Area and Difficulty Progression?

Ludosus

Ludosus

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Hey everyone. I'm new to Blue Burst, but I'm a long time player of Episode I&II on the GameCube. I'm wondering about the area and difficulty progression in this iteration of PSO. It seems that all areas and difficulty settings are unlocked from the get-go, meaning you can take a newly created character straight to ultimate ruins. Is it meant to be like this? I remember enjoying unlocking the areas and difficulties one-by-one on the GC. It seems kind of lame to have everything open from the start. Was it like this on the original Sega servers for Blue Burst or not? Thoughts?
 
Locked areas are exclusive to offline mode as far as I know. Blue burst is meant for online play, thus it's open. You of course wont be able to jump right into certain areas blindly, you'll have to grind to be able to even play there without dying, but yes it's meant to be like this. Government and Storymode progression still has to be earned on Ephinea though, so you have that at least.
 
All areas are open sure, but unless you join a lobby with other high level players you won't be surviving for long in there. As Nikki said, Government missions still have to be unlocked manually, but this goes for difficulties as well: you won't even be able to join a lobby running Ultimate if your character isn't the right level, and the same goes for Hard and Very Hard. In case you forgot, the levels to unlock them are 20 (Hard), 40 (Very Hard) and 80 (Ultimate). Thankfully EXP sharing and individual loot (both of which weren't present in the original) make grinding a lot less painful, together with Solo mode, if you really wanna play alone. If you're not fond of being carried by other players during your first few levels, play Solo, it's made to be more manageable, and you should at least be able to survive the Forest monsters and grind till you're able to join Multiplayer. You probably know most of this, seeing as you're a returning player, just thought I'd give you a refresher. Hope to see ya in game!
 
BB never used the pillars to unlock areas the way previous versions did. Sega origincally forced you to play through every Government quest in every difficulty to unlock the freeplay areas, but enough people complained about it that Sega eventually relented and set all freeplay areas to be open from the start.

This doesn't really change anything if you want to level a new character by yourself, though. The monsters have the same stats as in GC, so just play through the areas in order in a solo team to get more or less the same experience as you would offline, sans having to touch the pillars or talk to the NPCs.
 
I remember being stuck on ruins because I didn't activate the pillar in the mines and Caves IIRC on GC. Also, I finished ep1 with ONLY a saber (and brand and buster)...and tech. I didn't know sword and knife.

like ep2, the seabed was off until you killed gryphon...don't remember about CCA tought.
 
Thanks for the comments everyone. Okay, I guess I'll have to get used to having everything open from the start. However, I will miss the sense of progression of unlocking areas and difficulties. One of my favourite things to do on the GC version was to start a new character, give them a bunch of great equipment and other items found with other characters, then plough through all of the areas and difficulties in sequence. One of my greatest achievements was taking a solo fonewearl through the entire game, beating ultimate Dark Falz at level 56 and ultimate Olga Flow at level 68. Good times.
 
"Muut, Ditts, Poumn"...cant enter ruins without unsealing it (jk btw for the ones who doesnt get my humour xD)...just imagine your progress, have fun, the good times will occur on ephinea as well, just feeling way better;) mhh...also welcome to our server^^
 
You can just play the government quests, which need to be unlocked, if you want your sense of progression. That's what I did when I first started on Ephinea, was pretty fun.
 
Also, just out of curiosity, was Blue Burst originally like this when it was officially released by Sega? Or did you have to unlock areas and difficulties like in the previous iterations of the game? Is it just a quirk of the Ephinea servers to not keep track of that portion of the game?
 
Go back and read Ives’ post again.

I’ve never played on a BB server that didn’t have all areas unlocked from the start.
 
Also, I just realized that the harder difficulties are only available after achieving a certain level (such as level 80 for Ultimate). I recall that this was the case on the GC version, but only for multiplayer. For single player mode, difficulties were unlocked by beating Dark Falz or Olga Flow, which would unlock the next difficulty for that episode (for instance, beating Dark Falz on Very Hard would unlock Ultimate for Episode 1). This meant that it was possible to unlock Ultimate even if you were under level 80 (I recall playing Ultimate with a level 50 FOnewearl on the GC version). It's unfortunate that this feature didn't make its way to Blue Burst, as it was fun to push the limits of your characters by trying to unlock Ultimate mode at the lowest level you possibly could.
 
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