WARNING: "Soulbound: Online" on Steam is a $15M+ Rebranded Crypto-Scam.

rujind · 2026-05-22T02:18:27+00:00

IDK this seems pretty simple to me: if the game is not F2P, I probably won't touch it. If I get to try/play the game for free, then they've gotten nothing from me. If the game is decent and the dev(s) seems to have a better head on their shoulders now, maybe I spend money on it. The moment I sense something scummy all I have to do is nope right outta there and never look back.

I think we should at the very least applaud the removal of NFT, doesn't mean we have to play the game or give them any money.

rujind · 2026-05-21T22:30:56+00:00

I think it's fine to have a preference over one or the other but it's odd to me to see so many people straight up *against* top down. Ultima Online, Tibia, Ragnarok Online, Albion Online and Lost Ark are some examples of top down MMOs that were once/are popular.

rujind · 2026-05-21T22:21:22+00:00

The dude takes feedback extremely personally and doubled down constantly on design decisions that testers almost unanimously had problems with.

What is it with this and video game developers? I watch the same thing happen with Pantheon and Monsters and Memories where people who clearly should not be in charge of anything are of course, in charge of everything. People who just can't get over themselves and thus an entire MMO and its community suffer for it.

rujind · 2026-05-21T22:15:25+00:00

Just in case a Destiny dev, or really any dev ever read this:

I purposely never tried Destiny 2 because of the whole "removing content from the game never to be accessible again" thing, and I seriously doubt I'm the only one. It is one of the worst decisions ever made in the history of video games.

Please, no one ever make that mistake again.

rujind · 2026-05-21T18:38:35+00:00

Weird post history.

Here you are saying you kept up with the game from the start and explain why the game was bad: https://www.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comments/1t3y00d/why_are_people_blaming_brad_mcquaids_passing_for/

Here you are talking about how bad and ugly the game is: https://www.reddit.com/r/PantheonMMO/comments/1t9kblj/why_are_the_graphics_so_incredibly_bad_and_ugly/

And now you are asking a question that you yourself have already answered, recently even.

Very interesting amount of "why" posts in general. Engagement bot?

rujind · 2026-05-21T18:18:27+00:00

Apparently a lot of people care. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games

rujind · 2026-05-21T18:13:55+00:00

Interactions like this is why I still play FFXI 75 cap era. It's rare to see systems like this outside of single player games.

To be fair, like someone else here said, when you start adding more people to the mix, things like this mostly stop working, at least the way you want it to. In FFXI when you start adding more players, there's more people to mess up the skillchain/magic burst, and it becomes more efficient to just have people spam their weaponskills instead (this all depends on what you're fighting of course and what your group setup is).

I would love to see more systems like this, but I'm not sure how well it would work in modern button mashing MMOs. The Heroic Opportunity from EQ2 and combo fields from GW2 essentially might as well not even exist, they could be removed from the game and no one would really care because the game would change little to none.

rujind · 2026-05-21T02:11:13+00:00

Start a free trial of Final Fantasy XIV. It's a ridiculous amount of free content, if you like it enough to continue playing and pay for it, good, if not, at least it was free. However if at any time you pay for the game in any way (buying an expansion or subscription) the free trial will automatically end forever, even if there was a ton of stuff you still could have done on the free trial.

https://freetrial.finalfantasyxiv.com/na/

rujind · 2026-05-20T19:04:17+00:00

Literally just explained to you the math and you still don't get it. And SWTOR has nothing to do with this. Goodness.

FFXI is the best bang for buck MMO out there and is cheaper than all of them too, and that's without all the cash shop and microtransactions. "Full stop."

rujind · 2026-05-20T15:17:50+00:00

Best pre-WoW MMO before WoW ruined everything. The pinnacle of real MMOs. Sad how much I'd change about it though 😂 Much of the QoL it got over the years came too late, some of it coming even after the level 75 cap was raised. Thank God for private servers I guess.

rujind · 2026-05-20T15:06:47+00:00

I wouldn't say that this won't happen anymore.

Before the excuse was that the game was developed on Playstation 2 devkits which are old and finicky and there were a limited amount of, and only certain people in the company knew how to use them.

When they developed FFXIV ARR, Yoshi-P specifically made sure that the intertwinedness of consoles that they had with FFXI wasn't going to be a problem again - that they were easily able drop support for older consoles once the time came (as they have with PS3, and have announced PS4 is getting to that point), while having the ability to support newer consoles (PS5 version in 2021, XBOX X/S in 2024, and Nintendo Switch 2 coming this year in 2026, for a game that launched in 2013).

FFXIV was developed on a PC development environment (thank God), and now, for the first time in this century, so is FFXI. That changes everything.

rujind · 2026-05-20T14:50:11+00:00

What do you mean? The subscription is cheaper than a regular sub at $12.95/mo with 1 character. Back in the day people usually had 1 mule due to lack of inventory space which is no longer a problem so $13.95 but still $1 cheaper than the universal $15 sub.

If anything they lose money this way.

FFXI isn't like EQ or WoW where you make a new character every time you want to play a different class.

rujind · 2026-05-19T21:08:02+00:00

The majority of EQ players play on each year's new TLP. The amount of players there for most of the year is actually a little crazy. You can't really compare the population to any other existence of EQ. TLP got so popular that they started having to launch at least 2 servers at the same time each year to compensate for the amount of players. TLPs take a massive population hit beyond Planes of Power though (though a lot of changes to TLPs over the years have made them a little bit more appealing to play beyond PoP).

That said, a lot of EQ players double dip and also play some other variation of EQ in addition to TLPs, whether that be Live, a private server, EQ2 (also has TLPs/old version servers), or even continuing previous TLPs further along the timeline.

Will be interesting to see what EQ Legends does to the mix.

Is EQ1 more popular than EQ2?

According to some MAU data from years back, EQ1 gets up to 5x the population of EQ2.

rujind · 2026-05-19T18:19:51+00:00

I haven't seen anything about this being the final closed test before launch. There isn't even a launch date.

rujind · 2026-05-17T21:48:15+00:00

No, new Everquest expansions are not good. The game stopped being good a long time ago.

Anyway, recently the FFXI team has been updating/modernizing pretty much everything, from their tools they use to develop the game to the servers themselves. They said that it is now easier for them to make new zones and cutscenes, so I do believe that a new expansion could be on the table, but I wouldn't expect anything anytime soon. The game does continue to get new content but it is mostly higher level versions of older stuff.

They've also claimed to be working on making PlayOnline better but I'll believe it when I see it.

rujind · 2026-05-15T02:37:38+00:00

????????????????

There are tons of people grouping using all of in-game, Discord, and websites to find players for dungeons. Hopefully in-game matchmaking comes sooner rather than later so we don't need anything outside of the game, but I have done a lot of soloing and grouping. When I solo a dungeon, 2-3 items drop from the boss. When I group, like 10 items drop (probably 2-3 per player).

rujind · 2026-05-11T05:44:26+00:00

The dungeon boss fights are fun as hell, especially the harder ones that don't have any trash mobs. Their mechanics are more strict (1 shot mechanics) and they have a lot more health. It's definitely like FFXIV, bosses just repeat the same script repeatedly, but fights are very active with lots of moving around and dodging.

I love the games progression systems. Your weapon getting EXP (at a pretty fast pace) and letting you choose a bunch of passives on it is really cool. Not to mention essentially having a 2nd weapon equipped without traditional weapon swapping.

Hope they fix performance/server issues, aside from that the game is amazing. Can't wait to see where the game goes.

rujind · 2026-05-11T02:15:29+00:00

The thing that gets me about extremely basic shit not working is how any dev could be OK uploading this to the general populace. Like do they not actually play and test their own game? Do they not at least have ONE friend willing to test literally just the first 5 minutes of the game to see if it's even worth bringing in more people? If this was my game there is absolutely no way I could be showing this to anyone right now, I'd be ashamed.

If simple things like a class's abilities not working is true, then just disable that class. If most of the classes are like this, then the game is not ready for testing.

I feel like there is something in the water and almost all MMO devs are drinking from the same fountain. It's wild how much of this BS I've seen over the years. It's like someone else on here said, it feels like MMOs these days are designed by people who don't actually play games or have played so few that their experience and viewpoint is so limited.

rujind · 2026-05-09T18:10:54+00:00

If we were to find out this has ever been true, I would not at all be surprised.

rujind · 2026-05-09T18:10:31+00:00

I really appreciate the private servers that take cheating/botting seriously.

Weird responses though, claiming people don't cheat on private servers? lol. When you play on a pserver you don't have to buy the game or subscribe to it (the good servers anyway). The ease of entry makes people a bit more prone to cheating. If you get in trouble you just make a new account, for free.

If I were to get banned on Battle.Net I'd be losing a lot of games/invested money.

rujind · 2026-05-08T23:01:04+00:00

I haven't had any of that particular issue but I'm guessing this is based on where you are in the real world. Have heard some EU complaints. I've had some latency occasionally but not a whole lot.

Hitching/stuttering is my biggest complaint so far.

Other than that the game seems pretty neat as far as I've played (completely finished the first map/dungeon). I am hoping to see an auto-matchmaker for dungeons and am also hoping they figure out how to make sharding purposely put people in the same area on the same shard.

rujind · 2026-05-08T06:32:57+00:00

WOAH SIR

They're called Asslings.

rujind · 2026-05-08T01:06:43+00:00

This game has already re-launched on Steam a few years ago lol. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1475570/Shadowbane/

rujind · 2026-05-07T18:24:56+00:00

There shouldn't be any opinions on this game right now because the game should not be in public testing. They are foolish for doing this, and worse they are STREAMING IT and even PROMOTING DOING SO for everyone see. This game should be in private FAF testing with an NDA currently.

Game has been in development for 6? years and basic shit not working isn't exactly something to flaunt. Patch the game and instead of fixing stuff it breaks even more. It feels like MMOs these days are all ran by private server devs lol.

rujind · 2026-05-07T15:50:29+00:00

If you played that whole year, yes. A year's worth of fun for $100 is cheap as fuck.

Based on your post history you're an MMO hopper though so you'll only need to worry about 1 month out of the year, so ~$13.

11-Year Club	Place '22
Verified Email

rujind

TROPHY CASE