I was in the beta and really didn't think much of it. I'll walk you through it (as it was).
Character Creation: 3 races. A handful of hairstyles and faces each. Pretty standard stuff. The most annoying thing of all is that there is (was) no gender selection. All Moon Elves are female, all orcs are male. Humans have both, but related to class choice. So all of one class is female, all of the others are male.
Newbie Experience: This wasn't too bad, although it did get you into the grind right away. You get told to speak to Person A and when you find him he wants you to kill a handful of Creature B. When you do that you speak to him again, get your minor reward and he tells you to do the same thing again but this time you need an item to drop. After that, repeat for higher level creatures ad nauseum. Every so often you'll find an NPC who will give you an item as a quest reward. The rewards I saw were just items you could buy at any town merchant.
Combat: Once again, rather uninspired. Double click to attack a creature. Auto-swing, auto-fire, auto-staff fire. Creature dead, xp gained. Potion spamming sucks. I know that gamers seem to hate being healers, but I don't think potion spamming is the way around it. You get special attacks at certain levels, but because of the non-potion mana regen rate, you can only really afford to use them once per fight without running out of potions really quickly and costing yourself money.
General Stuff: My biggest problem was with loot. It automatically pops out of the corpse and lays on the ground for you to pick up. Fine, but the icons were very difficult to see against the ground, and impossible to see when the creature corpse was large and obscuring it.
Also, you couldn't just travel round to look at the scenery. Venture too far from town and you enter very narrow valleys populated with hostile creatures. So trying to scout as a solo archer is near impossible. Silly when that's part of what makes that class fun.
I couldn't even stand to level up enough to get involved in PvP, and maybe I missed out on something there. That is the whole point, after all. But when you need to put in countless hours just to get there, it's really not worth it.
I was above the minimum specs, but still had to run in DX7/8 mode. As soon as I enabled any DX9 effects my frame rate went through the floor. My computer is fairly old now, but can handle plenty of newer DX9 games without any trouble.
It's a bad sign when the newsletter has a paragraph entitled "But I played the beta and was unimpressed", and that's exactly what my end of beta feedback said. I explained the above points and told them to stop buying cheap Korean RPGs-by-numbers and concentrate on putting some effort into developing quality titles.
I remember my Spectrum days with fondness, when Codemasters were the finest game producers around. I miss really good titles like Dizzy and Pro Mountain Bike Sim. I asked them about the chance of a Dizzy revival a couple of years ago and they said that it wouldn't happen due to licensing reasons. I was gutted.
Back on Topic: I may give this another try since they said they have changed some stuff since beta, but I'm not going to rearrange my life to fit it in. It will take a serious rework to remove the grind and get people to PvP faster. And since PvP is what this game is all about, that is very important.
Sorry for the length of this post, but I hope it helps out some people who haven't played.
Comments
I was in the beta and really didn't think much of it. I'll walk you through it (as it was).
Character Creation:
3 races. A handful of hairstyles and faces each. Pretty standard stuff. The most annoying thing of all is that there is (was) no gender selection. All Moon Elves are female, all orcs are male. Humans have both, but related to class choice. So all of one class is female, all of the others are male.
Newbie Experience:
This wasn't too bad, although it did get you into the grind right away. You get told to speak to Person A and when you find him he wants you to kill a handful of Creature B. When you do that you speak to him again, get your minor reward and he tells you to do the same thing again but this time you need an item to drop. After that, repeat for higher level creatures ad nauseum. Every so often you'll find an NPC who will give you an item as a quest reward. The rewards I saw were just items you could buy at any town merchant.
Combat:
Once again, rather uninspired. Double click to attack a creature. Auto-swing, auto-fire, auto-staff fire. Creature dead, xp gained. Potion spamming sucks. I know that gamers seem to hate being healers, but I don't think potion spamming is the way around it. You get special attacks at certain levels, but because of the non-potion mana regen rate, you can only really afford to use them once per fight without running out of potions really quickly and costing yourself money.
General Stuff:
My biggest problem was with loot. It automatically pops out of the corpse and lays on the ground for you to pick up. Fine, but the icons were very difficult to see against the ground, and impossible to see when the creature corpse was large and obscuring it.
Also, you couldn't just travel round to look at the scenery. Venture too far from town and you enter very narrow valleys populated with hostile creatures. So trying to scout as a solo archer is near impossible. Silly when that's part of what makes that class fun.
I couldn't even stand to level up enough to get involved in PvP, and maybe I missed out on something there. That is the whole point, after all. But when you need to put in countless hours just to get there, it's really not worth it.
I was above the minimum specs, but still had to run in DX7/8 mode. As soon as I enabled any DX9 effects my frame rate went through the floor. My computer is fairly old now, but can handle plenty of newer DX9 games without any trouble.
It's a bad sign when the newsletter has a paragraph entitled "But I played the beta and was unimpressed", and that's exactly what my end of beta feedback said. I explained the above points and told them to stop buying cheap Korean RPGs-by-numbers and concentrate on putting some effort into developing quality titles.
I remember my Spectrum days with fondness, when Codemasters were the finest game producers around. I miss really good titles like Dizzy and Pro Mountain Bike Sim. I asked them about the chance of a Dizzy revival a couple of years ago and they said that it wouldn't happen due to licensing reasons. I was gutted.
Back on Topic:
I may give this another try since they said they have changed some stuff since beta, but I'm not going to rearrange my life to fit it in. It will take a serious rework to remove the grind and get people to PvP faster. And since PvP is what this game is all about, that is very important.
Sorry for the length of this post, but I hope it helps out some people who haven't played.