It doesn’t look like the idea followed the game over, which would be one of the key points of concern that I’d normally be looking for. That’s very typical of games in that region, and very non-typical for Western audiences. From what I’ve heard, there are items in the Korean version of the game that you have to purchase to use, and those sorts of items can be fairly dominant in PvP. I’m not seeing any pay-to-win, so that’s a pretty big positive. Looking at the pre-order, you get a sense of how the team plans to monetize the game on this side of the Pacific, and there’s good and bad to be found there. No matter what you do, you can’t get away from the fact that the game was built to appeal to a slightly different audience, and that’s going to reflect going forward. The other major change between markets is monetization. It makes finding what you’re looking for a lot easier. I like how quest objectives are labeled in the UI.
I think that suggests that they’re close to being done with that portion of the porting the game over. Astellia Online seems to be pretty robustly voice acted in the earlier part of the game and I’m not seeing anything missing that feels like it should be there. It seems like voice acting is typically layered in a character at a time as you’d have a single voice actor run through all their lines before giving the booth up to the next. Notionally, they could just have the early part of the game really well voice-acted and then still be working on the rest a la Age of Conan, but I don’t think so. Man, that muppet can talk.Įverything I’ve seen so far suggests that they’ve made really good progress on the voice acting. All the stellas seem to have a list of phrases and conversation they engage in, so there’s a solid amount of voice work there, as well. The main lift would be the constant babble from Rota, your first stella. NPCs with quests usually started off with a short phrase, as well. It seemed to be like every single NPC I spoke to had a handful of phrases they’d fire off when you accessed them. Astellia Online seems to be a little more voice-intensive than average, so that’s not a trivial process. You don’t have to worry about the yells and grunts associated with player and NPC attacks and jumps typically, but there are conversations and cut scenes with voice-overs that do have to be recorded with new actors. Modern MMOs contain a sizable catalogue of voice-acted dialogue.
The linguistical barrier is a key one and it has to be passed to launch the game in the new audience. That’s just from what little I know about it. Depending on how deep you go into it, we’re talking a fairly complicated process. Moving a game from Asia to a more Westernized audience isn’t just a matter of translating the text and hiring English-speaking voice actors. It would be a good way to mitigate pay-to-win complaints.
#Astellia closed beta free
I’ll also go through some of my early impressions about the game, and what I mean by early impressions of an already finished game.Īchievements could be a really good way to establish free ways to get bonuses similar to what some cash-payers might get. We’ll touch on some of the work that has to be done to convert the game from its original format to one more suited for a Western audience. I’m going to walk through a few of the things I think the closed beta tells us about Astellia Online today. Beta in this case truly is a test of systems for the most part, and I think that’s what we saw in this case. That means the game is complete, and a lot of the bugs and problems of their initial launch have been discovered already. Unlike a lot of the beta and early access opportunities we get with more typical Western games, Astellia Online is a launched title in Asia. The closed beta is a different story, though.
That’s not normally the part of a game that I go for, so I didn’t really feel I walked away with a good sense of the game.
I had the opportunity to play it at PAX South, but it was a very guided experience focusing on the smash-em-up aspect of the game. That’s probably also why I jumped at the chance to check out Astellia Online during their recent closed beta.
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