Skyforge has made it's way to PS4, but no dice for Xbox One. Faster than it took Perfect World to port Neverwinter and Star Trek Online to console, these no-purchase free-to-play MMOs are trying to fill the whole in the MMOARPG market where consoles are concerned. The PS4 consumer market is not an easy beast to tame. Elder Scrolls Online tried to fill this gap and made great strides to get there, too. A third of the Elder Scrolls Online player-base is on PS4 according to Polygon's interview with Matt Firor. With the recent trends moving people out of ESO's camp and into others, players are grasping desperately for something to keep them on their daily grind.
For those who are out of the loop, the way that these free-to-play games make their money is micro-transactions. On the PlayStation store, the minimum transaction is five dollars. That means big money for PlayStation and Allods Team-- both companies known for puttin' it up for their bucks. Allods Team has made a nice chunk of change from their oldest MMO IP Allods Online. They learned their lessons from Allods Online and pumped them into Skyforge and you can definitely feel that flavor if you've played both games. I liked Allods Online, but the pay-to-progress nature of it's gameplay when last I played it didn't seem like a solid strategy. Regardless of how I felt about it, Allods Online still has a player-base large enough to continually support the game to this day.
So, we come to the crux of the matter: I played Skyforge on PC when it first came out and wasn't a big fan of the experience. The game was full of bugs and the control scheme was not my cup of tea, not to mention the fact that my brand-new-- at the time-- laptop couldn't handle the amount of emitters and polygons in the social spaces. I played a couple of weeks and just couldn't take it anymore. However, when I saw that the game was now on PS4, I had to try it because I liked the lore and the look of the game. I also figured that I could afford to give it another shot because it was a free download, so why not, right?
Launching Skyforge on the PS4, it felt more epic than I remembered. The music seemed better and the colors seemed to be more vibrant. I saw that the game had changed quite a bit since I had played it on PC. The beginning is mildly different, but it now gives you a better sense of what it is to become an immortal. The player must kill enemy invaders from multiple different races and factions to protect Aelion, but I'm glad to see that there are more of these in the game since when I played.
The control scheme with a PS4 controller takes a little getting used to if you play mostly shooters and other kinds of action games. You'll realize that it's a press-modifier system akin to that of Neverwinter or Star Trek Online, or Dragon Age: Inquisition-- the kind that you'll see in most MMOs and sometimes RPGs that are ported to console from PC. The reason is mostly because of the amount of buttons on the controller are not enough for all of the commands that a player needs to have access to.
The way that you receive loot has changed. Now, the loot drops straight from bosses, rather than looting a chest. Players can now style their character directly from the menu. Getting into and out of dungeons is faster and easier. Amassing followers/worshipers seems to be beaucoup amounts easier. These are definitely some huge quality-of-life changes to this game. All-in-all, I'd say that this game is definitely worth playing on the PS4 if you like ARPGs. Good fortune on the path to godhood, Immortals.
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