In A Realm Reborn, you can also equip a few spells from other classes that you’ve trained up. It’s not a problem at first when you simply don’t have that many abilities, but you eventually earn a lot of skills from your class and later from your job (a sort of advanced class you eventually unlock). So, yes, you can still access all of your spells, but it becomes a lot harder to keep track of them, especially when you need to cast a specific one immediately or else your party dies. So while you can comfortably map all of the spells and abilities you’ll need for soloing to the D-pad and face buttons, you’ll have to put situational skills on another set, which you can switch to by using the L1 and R1 buttons. What doesn’t work so wellĭungeon runs require a lot of teamwork and precise skill use.
This helps to make menu navigation, a huge problem with the PS3 version, much more manageable, even though you’ll have a bit of an awkward time moving the sensitive cursor around the screen. Basically, you can swipe your finger on it to move a cursor around the screen, sort of like how you would with a mouse on a PC.
The other noticeable inclusion in the PS4 version is the use of the controller’s touchpad. The MMO runs smoothly and offers some dazzling sights, like colorful sunsets on the beach and towering castles ominously lurking in the distance. While the PS3 version suffered from constant frame rate issues and a lack of sharpness, A Realm Reborn on the PS4 definitely looks like a next-gen game. Of course, everything nice I’ve said so far about the PS4 version was also true on the PS3, but the graphical difference between the two is staggering. It makes maneuvering and travelling much more enjoyable.
You have a full 360 degree range of motion available at the disposal of your left thumb. However, the PlayStation 4’s analog stick provides for, well, analog movement. Most MMO players have become accustomed to navigating with the WASD keyboard buttons, which somewhat awkwardly causes our avatars to strafe and back step more than any normal person ever would if they had to fight a dragon. The same goes for gathering and crafting, which use their own abilities that you can also map to the controller. While you might have a difficult time targeting and accessing all of your skills in a dungeon, you can easily map out all the abilities you’ll need for solo questing to the controller’s face buttons and D-pad. Most of the quests you tackle alone just require your basic offensive abilities to beat, and you can take as much time doing most of them as you want. Solo quests are also easier than multiplayer dungeons, which involve intricate strategies to take down difficult bosses. Soloing is usually less stressful, since your actions can’t potentially kill your entire party. As with most MMOs, your activities in A Realm Reborn split between group-based adventures and individual endeavors, like questing and crafting.