and win real money.

Of course that would be of little consequence if the game sucked. I installed this game really for shits and giggles and expected to uninstall it 3 hours later. I played it hardcore for a week so there is some good in it, although i like to explore MMOs as a pleasure in itself.

My advice if you do try this game is to take your time and not deposit right away, so you can get a feel for the game. Do alot of sweating north of Port Atlantis (sweat camp) as this will give you combat skills and get you to a spot where there are alot of noobs and vets askin questions back and forth.
If you dont go in thinking youll make money off MindArk, you can have a good time.

This is something of a flawed product, with an engine like that, and people motivated to create a living breathing world in a next gen MMO, that sort of game could easily attain a 8/10 or 9/10
.
As it is, I would give this generic in some ways game a 6/10 or 7/10.

[Qaedain]

Microtransactions. -5/10.

[Taxi]

Originally Posted by Qaedain [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Microtransactions. -5/10.

I actually hate microtransactions myself. But the key difference here, is that you can make money off the game. So for example, i stopped playing Dungeons and dragons online after a week because although the game is ok, i felt dirty encouraging this micro-transaction crap.

But the difference with this game is that its a real economy. You get all the content for free, and you can put some money in, but you can also withdraw money from the game.

Ill never play a game which encourages milking of their players with micro-transactions. I hate this whole trend of making downloadable content for games like dragon age.

Im tired and its late, im not explaining myself clearly but theres a key difference between this kind of business model and micro-transactions in a game where you just put money in and can get nothing back. Ill get back on it later.

[Reynard_CT]

Entropia is really a terrible "game" though MA has always avoided using that term to describe its brainchild. The returns are abysmal for most players unless you are one of the lucky few who started during its inception where you could gain skills easier and loot items which are still valuable, unlike the majority of the drops today. There are exceptions of course, where a new player might get a lucky find, but since those are the exceptions they are few and far between.

EU does not have an official forums, but on the major community forum there are several stories and examples of terrible, sometimes non-existent customer service, mismanagement, horribly flawed programming, and content releases pushed back for months or even for several years in the case of their "atm card" which vanished soon after its release.

While there are new "quests" (kill x amount of creatures mostly) they do not quite fit into any grand scheme aside from generation of revenue. The storyline is not much of a line at all, given its meandering and illogical nature, and even the writing is laughable most times. It might make more sense in Swedish since the game and its developers are based in that country, but it should not be difficult to hire a human translator from time to time so they do not have to rely on the online translation sites as seems to be the case.

Even the management seems to be clueless most times. A recent revelation which came to light when they released their quarterly reports a year late was that management had bought a castle in Germany... they purchased and renovated an entire castle, even painting it yellow. Not many people are happy about this, though some optimists hope the purchase will yield resale value so that some of the profit might make its way down the pipe to the players in the form of loot.

On a good note, it seems that new developers with insight and vision are going to release their own "planets" within the Entropia Universe. These new planets are anxiously awaited, though some players are already disillusioned given the unfortunate release of the "Rocktropia" planet which has a dubious reputation.

While EU had the potential to draw hundreds of thousands of players with its innovative RMT system, greed and mismanagement have ensured that the playerbase will not exceed its few thousand addicted gamblers, optimists, and those with too much invested/lost to quit.

[Humerox]

I tried it for a bit.

Wasn't bad, overall. If you don't want to invest, you'll find out what serious grinding really is, lol.

Sweat, anyone?

[jeffd]

Originally Posted by Taxi [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Running out of MMOs to try, i tried this MMO that ive put off trying for years because i thought it would be terribad to no end.

The bad:

Its partly true. With a real money economy,

that's as far as i needed to read to know this game is shit.

microtransactions and DLCs are the cancer destroying gaming.