It sucks to hear that this update has messed with the base game. I saw that people with no interest in NG were also stuck playing through the prologue before they could go back to base PSO2. I get that Sega wants people to try NG, but I can also get people's frustration that they can't play the game they want to play until they play another game!
I think I was probably being a little melodramatic, and overly lamenting the (necessary) backseat PSO2 has taken to NGS. I realized a couple things that have eased the sting, and I've probably naturalized a little bit to the other changes, but it seems my texture resolution was set to 'high,' instead of 'highest,' and my texture filtering was only set to Bilinear. So I cranked that up to Anisotropic 16x as well, and the textures at least look quite good. I still hate how dark everything is, how 'photon' elements are all drab and solid looking now, as well as enemies' textures/colors often making them look like reskinned enemies, but aside from those things, the graphical update is a bit of an improvement. I really miss the old contrast levels for the game, though. I saw someone mention that it was fixed by setting the shaders to the lowest setting, but I don't see anything like that other than in the config file, and changing that value didn't change anything in game for me.
I also realized that the preview window was punking me into thinking that the textures on clothing and accessories were all super low resolution, because they are, but only in the preview windows. No idea why it's like that, and if I could change it to not downsample the textures in those windows, that would be massive.
I was playing a bit of PSO2 today, and it's still too much fun to be really upset about. I've also been seeing more sprouts running around the lobby than I ever have. So, it's probably not really that bad.
With progression in NGS in general, I kind of wish they didn't gate it so much behind story progression. That's something I absolutely hate about XIV. I understand trying to walk people through all the features, step by step, but locking out all kinds of NPCs, and menu options until reaching a flag in the main story progression was pretty annoying as someone who was familiar with all of it from the beta.
One thing I do miss from PSO2: housing. I desperately loved housing in U and O2; had a lot of fun gatherings there, and always tried to make my quarters interesting and neat. Yeah, I can still pop over to my O2 housing, but I'd
like for NG to become my permanent MMO home (at least for the immediate future), and it can't quite be that if I don't have one!
Edit: looks like they posted a road map of future updates. Not bad!
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Yeah, fortunately there's still personal quarters, lookbooks, casino, etc in the PSO2 block, but I feel pretty confident that they intend to add most/all of those things to NGS eventually, and just didn't want to have them implemented in NGS without actually providing expanded features and design. That's just a hunch, but based on the roadmap, and the hints about the other regions to come, they're basically bringing in everything from PSO2, but upgraded: All the base classes from PSO2 are set to be included in NGS as of some time next year, including a new or Luster-esque class to use Gunslash weapons; Aelio is the forest themed region, with the next three regions appearing to be a desert theme, volcano theme, and tundra theme, which corresponds to the four areas introduced with Episode 1 of PSO2.
I think it's really their mission to sort of upgrade all the main features of PSO2 in NGS, over time. The initial release has been a little dissapointing in some ways, but I do find myself really excited about NGS's future. Particularly if it manages to retain a decent number of the people who have flocked to NGS for its release.