The interesting new evolution to Sega’s free-to-play MMORPG Phantasy Star Online 2 with the release of New Genesis is not in a good state right now, based on a player survey result.
The survey, conducted by Sega themselves, asked players how satisfied they are with PSO2 NGS as of October 27, 2021. 42% of respondents from the global servers say they are satisfied (12% from that are very dissatisfied).
In Japan, where the game has been operating for almost 10 years, fans are much more critical, with 63% being unsatisfied with the state of the game- 23% of that answered “very dissatisfied”.
The ones who absolutely love the MMORPG’s current state isn’t high either. Only 25% and 11% of players answered “satisfied” or “very satisfied” from the global and JP servers respectively.
The summarised survey results were shown on the monthly NGS Headline broadcast.
Here is the response from the development and live ops team regarding the current state of PSO2 NGS:
“[The development and live ops team] humbly accept that the various bugs caused trouble to our players and the current quality and volume of content is unsatisfactory. We will make further efforts to improve for the future.
“We will take appropriate measures to prevent them from reoccurring. As for the content, we finally released the new Retem region on December 15. However, we feel we still have a long way to go to meet everyone’s expectations.”
PSO2 New Genesis is an all-new game that co-exists with base PSO2. New Genesis brings in an open world (or “open-field” as the devs refer it to) replacing the Monster Hunter-style gameplay loop of the base game, plus improved graphics and an all-new setting.
The drastic changes also mean the NGS on launch was relatively barebones compared to base PSO2, gameplay and content-wise. It was relatively quick to see and do all that is available in under a month, and major content additions (like new regions) only comes in a six-month cadence. Updates to base PSO2 has stopped as well as the devs focus on NGS.
It’s good to see Sega owning up and saying it as it is, that the game still needs more work. The addition of the new Retem region from the Sandstorm Requiem update last month was a good step, but it’s more of the same. NGS still lacks a proper endgame or enough gameplay systems to keep players logging back every day not just for the sake of login bonuses.
As revealed later in the same Headline livestream, the addition of new classes like Summoner has now been pushed back to late 2022 instead of the original Spring 2022 target, while the still-unnamed NGS class to use the Gunblade weapon continues to not have a release window.
Every few months will now see an increase of the level cap (it will bump from the current 35 to 45 before the June 2022 update arrives), harder enemies, and new tasks (quests), and the team will be changing the seasonal event rewards.
There are also plans on adding “non-battle content” to make more use of the open world and more quests where you can take on co-operatively.
Don’t expect PSO2 NGS to miraculously turn into something amazing just yet. It has the solid foundations to be a great action-focused MMORPG but give it another year or so before it’s good enough to get recommended by every player playing it.