Star Legends: MMORPG Review Diary #2

“Wait, how do I accept your guild invite?”

If you haven’t read diary #1 yet, check it out here!

Last week I touched on some of the basics in Spacetime Studio’s new MMORGP, Star Legends. I am now two weeks into the game, playing as my sexy sniper rifle-wielding commando (tank), “Teegen”. During my first week of the game I wanted to focus on playing through the missions and leveling up my character. My experience, for the most part, was a good one, with a few minor complaints here and there. Once I hit level 15, and was able to equip all that fancy gear I had purchased when I “upgraded” my character, I felt confident that it was time to spread my vast game knowledge and experience to other players to help them reach my level of might and glory.

That’s right, it was time to start a guild.

Guilds (by that or another name) are pretty much a must for any MMO, as they allow players to group together to support and help each other tackle tough game content together. Pocket Legends did not feature guilds until recently, and even then they weren’t as complete as many players had hoped for. Sadly, it appears that the guild system in Star Legends, while functional, is riddled with issues… almost to the point where joining a guild becomes unnecessary to enjoy the game to it’s fullest. Almost.

As I mentioned in the first diary, I created a guild called the Space Nips. Why? Well, I figured that Space Nipples would have been flagged as being inappropriate. You know, duh. Anyways, in order to start a guild, you must cough up either 20 platinum (around $3) or 10,000 credits (in-game

Oh no, crabhe- I mean "squidheads"!

currency) to purchase a “guild charter”. This allows you to start adding players, and gives you access to guild chat, which is accomplished by posting messages with a “/g” prefix. Guild chat was very helpful for getting groups of members together, and is probably the most useful aspect of starting and maintaining a guild. After the initial creation you have the option to spend platinum on three different tiers of “guild halls”. These are fairly bland-looking sections of the ship that can only be visited by guild members. In order to reach your guild hall you have to manually travel to a Blackstar instance, walk to the guild area, and take a teleporter to your guild hall instance. There is no way to automatically teleport to your hall by default when you log in to the game or finish a mission. Because of this, our guild hall was generally empty, with people only popping in to purchase goods. A tier 1 guild contains very little for the $3.50 you have to cough up to buy it. It’s merely a gathering room with a personal “stash” to store your goods. Unsurprisingly, you only get 5 item slots before you have to start spending platinum to buy more. Very surprisingly, there was no guild bank or guild stash to share items and credits between members in any tiered hall.

Since I obviously wanted to be the sexiest commando on the block, I went ahead and upgraded to the highest tier level for a mere $14. (note: Spacetime kindly provides me with complimentary platinum for review purposes. There’s no way I would spend $14 on a guild hall!) I was disappointed at the aesthetics of the tier 3 hall. For something called a “Galaxy Penthouse”, it looked more like three office building breakrooms connected together. That said, there were two significant features of this hall: a console that featured over a 50% credit discount on “stims” (health and mana packs), and a console that allows you to buy “enhancements” (xp/speed/damage/defense boost items) without needing to purchase platinum. That’s right, the only way to purchase items that help you level faster without spending your hard-earned cash is to join a tier 3 guild. While certainly a great feature of an expensive guild, I question the decision to withhold these from players who want to join lower tiered guilds with friends, or who have no desire to join a guild at all. Interestingly, each guild hall shows a “level 1″ next to it. I don’t believe guild leveling is currently in the game, but i feel this would have been a better route for increasing tiers rather than forcing people to pay money.

I started Space Nips with my girlfriend, my brother, and a couple other friends so that we could start with some active members. I spent about 20 minutes recruiting in the Blackstar hub area, and was very surprised at how many folks were willing to randomly join up. Unfortunately, unless you

Our first and only full guild run. We pwned.

know exactly where to go in Space Legend’s cornucopia of menus, it’s difficult to dig out the guild invite to accept it. For multiple members it took 5-10 minutes of explaining before they finally accepted the request I sent them. Spacetime MMOs really need a center location for notifications and invites, rather than splitting them up into 3 or 4 sub menus based on context. Despite that, in one night our numbers group from 5 to about 25! It is then that I realized how laughably little you can do as a guild master. Member management in star legends is practically non-existent, with only two permission levels allowed, and no customization in-between. You are either a member, which allows you to do nothing more than use guild chat and have access to the list of members to play with, or you are an officer, which gives you the ability to invite and kick members. Knowing that the ability to invite friends is a huge part of growing a guild, I had to hassle with making every new member an officer, hoping that they all played nice and didn’t decide to kick everyone out on a whim. I tried to make Pat a guild master with me so he could help out, but the only option was to transfer ownership. A few days later, without any recruiting, we were approaching 50 members, all of whom are officers, and all of whom could royally screw the guild over if they saw fit. Sigh.

I have had the guild for about a week now, and to be honest, have found very little use for it outside of stim discounts and credit-bought enhancements. Despite being an instance-based RPG, Spacetime Studios still hasn’t built a party system into the game, meaning any time you leave an instance to go redeem quests, you have to either manually join the one person who stayed in the instance or manually create a new game and re-invite everyone. Because of this, you pretty much never access the different levels and dungeons via their “proper” paths through in-level teleports and such. You are instead forced to do everything through the game menus, which takes a ton of immersion away from the overall game experience. I was hoping that instances would at least automatically match you with other fellow guild members when you entered the same level, but that also doesn’t happen. On top of all of this, several huge pre-existing guilds stole several of my members due to higher member numbers, and as a result, higher activity. Everything about our two guilds is identical except the fact that they have more players. At this point, that appears to be the only reason to join a guild, and that leaves smaller guilds in the dust with almost nothing to offer aside from the payed options that anyone with enough cash can buy. Rather than providing bonuses for quality guilds based on achievements and experience, all builds with tier 3 features start off even and make a mad

This boss was a pain in the navel to beat.

recruitment spam dash to get as many members as possible. It appears that the winners take all in this respect. One of my best members left the guild for a large “mega-guild” after just two days of not seeing me online (I was online both of those days for about 2 hours each). Other than guild chat and discounts, my guild feels like nothing more than a glorified friends list. At least friend requests are easier to find.

I’ve been a fan of Pocket Legends since the beginning when I gave them a solid 4-star score. At that time, Spacetime had created the unthinkable – a full mobile MMORPG that could be played from anywhere. There was much to be added and tweaked, but the initial package was fun and pretty damn impressive. It’s been a year and a half, and I’m starting to feel like the Spacetime MMO engine isn’t quite keeping up the times. The tech is certainly impressive, as being able to play an MMORPG via EDGE, 3G, or wifi is an amazing feat, but is that enough? Right now Teegen is at level 23, which is fairly close to the level cap from what I know (after extensive research I was unable to find it, but I believe it’s 25 or 26). I have played through all the game’s content multiple times, and am starting to get that grinding feeling that I felt with Pocket Legends… the point at which I stopped playing.

The fact that Spacetime currently allows you to play all of it’s content for free is great, but I wonder if that will change soon. They have announced a new update coming “very soon” that raises the cap to 30 and provides some new content. Will this content be provided for free, or at a premium “platinum” price? I have really enjoyed the somewhat varied levels so far, but even with 2x and 3x XP enhancements, I’m still required to replay through them over and over again to get to the top. Had I been spending real money, I probably would have put about $25-$30 into Star Legends for 2-weeks of casual gaming. Gabe has meanwhile not spent a dime, and is having to grind the same content even more than I did… around twice as much to be precise. If there was a variety of content available with wide level ranges, this probably wouldn’t be an issue. As it stands, there is very limited content for each level range, meaning that once you level up past say 10, you can no longer gain XP for content that is below level 10. You then have one set of levels that you can access until you hit around 15, in which another set of content opens up, and the old set gets very close to closing. Grinding is not a terrible thing unless you are grinding the same instances over and over again, which seems to be an accepted part of Pocket/Star Legends.

Considering Spacetime’s history with Pocket Legends and their commitment with Star Legends to providing regular (read: semi monthly) new content, I’m going to hold off on my final review until their announced update pops. I may write a third entry next week before moving on to a final review if I can find something to do in that doesn’t require more grinding – my thumbs can only take so much! Check out a brief gear-focused trailer for the upcoming update below. Poor engineers, they always seem to get the shaft when it comes to stylish armor. Maybe that’s why there are so few of them in the game?

Star Legends (Universal) – Free to play

Due to the large time commitment required to complete RPG games, TouchGen.com generally reviews them in a segmented “diary” format in order to bring you information without waiting too long for the entire game to be played. Unlike many gaming websites, we are committed to playing through games in their entirety before giving them a final score. MMOs are a bit different due to a lack of “endgame” events. That said, we will play them until we feel we have seen everything we need to see to make a final judgement on the game’s score.