Phantasy Star Universe

[Eminence]

Do any of you fellas still play this? Was thinking of joining up. Never got to play the original PSO in it's hey-day but clocked countless hours on the Offline portion of it.

What's your recommendation of the game? Worth it? Or should I seek other options?

[Smidge204]

There's still a good-sized community around it. You can get onto the Japanese PC servers for free (legitimately free) though there are limitations. The only English servers still online are for the XBox 360, and IMHO it's only a matter of time until those get shut down like the PC/PS2 servers did back in March.

There are, to my knowledge, three groups working on private servers for PC users to fill the gap left by the official server closings; Newzero is the group I'm part of, Essen has a second group which split from ours early on due to ideological differences (and he stole a lot of our work in the process...) and I've heard of a third group in Spain but I don't know much about them. Unless there's a major breakthrough you probably won't see a proper private server for PSU for another year... but there are plenty of people waiting for that day.

=Smidge=

[Serephim]

Im never playing on the US servers again. They're so far behind the JP and their support is so pathetic that the servers are just....bad. IMO they should have gotten shut down with the PC/PS2 players to save us the agony. You can play on JP, but IMO it really isnt worth it to me anymore. I cant read anything, and i've already made multiple lv 80+ characters on 2 different servers. Too much work.

PSP2 is better than PSU in nearly every way, but the english release is going to tell that story too -- they're likely gonna gyp all the content and neglect us on events and DLC as well. I'm just waiting for the next entry in the series, im tired of Sega screwing over everything. Private Servers....egh, im not really gonna hold my breath. A Scthack equivalent of PSU would be the best thing ever, but i just dont see it happening anytime soon.

I recently started playing PSO again, and honestly i dont miss anything about PSU that much. IMO, In terms of design, PSO was a far superior game. After years of playing, PSU feels really, really rushed in every single aspect. Except perhaps the character customization.

[Asuma]

Yeah and the fact that you can make your own PSO server is awesom.

It's pretty stable too and has better support than what SCHTHACK use. So I've heard anyway. I use it to play singleplayer at times. Anyway, it's called "SPSOS "Tethealla".

I like PSU, but only cause the weapons and combat system.

[ila]

Pessimism aside. Some of us are going to jump into PSP2 when it comes out. You're welcome to join.

[Dan]

I haven't played much of PSU, only the offline story, but I've wasted a lifetime on PSO.

From what I saw PSU did some things very well and some not. I preferred the looser fighting - holding/releasing targets, strafing, firing while running etc - but really missed the strict combo system of PSO. That's an example of how I saw much of the game; many changes had some good and some bad. The music; really good action tunes imo but missing the sound of the isolating, unknown dungeon that the original PSO's areas had.

I enjoyed it but I was really missing the tighter comboing. I wanted the best of both worlds.