Worst MMO Ever? - Nostale

awesome i've reached the first dungeon a suspended tile platform held in a red void moving from room to room killing enemies now all the rooms are the same shape and same size but it's only the first dungeon i'm sure it gets better and more varied as we go on oh the second dungeon is an exact copy of the first well okay maybe it's a call back i'm sure they're not all like this third dungeon starting to sense a pattern here fourth dungeon looks pretty familiar too fifth don't you okay now you're just taking the piss ladies and gentlemen welcome i'm josh drivehayes and this is worst mmo ever a series where i play every mmo game i can find in an effort to find the worst drop a like on the video or sub to the channel for more mmo stuff ring the bell for all the future notifications as usual a massive thank you to all the supporters on patreon and twitch who keep the channel alive more on how you can support at the end for now let's begin today we are playing nostale one of the most frequently recommended anime mmos it's on steam and it's free so let's give it a go when you launch nostale the first thing you'll notice is it's got some awesome music honestly i can't fault the music in this game it's done that thing where it's not diegetic or relevant to the area or the aesthetic or the ambient design at all it's literally just background music but it's so good i don't actually mind it the game loads super fast and we get to character creation which is really simple no classes nothing complex just boy or girl hairstyle one or two choose a color and let's go intro cut scene act one the tree of fenon there is a strike in the covalt mining camp and we need to get involved for reasons never quite explained covalt seems to be sentient dog and the translated english isn't the best you've got lines such as the enemies is who will stop you the resurrection of the fernand tree that could throw the whole world into chaos now this is only the first level look don't try to follow the plot it really doesn't matter game starts top down viewpoint with 3d rendered world and sprites of players and objects everything is bright and colorful we have a chat with mimi mentor she starts to explain the game and then a big white window pops up is this meant to say something maybe this is just a bug and hopefully it won't happen again later foreshadowing left click to move around wasd don't seem to do anything you can zoom in and out but it's reversed scrolling backwards zooms in scrolling forwards zooms out i never understand why games choose to do this we're given our first quest hunt danders left click on an enemy to target them left click again to start auto attacking behold combat now nos tale is one of those games with huge packs of similar enemies all grouped together and instead of left clicking you can just press spacebar twice to target the nearest and then attack the nearest so it's a game you don't really need to pay too much attention to while you grind and this is good because you'll be grinding a lot finishing quest brings up dialog boxes at the bottom you've got these arrows either back to the start back one paragraph forward one paragraph or skip to the end and when you reach the end you need to click end dialog on the bottom of the box which is a little clunky just have the final arrow end the box get the quest reward right how do i equip this i opens the inventory does c open the character sheet oh no c sits down ah p there we go p opens the profile unfortunately the equipment system is overly clunky as well right clicking on an item opens a window showing its stats but you close this window by clicking the little x to the top right because right clicking again just opens the window again there's also no way to see a direct comparison between what you're wearing and what's in your inventory holding control or alt doesn't do anything come on guys comparing equipped and non-equipped should be standard by now o opens the quest list my current task is catch a chicken in the quest journal there is a start dialog button i assume this will replay the convo that gave you the quest so you can reread the context but no this button does nothing these small touches already broken window pop-ups no item comparison buttons not working they're a common theme with nos tail the foundation of the game the actual core concept is okay i'll explain this more later it's all the bells and whistles which are broken and weak in the game walk up to a big chicken try to use the skill capture it's number nine on the hotbar and nothing happens not quite sure why maybe this is the wrong chicken games like this are sometimes really pedantic with enemy names and yes you can't capture big chicken you must capture chicken totally different things enemies need to be at 50 or less health to be captured first issue with gameplay it is such a mess of items enemies and my own avatar that clicking on any specific thing in a crowd is quite difficult everything overlaps everything else and when in a bundle of stuff the cursor seems to have a mind of its own for some reason capturing an enemy makes them your pet or nos mate so now i have a chicken and another white window pops up that's two are these meant to say something am i missing information graphically the game is actually lovely vivid colors great music a nice blend of 3d rendered environments and sprite players and items nostalr looks good it can be a bit chaotic and messy when there's too much happening but this is not an ugly game the next quest has us fight alongside the chicken and when we win it asks did you see your nos mate in action well no game i didn't because circluxalot got stuck behind a tree and didn't do anything for the whole fight more quest rewards and we go from using a wooden stick to a high quality wooden stick thanks i feel much better equipped chat to coach calvin he says allow me to explain and then another white window oh no are these meant to be tutorial boxes are they meant to have extremely important words or pictures on them has the tutorial broken because this makes things a little bit harder i managed to figure out the systems by randomly clicking things and now we're off to hunt five danders which are mechanically the same as hunting chickens just click and wait the opening section is basically talk to everyone in town and then do a small task for them chat to the coach in another white window now unfortunately this window should be explaining the skill upgrade system which is not self-explanatory so i do not know how this is going to work back to mimi she sends me to malcolm mix the alchemist another tutorial and yep another white window oh i've just discovered the strange design that makes the cursor so annoying there is a soft lock system whenever you hover the cursor near npc's or items it gently drags the cursor onto the thing and then just stays there this is why precise clicking in a group is so hard the cursor is constantly soft locking from one asset to the next next up top the blacksmith that's his name not a command he sends me to the market and even more white boxes pop up i go on a lot about the importance of a hidden tutorial a game play section where the players have to actually perform the important mechanics and see how they work in a real scenario this is a perfect example of why that design is so important this is a generic here's how stuff works tutorial and it's broken and it's not going into my brain i'm not learning anything if the game opened with a section where upgrading was actually needed and took me through it step by step and i could see the impact that was having on my gameplay i would understand it and i would care about it much more i am amazed at how many people are hanging around though game clearly has a sizeable player base still and now we're introduced to what will essentially become the rest of the game the time space stones rips in reality with monsters in them time space stones are level gated and if you follow the main story you'll always be at the right level but not necessarily the right power to actually finish them each time space stone has the word click above it so we click and we go in the first room is always the lobby you can organize your team here then you move through one of the four edges to advance to the next room each room is basically identical the red wavy background that's identical too sometimes enemies spawn and you kill them you advance to the next room sometimes there are levers which open doors some rooms have you defending an npc and the whole thing is timed you can see the countdown to the bottom left you've got a one minute timer that counts down and then next to that is a number of rocks one minute uses up one rock run out of rocks and you die finish a time space get a random reward return to the main village and get a tutorial about rarity which means another white window the village needs defending this means go and do more time space things so we head off the minimap shows the local connections and exits to other maps so we go to the meadows just north of the village head to the next time stone go in and it's the same as the first right i guess this is the game pull some more levers and hang on no wait go back why is that the activation animation what is that that's the dance that joey from friends does when he forgets the moves he's meant to be teaching to the other dancers finish the second time space dungeon hand it in and get told awesome go and kill six sheep well okay then oh i've also lost the red quest tracker arrow that did appear above my head guess i've just got to remember where the sheep are if you're on the right map the arrow points you to where you should go if you're on the wrong map though tough and the journal doesn't tell you which map you're meant to be on it just says go and kill six sheep so forgetting a quest location in nostale is actually pretty bad because there's no in-game hints as to where you should be or where the enemies you need to kill actually are your hit points refill outside of combat so you can take on one tough enemy and then just kind of wait and you'll be doing this a lot one thing i do like about the game though is how the damage numbers are still relatively low nothing over a hundred yet it's grounded in understandable simple numbers it's an anime game and i've been playing about an hour or so and not hitting in the tens of thousands which is nice finish the quest and get asked if i'd like to tell you back then we're told to go and catch a sheep i mean we were just at the sheep you could have included that with the last quest but okay nos tale does this a lot do a quest return go back to the exact same place to do another very similar quest a giant cabbage so i click it you mine the cabbage by dancing at it what a time to be alive if you fail to capture an enemy even if it's below 50 health there is a 60 second cooldown on the capture skill and these sheep do not want to be captured so this takes a lot longer than it should with two pets we're now sent to miniland a personal zoo of everything we've captured we can only have one nos mate active at a time so this is where we swap them out and unlike the rest of the game you cannot swing the camera around in miniland it is a fixed angle only take my sheep then get piled by aggressive peas and die and that's a sentence i never thought i'd say you can respawn where you are for free up until level 20 or respawn in town i get sent to another time space so i avoid the deadly peas and in we go here's something i absolutely hate the text says there is an eerie silence except no there's still music playing if you're going to attempt to set the ambience with your text have the audio and visual match what you're trying to set you're a video game that's literally one of the strengths of the entire medium you don't need to tell the player what's going on you can have them play through the situation you want them to experience don't just say it's eerily quiet make it eerily quiet another issue i've noticed in these riffs despite them all being the same is how you can spin the camera around freely and there's a map to the top right showing the room layouts and connections but there's no compass to help you see which direction your camera is facing so it's super easy to get completely turned around you need to keep swinging the camera until you are running up in both the game and on the minimap and that's the only way you'll know the camera is now facing north finish the rift avoid the killer peas and are there high level players aoe grinding the peas no wonder they killed me so easily hand in the quest get told about crafting another blank tutorial window pops up so now i need to figure out how crafting works thankfully it's just a load of double clicking and then another text issue you can choose to craft something once or continuous production but that phrase continuous production is a little too long so it doesn't quite fit on the button it just says continuous product small touches game which make you look amateur we get sent to mrs styles the fashion guru and she gives us lunch to take to calum so we've gone from sheepslayer to ubereats callum teaches us about plus skills and without the text dump tutorial i actually can't figure out what they want me to do with this system i click double click right click click and drag and i cannot figure out how it works malcolm needs 10 fruit does this mean we explore a farming skill or go and pick fruit from a tree or harvest it from a field somewhere no it means we go to the next identical time space rift kill identical enemies until they've dropped 10 identical fruit thrilling stuff so on the map red dots are connections to other areas and blue dots are time space stones each area has a lot of time space stones so is this the game is the bulk of the gameplay level up and move from rift to rift with every rift being exactly the same design in the rifts the timer keeps on ticking down when you lose a minute the screen shakes and you hear a deep thud and look if you're not a fan of the gameplay by now leave because it doesn't get better if you're not super excited to find the next time space rift then there's not much to keep you around and the irritating thing is nostale isn't bad the combat feels fine if a little bit dull in the early game the graphics and sound are decent the writing is acceptable if repetitive the mechanics and systems definitely work even if the tutorial is broken the idea of instanced dungeons is an okay mechanic the collected mechanics that make up nostale aren't fundamentally bad nostale isn't a bad idea for a game it's just a bad presentation of those ideas level up learn a new skill which i use and then discover is pointless because no skills are actually any better than the standard auto attack i get some glasses which i equip and now we're off to collect five beans for eva i've gone from rounding up sheep to collecting fruit and then beans basically i am a farmer so while i'm killing these aggressive bean pods let's just have a read of some reviews pay to win but fun hardcore pay to win devs make a new server every few months to kill the old ones so people move to the new one and pay because it's needed to maintain the economy so they see success and scam everybody repeat awesome game decent grind friendly players i really want to love nastal but it's so pay to win it hurts i don't even mind a bit of pay to win in a game but when you're so paid to win you can't do content that's a big problem for me would love if this game could get a rework since it's such a nice concept but because of its age difficult to appreciate in current time if you don't have nostalgia from back in the day played since 2007 and all i can say is this good game but too much micro transactions i used to play this game as a kid and recently i decided to give it a try it's good old mmorpg and i did have fun but the later game is full of pointless slow and boring grind and heavy pay to win but i could possibly deal with that the main problem is gameforge making a new server every few months to make players move to it and spend money over and over again i honestly regret playing it it's such a waste of time dollars dollars dollars nos lots of mentions of the monetization is it really that bad so i open up the shop and oh hello there game forge standard shop layout i've missed you well now i know we're dealing with a game forge game of course it's going to be pay to win let's just work out how pay to win want some spring water which instantly restores 3 000 health that'll be five nos dollars so you can just buy health want a seed of power a consumable item required for entrance into time space rifts that's another five nos dollars so you can buy entrances to dungeons how about a wedding box for an in-game marriage because you earn more experience when you're married that's 25 notch dollars but then when you inevitably want to get divorced because your partner finds out you spent money on this game a separation letter will be another 25 nos dollars when you're upgrading your items be careful because they might break so buy a golden protection scroll for 25 nas dollars or spend 200 nas dollars to metamorph your pet into a super powerful archdemon with better attacks and some enemy debuffs or to really flex on people complete limited time events to earn jewels and then buy some onyx wings but you best be quick because there are only 75 onyx wings per server and they're powerful so you'll want to make sure that you spend enough money to finish the events the fastest so how'd you get nos dollars well five pounds gets you 70 knots dollars and 200 pounds will get you 6 000 nas dollars now one thing gameforge do very well they've basically got it down to a science by now is abusive pricing structures nothing lines up with the sizes of packs so you're always buying too few or too many see here a tiger mount is 450 nos dollars but the packs you can buy either 175 or 560. so you're either buying weight under or weight over what you need oh game forge you really do love money and hate players don't you so the shop is pretty much pay to win no defending it it just is next up we're told there are some monsters in another time space rift and we need to help the trapped soldiers so off we go going into a time space by the way costs one seed of power i wonder how long it'll be until i'm forced to buy some i wonder if they'll get so difficult that i always keep failing and need to try again which burns through my current seeds here's also why i hate this design of being told to go and kill enemies we get told the village is in trouble we get told the monsters are bad we get told the time spaces must be closed but we never get shown why we're never actually worried the village is going to get attacked or destroyed we never get told why the monsters are bad or shown why they're bad in fact we've only ever seen monsters just kind of chilling minding their own business until we come along and kill them so from an objective point of view we are the bad guys here you need to give the player personal motivation from the start of the game to hate something a reason to hate you can't just say you should hate these things because you should that's empty there's no personality there so i finished this time space rift and then i get told to go straight to another time space rift this is the early game eight hours of time spaces i really hope you love grinding on small platform-based maze puzzles with red glowing backgrounds because it's what you're gonna be doing oh there are also some emotes so i have a play around some of the emotes are just emojis and what the hell is that face it's called are you kidding me this is the are you kidding me face in nostale this is cursed now this emoji needs a bit of explaining not from me but from the company maybe this was just lost in translation maybe they didn't quite get this but there's an emote called gotcha and when you use it it shows a little animation of someone fishing with the letters kkk above it i think you might need to speak to your localization team about this because this isn't great oh i'm level 13. didn't even notice the gameplay feels exactly the same nothing feels different i've got stronger so of the enemies combat hasn't changed early game nosh tail is like eating one endless piece of spaghetti it's not offensively bad it's just not really that enjoyable next quest kill 10 sheep six hamsters and three p-pods the enemy desires clearly had no real narrative structure of the area or they just based all their enemies on a stroll through a farm there i hear a doorbell sound which is unusual because i'm in the middle of a field so i look around and notice a small flashing icon to the bottom right i click it and it joins me into some instanced combat cool i get teleported to a mass battle event it seems that we're all waiting around for the enemies to spawn and then they flood in and oh it's the miners from the intro movie i forgot we were meant to be following some sort of plot i don't mind this though it's quite fun to have a big battle with everyone working together so i think you know what let's get to know the community see how friendly people are i say hi and then i get a reply well guess that about answers that i die and get sent back to town also i've seen something which cannot be unseen and now i've seen it you need to see it too i know that it's meant to say click above the time space crystal but the c and the l are combining into a lowercase d and now i've pointed it out you won't ever read it as click again it's just a crystal with the word dick over it now a quest about killing hard pea pods not soft pea pods not regular pea pods specifically hard pea pods they all look identical and act identical but they are in different places so are clearly different types of peapods i get told i need a covalt mask to investigate the covalt so i go and kill some weak toxic danders and then some light fire seeds how does this help make a mask who knows the game stopped making sense when the dick crystals appeared by now i am two connecting maps away from the main village and it's noticeably quieter there are no other players around that's quite telling the village may be busy but this seems like an instanced based hub game outside of the main hubs the world is somewhat dead this is also the first quest area with a terrible drop rate it takes me around 15 minutes to find the six items i need make the covalt mass get told some more soldiers haven't returned from another time space so we need to go and save them i'm getting real tired of the soldiers defending the village spending more time being in peril than actually doing anything useful also i'm just sick of the time spaces by now how is this such a repetitive game design this is the first time we get a boss enemy nothing special just bigger with a constant particle effect over it so i can't actually see what i'm meant to be killing enjoy a thrilling in-game cutscene with guards one two and three that's the actual names come on at least give the guards names finish the time space and then the child whipping guard from indiana jones and the temple of doom shows up this is mine manager mud he has lost some hammers where has he lost them that's right inside a local time space so we go back to another one and kill enemies to find three hammers if you wait for the timer to run out you'll fail a mission and as you can see from the bottom left you'll get dignity reduced 15. there's a dignity stat now this time space is actually the first one i struggle on because you've not got enough time to kill everything and trying again costs another seed of power and i failed twice because the enemies are now aggressive and i can't stand up to mobs but look at this if you fail a time space more than twice you can try again in loser mode it doubles your time and makes the enemies weaker thanks game survive the rift barely hand the hammers to the mine guy and he sends me all the way back to the main village to hand this in there's a lot of running back and forth in nostal and nothing happens on the run it's not an emergent adventure where people jump out and say hi it's just filler it's used repeatedly other games sometimes use repetitive journeys to teach you the lay of the land and the important landmarks you're going to need to remember to navigate in the future but because nostale is split up into smaller maps with clearly defined connection markers you don't really need to remember that much and now we've lost the quest arrow above the avatar's head so we have to use the minimap to find where the important npcs are we explain how we met the miner found the hammers and got sent back here and guess what we now get sent all the way back to the miner to see if they need any more help right this is getting a bit gratuitous with the back and forth also i've just realized covalt is super close to kobold and the plot of kobolds in the mine is basically the start of baldur's gate 1 which is one of the greatest rpg games ever made so another design hint be very careful when you reference better games because you're going to invite comparisons and unless you are the better game a comparison will not work out in your favor we equip the covalt mask and blend in diving into the mines to spy on the workers and yep i knew it this is a furry game the rebelling covalts speak of a strange plan of action and we need to stop them hang on are we stopping a revolt by the oppressed workers are we legitimately the bad guys am i union busting so we stop their plans by completing another time space rift because what other mechanic is that i really can't get over how lazy the design of the rift is they are all identical oh god another dumb riff that starts with such a strong wind i can barely stand on my feet and then nothing mechanical changes if you're going to say there's a strong wind in your game you need to program one have the player knocked around have them move slowly have a wind effect both audio and visual don't tell me show me this is high school levels of storytelling there is no mechanical difference between this rift and every other rift adding in the fluff of always so windy doesn't matter you're a video game just have wind and while i'm being pedantic why is the keyhole on the room padlock icon upside down you can literally google the word keyhole and get thousands of images showing you which way up a keyhole is how did you get this wrong okay this rift is much harder i'm failing even with food i can't kill the enemies fast enough i can't heal fast enough and i can't make it through in time so i speed snack through chicken heads and eventually finally i make it through it seems the difficulty spike starts here finish the rift let the minor dude know then he sends me all the way back to the village to hand it in and then they say brilliant go back to the miner and see what else he needs and you know what no i just talk with some npcs seems there's a job system where you can change your combat style but you need to be level 20 before that opens up to you it then says press f12 for the guide so i press f12 and nothing happens great job game while i was editing this video i actually discovered that i was wrong pressing f12 on the nostale official client does indeed open the help menu however they haven't localized it correctly for steam pressing f12 on the steam version just takes a screenshot so now my screenshot folder is full of nostale i explore the town and hop through some of the teleport bits find the bazaar lots of people buying and selling sticks it seems find a nice hedgerow in the city center then take a teleporter to the western crem a high level area i absolutely should not be in but i do like how you can go there i value freedom and exploration if the player so chooses here's my problem with nostale it's not a bad idea it's not a bad concept it's just presented in a less than stellar way i get the feeling that there's areas of high quality the game probably has raids and dungeons and team battles and nice late game areas and crafting and recipes and i can feel i can sense there is depth here but the opening few hours of the game don't play to that the opening is a broken tutorial with a huge text dump which doesn't work the windows are broken there are repetitive kill x quests there's way too much running there's quests which don't always follow on from each other and there's identical time space rifts which get old after about an hour it makes me sad because i don't dislike the feeling of playing nostale yes it's pay to win and broken and repetitive but there is some level of quality that i know is there it's built on the correct foundation it sounds stupid but i feel that nos tale has got the right stuff arranged in the wrong way i don't feel nostale is an inherently bad game but i do feel it's a bad gaming experience so to end the review i will award nos tale broken tutorial window out of 10. cheers for watching another massive thank you to all the supporters on patreon and twitch who keep the channel alive you can support from only one pound a month check the video description for links to the patreon twitch twitter discord and the second channel josh drive plays where i review old games voted on by you and as always have a great day you

Channel: Josh Strife Hayes

Views: 917,776

Keywords: mmo podcast, mmo discussion, mmo design, mmorpg youtuber, mmo news

Id: i38zoixie3Q

Length: 28min 25sec (1705 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 12 2022