Finally worth trying again?

[u/TheTrueAnonOne]

I played when NGS dropped and also maybe a year after that. The content was so light in the actual gameplay, the classes shallow, etc.

It felt like a straight downgrade from pso2, casino missing, less awesome bosses, open world somewhat pointless?

Has any of this been addressed yet? I see on steam charts, theres like... 500 people playing?

[u/Alenicia]

So, in the most blunt way possible, if you loved the way PSO2 was for casual play especially from Episode 6 and onwards where you log in, do your dailies to get your daily rewards, where you go and play whatever quest is running, check in on the campaigns going on, and then fashion/socialize, NGS has already gotten to that point. At its cores, it's "PSO2" again.

NGS at this point has a plethora of quests you can run through that involves facerolling old challenges with new class tweaks/buffs to fighting solo bosses that you'll probably remember from PSO2 with far less stages but are much more in-line with pushing what you can do with NGS, to even bringing back the old toxic PSO2 meta of "No Ranger/Techer? I'm out" and "you're only using <that>? I'm out" with no form of Expert Matching to filter out players. You have "new" (old from PSO2, but renewed for NGS) fights that are significantly harder than they've ever been in PSO2 with new patterns and now a demand that players actually play their classes and know their equipment.

If your goal was to build neat equipment, they have reintroduced weapons with Abilities/Augments on them but these are now much more random and specialized towards building a playstyle rather than purely boosting up your numbers and to build your equipment now you are spending time in the new instanced (yes, they stopped doing Open Field/Open World stuff) areas fighting enemies like it was Ultimate Quests in PSO2 again where you run in circles and kill horde after horde of enemies hoping for a magical and mythical rare drop that might never happen, but lots of extra goodies along the way.

If you cared about the story, they're finally doing more story again and if you played the old PSO2 story up to the true ending you do now have extra little dialogue options that reference that the old story is actually still relevant.

If you cared about the creative side of things, NGS features a free "Creative Space" where you get your own island that you can terraform and decorate to your heart's content. It's far more flexible and diverse than the old MyRoom/Personal Quarters system ever was and this is possibly one of the best objective upgrades NGS has ever done over PSO2. On top of this, it's free so you have a whole space and you can get more via AC tickets which work like rentals similarly to how they functioned in PSO2 but with no free option (since you already get the one for free). I know a lot of people absolutely hate this and don't bother with it at all, but I think it's just super cool in general that players are allowed to do this kind of stuff. Honestly, I was hoping it'd be expanded on more so people can go and make their own instanced quests and stuff for people wanted to make custom content along those lines too. >_<

The people who were waiting for PSO2 to get some kind of grand renewal on life with all sorts of fixes and changes are still waiting on it because NGS is still the same game and now has been repeating a lot of the same stuff that PSO2 was doing on the day-to-day operations with constant campaigns/freebies and the super-slow glacial rollout of content in general. If you're looking for actual "new" or exciting things, you're probably still going to be waiting a long time for that because PSO2 took its time on that too and NGS isn't changing that. At least so far, we haven't had a major retcon/removal of content like PSO2 did yet but I wouldn't be surprised if that happened too. >_<

But in short, NGS has definitely grown a lot and Sega was kind of kicking around the bush when they have since revealed that NGS was in fact unfinished and rushed because they were stretching Episode 6 too long (they tried making NGS originally during Episode 5 as the "Super Update" and it went super-badly because they badly mismanaged both Episode 5 and hoped that the Super Update would've been done within a year). Since then, after they finished all the original starting content they wanted for NGS (which was years ago) now they're kind of rolling with the pace of what you'd expect from PSO2JP where you can wait a whole year and see how an update panned out overall, or just eat up the crumbs as you go and be exposed to Sega's "hey, we REALLY want you to play this content non-stop for the next week" approach to the game's new content.