Phantasy Star Online 2 finally got an official release outside of Japan, and after eight years of waiting, players were excited to finally get to play this game when it released for North America last month.
But it wasn’t completely smooth sailing. For whatever reason, prior to release, Sega canceled their plans to release the game on Steam, but instead released it as a Windows App Store exclusive. Kind of frustrating, because the Windows App Store doesn’t work particularly well, especially for installing large games. I’ve had multiple problems installing large games with the Windows App Store myself, with games taking huge amounts of time to install, and even have installations fail after the download has finished. I would always opt for an alternative for downloading and installing games if such an alternative existed.
Fortunately for anyone wanting to play this newly released English language localization for the online RPG, there is a mod tool that has just been updated to support installing the game without using the Windows Store. PSO2 Tweaker is a custom made launcher for PSO2 that adds a range of additional features and options and was just updated to allow installation of the English language version of the game, independent of the Windows App Store.
There are detailed setup instructions that explain the process over here. There are quite a few steps involved in the process, so you’ll have to be prepared to methodically follow all of the instructions, but once you’re complete you’ll have a version of Phantasy Star Online 2, ready to go, without having to rely on the Windows App Store. You’ll need 70GB of free hard drive space, and the install process will take quite some time, so set aside a chunk of time where you’re not using your computer for anything else.
Microsoft perhaps won’t be super excited about this development, but you will still need to use their Store if you want to spend any money on in-game items or currency. You can simply access them via the web version of Microsoft’s store, and they will be added to your in-game account. Once you’ve installed this mod, you can’t use the Windows version of the store without forcing a reinstall, it has to be the web version.
Have you been playing Phantasy Star Online 2? Did having to use the Windows App Store turn you off from playing the game? Will you be using this mod to install the game independent of the Windows App Store, or will you just wait for a Steam release? Let us know in the comments.
