Yesterday’s maintenance was only to remove the cap on character creation, however today’s maintenance is intent on fixing the lag as well as fixing some bugs. Well, good luck to them. Said maintenance could well be over by the time you read this post, as it’s due to end about 5 minutes after this post was published. So, the future, I have a question for you. Did they fix the lag?
Also, is it me or does the lag actually seem to get worse when Japan goes to sleep? It certainly seemed to be when the worst lag spikes hit for me, at least.
Hard Mode: Observations
Well now I’ve gotten to play around in hard mode a bit there’s a few observations about it and other general bits of the game that playing on a higher difficulty allows us to see.
You only need to unlock quests once.
Seems a given, but saying it just to remove any doubts you may have. When you unlock quests on normal, you’ve unlocked them on hard.
However, missions are not uniformly distributed by level requirement. Being lv20 doesn’t grant you access to all the quests. lv20 will grant you access to all the Forest quests and the first Caves quest. lv25 will grant you access to the rest, or up to the 3rd Desert quest anyway. To access the hard mode versions of the Free-Field quests you’ll need to be lv30, annoyingly.
Essentially it’s a blend of PSO and PSU difficulty. The PSO part is due to it being called “hard mode” and requiring you to do things to unlock it. The PSU part is the level requirements on a per-mission basis, making it functionally similar to “B-rank” versions of missions in PSU.
Items are tiered.
You may have noticed that the weapon with 4* rarity is actually weaker than the weapon with 2* rarity. In fact that awesome looking 7* weapon is statistically similar to a 2*. It appears that rarity is not directly related to item power this time and that the items themselves are arranged into tiers. It works something like:
- Tier 1
- 3 1* weapons, with clear stat progression. We’ll call them 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3.
- 1 4* weapon.
- 1 7* weapon – Statistically as powerful as 2.1 weapons, but has a much lower requirement to equip it
- Tier 2
- 3 2* weapons, with clear stat progression. We’ll call them 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3.
- 1 5* weapon
- 1 8* weapon – Statistically as powerful as 3.1 weapons, but has a much lower requirement to equip it?
This is the theory for each weapon type.
It’s possible it goes on like this, but this is only an early theory based on observation. The 7* and 8* weapons may not actually be included in this tiering system and behave by their own rules, at this point it’s not really certain as we’ve not seen enough examples yet. I can say though that you may want to re-consider splashing out on 7* weapons, as you’ll likely replace them quickly.
Update: Well after playing a bit more I see that there are in fact multiple 4* weapons for each type. See how quickly these early theories can unravel? There still appears to be some tiering involved, however.
Possible localised PSO2 announcement incoming?
Sega of America’s official Phantasy Star twitter feed, @phantasystar, seems to have moved on from PSO and is now posting PSU screenshots. This only leaves the portable Phantasy Stars before PSO2 (Phantasy Star: Portable and its sequel), which could indicate that an announcement concerning a localised version may be imminent. This is of course, just speculation.
PSO2Blog 