ArcheAge Review

Pay-to-Win reputation

Where ArcheAge falls is the way it was handled by Trion. The game was sometimes considered pay-to-win. In its current state, from what I can tell, ArcheAge is in a pretty good position. However, the damage may already have been done to ArcheAge’s once-good reputation. This does not prevent both available servers from being highly populated at the time of writing.

The game may be free-to-play and has moved away from many of the pay-to-win aspects that once plagued it, but unless you can actually play it, avoiding crashes and startup problems with the Steam version, then it doesn’t really matter.

Established players and characters seem to be fine for the most part. As far as I could tell from my tests, it really only crashes in a certain area when showing users how to use gliders. As this is a non-skippable section, however, it makes it impossible to create a new character, at least for me.

Final verdict

While ArcheAge may be better now than it has been in the last couple of years, it is by no means in a very good state of playability. If you have an existing character or know how to get around crashes, you will have a great time in the world of ArcheAge. It gives you the freedom to really play your way and live the life of a noble king or sneaky bandit, or anything in between.