Archeage

Looks like garbage and shouldn't have the Archeage name. Hopefully Archeage S, the MMO for PC coming next year is close to the original.

That looked pretty janky - I'm still wondering what Chronicles is actually going to be game wise.

Interesting - doesn’t change much for Chronicals, but puts the proper mmo into a question mark since the dev house is changing

This Chronicles thing has a demo up on steam for anyone morbidly curious.

I decided to try it - demo install is a bit over 40gigs. Overall impression: Archeage themed "Where Winds Meet", although impossible to tell if it will have as much to do as WWM.

Right now there are only 4 archtypes: warrior, ranger, berzerker, and mage. However, they have different playstyles depending on what weapon you use. They're all gender locked atm, although XLgames released a statement saying after player feedback they'll change that (seriously why the f are classes genderlocked in 2026?). In the demo warrior and zerker are male, ranger and mage are female. Character creation seems standard, although it was bugged when I did it because 80% of the face adjustments didn't seem to take, but once I got in game they were suddenly there. The outfit you pick in character creator doesn't seem to actually apply to your character - you get the default noob look once in game.

I decided to do mage since it seemed interesting. Default weapon is a staff that shoots fire or lightning, but I decided to do waveblade which is basically a melee mage playstyle where you can do ice AOEs and freeze enemies as you attack with your sword. Combat reminds me a lot of Where Winds Meet - there are talent trees that change up what your abilities do and lots of different combo options and the playstyle is dictated by what weapon you use. However, your attacks + dodge are tied to the same bar, so you can get fucked if you spam attacks and then the npc does some unblockable attack. I was sort of getting the hang of it, although some NPCs give you very little time to avoid attacks and the pirate boss at the end of the dungeon before you beat the demo was cheap as fuck at low HP.

Stat gear doesn't seem to change your appearance - there is a separate slot for appearance. So everyone running around at the start is the same noob look. I got a new outfit cosmetic after beating some undead skeleton mage boss. Items have durability and you lose XP and some money on death (currently I don't see a way to regain the lost shit). Side quests aren't automatically marked on your map best as I can tell. Environments are nice looking. Characters ingame are kind of meh - which is sort of standard with KR online games (your character creator look vs. in game almost never match up). Netcode seems funky in terms of other players - some where teleporting around. For whatever fucking reason, gold sellers are spamming the chat to sell gold (for a demo lol...) and you can't mute them in the demo.

Seems kind of interesting for a demo, although I'm still wondering how fleshed out group content will actually be (the demo you can basically just solo - it gives the option to group up for instanced areas, but not sure if anyone was using it). In terms of Archeage tie ins, there are some place names and item names that seemed familiar and you get a glider. Honestly the story in the original Archeage MMO was mostly forgettable anyways, so I've forgotten most of the "tie in" stuff.

Seems nothing like what made archeage fun

Ya it’s a completely different game. Analogy would be Crimson Desert and Black Desert Online - they share an IP, but play completely different

Supposedly they want make an actual Archeage 2 with wars/ship battles/etc but who knows if they will ever see the light of day and if it will ever be as fun as early Archeage before the game was enshittified