I had been seeing the press on this one and decided to give it a try after Janey met one of the devs. The fact that there is no subscription fee made it even more appealing.
I played most of the weekend and made it to level 13 so here is a quick review.
First off, as should ALWAYS be the case, they fixed a few of the constant nags we all have about most MMORPGS.
Logging in takes about 20 seconds from the time you double click the desktop icon till you are ready to play. Logging out is immediate, either select logout and pop back to the login window or click the little X and Boom, back to desktop.
Character creation is not even worth mentioning, one race (Human- YAWN!!), 6 professions, are you a dude or a chick, pick you hairdo and move along. PvP opens it's up a little but more about that later. You start out in happy bunny land and do a few missions then go 2 years into the future after a large devestation has happened.
Death penalty is gone for the most part. Everything outside of town is instanced and you only take a hit while you're in an instance. You lose a percentage of your stats every time you take a death so it doesn't take long to make an instance undoable. Pop back to town and you're back to normal but the instance resets (which means you have to kill everything yet again). The good news is you never lose xp or items or money.
Travel is easy, just open the map, click a town and Boom, you're there. The bad news is that you have to get to the town thru the wilderness or a mission first but to me, that's called playing the game but it can be tough. Chat in town is full of people offereing to "run" people to this town or that one.
There are no servers to pick, you just get 4 characters per account, that's it. 4 characters is not a problem because there is nothing new to do with a different character. Everyone starts in the same place with pretty much the same mission progression. If you love your alts, you're gonna hate this game. However, you get to pick a primary skill at character creation and get to choose a secondary skill set thru a series of missions that lets you try out all the other professions.
Crafting is not crafting, crafting is gathering random crap, salvaging it into materials and and trading the materials for a shiny new axe or piece of armor. Weapons drop but armor, except for shields, does not.
Probably the coolest thing about this game, which I experienced for the first time last night, is that you can make what they call an RP character (described above) and do the treadmill or a create a maxed out, PvP only character. That's right, install the game, create an account, make a fully equipped, maxed out PvP character and start kicking ass. Take note you other game makers,
THIS IS THE WAY TO DO IT. No bullshit, no 6 months slogging to level 90, just go kick some ass. There are three different types of PvP, guild, friends or 4 on 4. I don't have any friends so I made a big honking warrior and went into the 4 on 4. I literally just clicked thru the defaults on the character and Boom, there he is. I teamed up with 3 complete strangers, the gates opened and it's balls to the wall. You get to keep fighting till you get defeated and we won 7 straight matches. It's arena type matches, either get the most kills (you res automatically if you die) or annihilate the other team (last team standing wins). So, no more level 50 one shotting a level 30 then spitting on him, everyone is max level and while balance is a myth, it really does seem to be a pretty level playing field. I know our team had a healer, some kind of mage and I believe our advantage was two warriors. Warriors don't seem to be really tanky but they can deal some damage. It was amazingly fun and the best part, it requires no investement of any kind to play.
Back to the normal game play. More of the same ol' thing. Kill monsters, get xp, kill more monsters, level, get a new skill, kill more monsters, get some xp, die, do a mission and kill some more monsters, die, carry this thing to that guy while killing more monsters. One thing they did right here was henchmen. You can put together a group of real people or, if you hate people like I do, just talk some henchmen into going with you. It doesn't cost anything but your henchmen take their share of xp and gold. You get all the drops though. You have absolutely no control over the henchmen, they follow you and attack what you attack. I have to say that their AI is pretty good as is the monster AI. The more intelligent mobs seem to go right for the healer and their healers will run from you. You can also just go into the wilderness alone but you won't last long.
They actually have a bit of a story and it's not too bad. They have small regular type mission and they big complex cooperative missions. The big missions advance the story line and even have little cut scenes which you get to play a part in. I've never, ever played any game, MMORPG or otherwise where I gave two shits about the story and while this is pretty much the same, it's really not too awfully bad.
The other players in this game are pretty much what they are in every other game. Lots of people crowded around in various spots dancing and emoting various random garbage. People fighting, spamming, cussing in global chat. I got an invite to a guild for some reason, must be my winning smile, so joined for lack of anything better to do. They seem like decent enough people. They had an auction last night for some runes (I have no idea what they do) and I heard the guild master talking about kicking some guy for scamming a newbie. Global chat is silent in instances Thank God but you can still hear guild chatter if you chose.
I would give the RP game a 6.5 because of all the things they got right but not higher because, while they did a lot of things right, it's still pretty much the same ol thing.
On the other hand, while I don't know if there is a point to the PvP game (I got some points of some kind), I give it a 9 just on implementation alone. If you're into PvP, give this one a try.
That's about it. I'm sure I'll think of more later on.
