The 44th broadcast happened today so let’s get this opinions machine rolling again.
Bumped has its bullet point write-up here as always. As usual, I’ll generally be sharing my opinions on the stuff I care about as well as a gathering spot for the various videos captured from the stream.
GODZILLA
Arks League
Seems to be a new ranking system in which you’re matched up with 19 other players. If you score well within your league, you can earn prizes like Stargem Tickets and Tri-boosters.
It’s nice that at least casual players will stand a hope in hell’s chance of actually competing as opposed to a ship-wide ranking. That said, I’m curious if there’s any matchmaking involved or if it’s just completely random.
SG Scratch Recycle
So this was finally shown and no surprise it’s a disappointment. For one thing it requires 40 Stargem Scratch items to be exchanged, which is a huge number of items. Secondly, the selection of items you can exchange for doesn’t include every item in the scratch. In particular, you can only exchange for the default variations of the Dark Falz costumes excluding the battle damaged Apprentice costume. So if you want any color variation or that, you’re still at the mercy of RNG.
To illustrate, you will need 3600 Stargems total (80 * 40), which means you need to be earning 21 Stargems per day (153 days until the scratch expires, so 3600/21). If you’re not, you don’t stand a hope of using this exchange unless they get very liberal with Stargems down the line.
As someone who has been wanting these costumes for nearly 4 years, this system continues to be an insult.
Chat Commands
Chat commands to change your facial expression and your fashion preset will be added. Not sure why it took them this long to add these, really.
New story stuff
Seems we’ll be learning more about “Earth Guides”, the resistance force against Mother Cluster. New Unite E-Trials will appear on Earth featuring members of the Earth Guides battling against Phantoms.
During the events, we meet yet another Mother Cluster Apostle, this time an Apostle of Fire named “Phaleg”. She’s demonstrated to have considerable power, which surprises the player even after the tough enemies they’ve had to deal with in the past. Not sure why we needed another apostle introduced so soon seeing as we’ve barely gotten to know the 5 they introduced all at once last time.
Bikini Scratch
Normally I wouldn’t write about this kinda stuff but it’s interesting because the three costumes on the right are the first conversions of old outfits into the Layered wear system. So it seems they are willing to do this after all, which naturally makes me ponder what other outfits are due for conversion.
The two main things of note with this update are the new pet and selection of skill rings.
New Pet – Lucari- er Synchro
The main gimmick of this pet is essentially Tech-Arts, in that the pet’s power rises as you combo different PAs together.
Might be interesting, I just personally have no interest in playing Summoner myself so I’ll likely end up sticking to easy-mode Wanda whenever I’m on that alt.
Skill Rings
These are the skill rings shown so far (with credit to Bumped for the names).
- L / Bullet Bow Homing
- L / JB Elemental Keep
- L / Standing Sign
- L / A Launcher Mode
- L / Short Mirage
- L / Wand E Change
- L / Mate Lovers
- R / J Reversal Cover
Ranger finally gets some skill rings!
Another Launcher Mode changes Launcher’s basic attack to be like that of PSU Grenade Launcher weapons. Not sure why you’d do that seeing as I’m fairly sure that would make the weapon much more inconenient to use. Standing Sign on the other hand shows an effect when Standing Snipe is active which… why is this even a ring? Sure, it’s useful but this is a basic gameplay feature they’re relegating to something you have to grind for. I genuinely feel bad for Rangers right now unless those rings have some other bonuses.
Bullet Bow Homing sounds like it might change up Bullet Bow gameplay a bit, depends on how accurate it is.
Mate Lovers has a kinky name, but it’s hard to guess exactly what this ring will do. May be use-time, may be boosted heals, may change the animation, it could be all the above and other things I’m too dumb to think of.
Wand Element Change could be potentially interesting, enabling Wand users to get away with just having a single Wand rather than a rainbow selection of them. Kinda sucks for those players who already gathered a rainbow selection, but at least they have a ring-slot freed up.
Rider Quest
Kill enemies to get points, collect emblems to get bonus points. Try to get as high a score as you can within the time limit!
Enemies will still reward drops and exp, however all drops will be pooled into an end-crystal like with the current Odin Limited Quest and Mining Base Defence. The higher the score, the better your rare drop rate will be.
An emergency trial can occur during the quest which is essentially a giant Independence Day reference. Destroy the UFO’s shields before it annihilates the city!
This is a new type of quest which is separate from the Free Field. I don’t know what kind of limitations there’ll be on it if there are any. There is however at least a Klotho Client Order associated with it, though it only pays out a measly 10,000 Meseta. Sugar daddy letting me down.
Las Vegas will first be appearing in story mode, which is slightly unusual for the release of a field but they did do it before with Kuron in Episode 3.
Aside the verticality of the map, the free field seems to be mechanically identical to the Tokyo field in that enemies are pointed out on the radar and you need to grind out quest points to clear. This may, much like Tokyo, make the field tedious to complete solo due to the smaller spawn sizes. The lower point requirement may ablate this somewhat, I also ponder if the boss may be guaranteed to spawn at a certain point quota as with recent event quests.
The map looks alright enough, albeit embarrassingly low poly in places. The most striking thing is how small it feels while riding around on the Rideroid vehicle. On foot, the map feels spacious enough but in the air it ends up feeling really small. It does also seem like it won’t be using the old map-generation system present in other areas.
Es Update: Starring the new character EDGELord and a badly drawn weaponoid made by someone who has never seen a woman in real life or has no understanding of anatomy at all (Whipblade Paratizel). Some pretty dang nicely drawn ones in there as well.
Arks Festival Items: WUB WUB WUB WUB WUB
Live Concerts: Featuring Dark Falz Loser as an old woman firing lasers into the Arks Shopping mall.
I’m afraid this was the surprise trailer, so no grand surprises to talk about this time.
Once again, thanks to Kami_Pepe on twitter for posting summaries of these. These are interpretations based on machine translation, so please please get in touch if you can provide something more accurate or if I’ve gotten something horribly wrong.
Q：武器迷彩を複数装備できるようになる？
A：元々武器迷彩自体がイレギュラーでしてシステム上難しいので今後も絶対にないです。
Q: Why can’t we have multiple weapon camos at once?
A: The original implementation of the weapon camo system was clumsy, so we can’t do this for now.
This is reminding a bit of the problem they had back in PSU when they wanted to expand the number of Photon Arts a character could learn but couldn’t due how the game was programmed. One day, Sega will learn how to do basic software engineering I’m sure…
Q：一括鑑定できるようにしてくれない？
A：前々から試行錯誤してまして、早くても年末や年明けになりそうです
Q: Is it possible you could allow for bulk weapon appraisal?
A: It’s something we’re currently doing a trial and error approach for, we may have something for the end of the year or early next year.
Nice to hear I guess, though I’m not sure how they’d handle the element portion unless people would be fine having bulk appraised weapons all having the same element. For the most part, I would be anyway.
Q：ラスベガス実装にともなってロケとか行かれたのですか？
A：行ってないですよ Googleストリートビューを元にしました
Q: Did you go to Las Vegas to do research for the new field?
A: No, we just used Google Street View.
Astounding.
PSO2Blog 
guy you’ve never heard of is the charadesigner for valkryia chronicles. I think he did some characters for F/GO recently, too.