Phantasy Star Universe Private Servers

Eggbert

Eggbert

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Are there any good PSU private servers that have a lot of stuff unlocked (like online quests/updates)?
 
Clementine is the only big one I know off. They have over the last few years had people play to test stuff while editing code to get it working correctly & re-writing the server every now and then. Right now it's pretty much complete, they have done 90% of the stuff done and have done the tasks they found most difficult. Right now you can join and help test stuff/play around to get some PSU experience but personally, I would wait for the next big re-write. Apparently, this should be done within the year or into next year (I don't know any exact details though) and it should be the last one/all content released. They have been working hard for this. I know some people have not been playing and are waiting for this (like me) because levelling a character just to be re-wrote and gone is not my idea of fun. So because of that right now it's not hugely active but there is a chill small group of players who are welcoming and will help you out if you decide to play now to gather some extra knowledge.
 
Aleron Ives said:
Clementine supports only PSUv2 (AoI) on PC, not on PS/Xbox and not PSUv1 on any platform, right?
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Right. No plans for Xbox support due to XBL, PS2 limits what can be done for a smaller audience and increases workload on a small team so was not supported (...was the logic, iirc)
 
Necro, but I've been messing around with Clementine this last week. It seems like a pretty good private server, but boy have I learned why PSU is such a black sheep of the franchise.
 
There is a pretty heavy lean on getting players to the end game instead of recreating the original experience. A chunk of the game is still missing and may not return (EP2/3, NPCs, quests with a lot of shit going on in the background or with NPCs)

Also, I think the last patch made everyone a murder machine.
 
Ah, it's incomplete? I never played PSU back in the day so I had no idea. It sounds like development will be stalled for a bit going off the forums, unfortunately.

I really like the atmosphere in the game but the combat makes me mad. Why does everything I do have so much startup and recovery, yet enemies are fast, plentiful, have some really obnoxious attacks and seem to only get flinched when they feel like it? It feels like playing PSO2 without a dodge or block button, though I'm pretty sure even in that game enemies were more responsive to getting bopped in the face. The most stress-free experience I had was going Acrofighter and spamming PAs that move you around a bit to dodge at least SOME of the damage coming my way. The rest is just CHUG those -mates.

Dunno if the original game was like that though or if it's just lag/incomplete pserver jank.
 
They still work on the game but unlike here, all update notices are confined to the public Discord and occasional Wiki post.

While pretty much everything related to story mode and NPCs is missing, you still get the core game since these were geared toward the single player aspect of the game (minus something like Bruce's Dungeon, but oh well.)

I dunno what to tell you about the combat. Server ping can be a serious issue but it was always ass on Xbox 360, so it feels better on Clementine. Defense is more relevant on PSU than it is PSO but positioning is still almost half the game. With the large selection of weapons it isn't always apparent which angle you should approach either. Especially with melee characters.

But eventually you become strong enough to just faceroll groups of enemies and Tornado Dance your way to the designated point so you don't break the grouping of your other dps friends.
 
CTB said:
They still work on the game but unlike here, all update notices are confined to the public Discord and occasional Wiki post.

While pretty much everything related to story mode and NPCs is missing, you still get the core game since these were geared toward the single player aspect of the game (minus something like Bruce's Dungeon, but oh well.)

I dunno what to tell you about the combat. Server ping can be a serious issue but it was always ass on Xbox 360, so it feels better on Clementine. Defense is more relevant on PSU than it is PSO but positioning is still almost half the game. With the large selection of weapons it isn't always apparent which angle you should approach either. Especially with melee characters.

But eventually you become strong enough to just faceroll groups of enemies and Tornado Dance your way to the designated point so you don't break the grouping of your other dps friends.
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Yeah the more I play the more I'm figuring it out. It's pretty shallow and yet weirdly addictive, like the Musou games. Finding a PA that positions you nicely is super important. Also weapons with lifesteal seem very strong.

Definitely feel the lag as well, hit registration seems to be more server-side than PSO. Probably doesn't help that the server is in the Netherlands but maybe that helps it not get taken down.

And yeah I noticed the forum is dead as hell, thanks to Discord. I'm glad this server's forum is still at least a little active, it's hard to find forums that aren't ghost-towns these days.
 
devildark said:
I really like the atmosphere in the game but the combat makes me mad. Why does everything I do have so much startup and recovery, yet enemies are fast, plentiful, have some really obnoxious attacks and seem to only get flinched when they feel like it? It feels like playing PSO2 without a dodge or block button, though I'm pretty sure even in that game enemies were more responsive to getting bopped in the face. The most stress-free experience I had was going Acrofighter and spamming PAs that move you around a bit to dodge at least SOME of the damage coming my way. The rest is just CHUG those -mates.

Dunno if the original game was like that though or if it's just lag/incomplete pserver jank.
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PSU's combat is for the most part, directionless. And didn't become otherwise until PSP2 released and even then there were massive glaring issues, such as the entire design being fundamentally incompatible with Forces. There was little real benefit to playing any class other than Hunter in PSU/AotI, as they were the only ones with access to Photon Arts and thus the only classes with any actual layers to their gameplan.

The experience of playing a Non-Hunter was watching people equip an Axe, immediately detonate the area with Anga Jarbroga or just melt everything with Dus Majarra, and then blast off at the speed of sound with Tornado Dance to clear the next room while you walk like a pleb lol

Ranger was mind-numbingly boring. Elements (and status effects) were limited to bullets and there were no extra buttons to press, so you could literally just get a turbo controller and play Ranger at maximum efficiency. Not joking.

The life of a Force was just a constant, slow, endless slog of desperately trying to not be completely worthless. Everything about the class was poorly designed. Spells needed to be manually grinded which took forever considering there were like 50 of them. And they only evolved in 10-level increments, with the first 2 evolutions of most attack Technics being absolutely tiny and worthless meaning you essentially needed them to be 21+ before you could even keep up with other classes .

Also unlike Hunters with photon arts and Rangers with weapons like Launchers/Shots, Forces were completely left out of the ability to hit multi-targeted enemies OR cause knockdown / launch to smaller ones....yet they were also the slowest, squishiest, least damaging classes. God forbid you played a Human or Newman force because the game punished you for it. Extremely squishy with no ability to use SUVs or Beast Forms for tight situations.

You essentially needed to hunt a Har/Quick unit to be able to use a Rod in any mid-to-high level content because of how utterly sloggish the technics were. You couldn't crowd-control enemies with Techniques so by the time you hit S-rank missions you were literally just getting run up and yeeted on, forcing pretty much all Fo players to use like the same 3-4 spells no matter what they were fighting.....Which actively made you weaker, because your wpn damage relied on how many same-element spells you had equipped.


/rant

thinking back on PSU it's kind of sad how bad its gameplay issues really were. Every time I think about joining Clementine, i remind myself how utterly bad the design decisions were and just opt out. Sadly, unlike PSO that game is not worth returning to in an unaltered, preserved state. And most people who attempt to rebalance the game do it the way Sega would, which just isn't very appealing to me.
 
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someone clearly never played psp2i where forces are like the best class and arguably the most fun.

Forces were compatible with the PSP2 changes, they just forgot to give them a way to build chain, which was fixed.
 
It's interesting to play just as someone who played a lot of PSO2 back in the day. Seeing how they tried to fix some of the things PSU buggered up and how sometimes it worked, sometimes they just made it even worse.

Like the field lobbies, they're a very neat concept that makes the game feel more like a "world" but it also splits the playerbase up a ton since, to my knowledge, there's no general quest counter where you can just see what anybody anywhere is doing and join in. PSO2 fixed this by going back to a singular lobby.

Then there's Photon Arts, where a large chunk of them are utterly useless so you end up just spamming a select few. PSO2 KINDA fixed this for some classes by encouraging you to rotate between different PAs for a damage boost. They also improved how PP works by making it all like Hunter in PSU.

As for how bad the PSU enemy design was (ie. their attacks, not how they look), PSO2 added blocking, dodging (and iframes to some PAs) so you could be more aggressive and not eat a million hits while chugging dimates/trimates to stay alive. On the downside, all these defensive techniques were so abusable (and they made them even more ridiculous with the successor classes) that the game was a cakewalk unless they made everything a 1-2hit KO which they did in harder quests.

PSO2's music was also a huge improvement. PSU has a few nice tracks but a LOT of stinkers and they don't change when you get in/out of combat.

Story is... does any PS game after PSO have a good story?

Anyway the game's pretty flawed but it's got a nice community and it's still fun to just log in and whack things with people from time to time. PSO2 was also very flawed but I had a lot of fun with it on JP and I think I'd get a lot more out of it if it got it's own private server with custom quests and freedom from SEGA's monetization methods. It also really bugs me that, instead of building on what PSO2 did do right, SEGA decided to chase the "make a mediocre BotW clone" trend and alienate at least half their playerbase.

Lastly, I don't know why PSO2 didn't bring back the Beastmen after them being in 3 consecutive games and it bugs me because I love them and their funny faces.
 
When it comes to PSU -> PSO2, it's more accurate to go from PSP2i -> PSO2 as most early PSO2 concepts are lifted straight from Infinity, such as the PP bar, the chain system (for Gunner), and certain attacks (Ramegid Zero is a clone of Foverse). Deumans, blocking, and dodging were also from Infinity.

SEGA fixed most of PSU's problems by making new games, with Portable 1 having many improvements over Universe (such as the weapon upgrade system), Portable 2 having more improvements, and then Infinity having even more, with none of these mechanical changes getting backported into Universe, only content.
 
Yeah I know, I was just comparing the differences between main MMO entries. Would be great if PSP2i actually had a proper online lobby thing going on, I like that game a lot. PPSSPP netplay works well most of the time but it ain't the same.
 
Matt said:
someone clearly never played psp2i where forces are like the best class and arguably the most fun.

Forces were compatible with the PSP2 changes, they just forgot to give them a way to build chain, which was fixed.
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Thats the kind of wonky oversight that bothered me about PSU lol. That wasn't fixed until an entire new entry was released, and one that didn't even get a real EN version at that. By PSP2i they were much better to play but I was kind of done with PSU at that point.

By the time of PSP2i, I had way more fun on Hunter and Ranger, which finally was given a secondary attack finally bringing them in line with Hunters. Force though was still essentially the same as always except this time they actually could play the game, which was nice to observe.

PSO2 fixed quite a few things wrong with PSU. The main thing about PSO2 is that it finally got rid of the 1-2-3 Combo system that PSO was carefully built around, that PSU took but clearly didn't really know what to do with. The majority of PSO2's issues are around its execution, not the gameplay itself. PSO2 was actually quite enjoyable, it's just the lack of anything meaningful to do that really hurt the game long-term.

One thing I actually did enjoy about PSU was....well, everything about it other than its actual gameplay. The 3 planets, the clothing and weapon manufacturers, the shield lines being visible, customization system, 2-handed weapon system, the field hubs and missions following a tour of the planet, all of those were amazing ideas.

The story was also interesting, especially around the time of AotI when it started following Laia. Ethan was way more interesting as a supporting character than a main IMO. PSU vanilla's main story was cheesy as all hell but I appreciated the confidence the game had in its vision. Unfortunately, that vision was kind of tossed out the window when PSP2 released, which kind of threw all of PSU's original theming out the window and went for a much more fanservicey, anime-centric shell which persisted well into PSO2.

I think that's why I didn't bother playing PSP2i tbh. The series just felt like it reinvented itself entirely....looking at the opening cinematics for Ambition of the Illuminous vs. PSPortable 2 you'd be forgiven for thinking it was an entirely different series.


/rant2, man i really can't stop typing when it comes to bitching about PSU. Sorry lol. Hundreds of hours and heartbreak.
 
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The closest I ever got into Phantasy Star Universe is when there was a demo that everyone was playing on Xbox 360, and you could grind hard on the same 4 maps, try to get a small pool of rare items like Durnadel, and you could be the 1 percent that had a mag that could fight with you.

My question to ya'll is, what's worth going back too? I burnt out of PSO2 well before it got localized in the US. And I always liked these "console" styled MMOs, that sported online/offline play, and you can experience the scope of one game instead of an MMO that's going to forever expand and bloat.

PSU sounds like it's the most flawed. But maybe had the benefits of being on stronger hardware for more immersive hubs to walk around?

PSP1 seems like it gets replaced by PSP2

It seems like getting PSP2i is your best bet, if you want to see what the Universe series was at it's peak & best. But that's just the impression I'm getting. Thoughts?
 
I'd say at least try PSU Clementine since it's surprisingly active. I usually see around 90 players online when I'm on, though of course you see about half of that at most thanks to the field lobbies. People are pretty friendly too. The server's also relatively high-rate so you can experience a good chunk of the game without too much investment.

PSP1 I don't remember really feeling significantly better than PSU, though iirc they did fix the drops in that game meaning you can actually get rare weapons drop ala PSO instead of having to craft them. Probably better off just playing PSP2i unless you're really curious.
 
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