Only Free Minds Can Form A Free Society

yungeinstein

I played Neocron "1" about a year ago for several months. After amassing many apartments, and large numbers of rare parts and items, I eventually left the game and gave every bit of it away to the few people I could actually call my friends in game.

The biggest factors contributing in my departure were:

1. The game is so full of bugs that it makes it difficult to play the game.

There were huge amounts of lag (all online games will have this from time to time) and frequent crashes to desktop which would occur almost at random. There was a trade bug which would annoyingly remove all the items which you put into the trade window and place them back into your inventory. The trade bug wouldn't have been so bad except for the fact that you can only pick up and move one object at a time, and if you were trading 30 items, it could take forever. There were synchronization problems, and a whole lot of other bugs that many people reported but were never fixed.

2. The game mechanics were clunky and not very sophisticated.

While the company touts the ability to become a crafter or tradesman in-game, there is a complete and utter lack of a player run economy. In order to sell your 'wares' you have to stand in one of the main sections of the city spamming what you wanted to buy or sell. You could log in to the city terminal and read forums in-game, but often when you posted anything, it would disappear after a few minutes. This also held true for clan forum pages in-game. You were also restricted to a maximum of 5 pages of forum posts. After that, your posts wouldn't show up and there was no way to delete the older posts. There was no way to transfer money to other characters of yours unless you handed the money to someone while you logged your alt (termed mule-ing). You couldn't let people into your apartment, unless you were inside, and those people you invited in couldn't open any of your cabinets (this was good in some circumstances since people would frequently synch into other people's apartments). In essence, it was damn near impossible to trade your items from one alt to another unless you had someone's help.

3. Many of the people playing the game have no regard for new players.

Before you all go off on me because "this is a PvP game...", when some veteran player within your own faction, with whom you are allied with, walks up to you when you're 5 days old and slaughters you mercilessly and steals your quickslot items, its gone beyond PvP, and moved into grief play. There is no way for a faction to kick someone out if they frequently kill players with whom they are supposed to be allied with. There is no way for a clan to declare war on an opposing clan and have the game show you that you are at war when you encounter someone from that other clan. Unless you are uber l33t, then you have to keep your Law Enforcer chip in (a newbie protection implant) to keep from getting ganked every five minutes and losing all of your hard earned items.

When Neocron "2" came out, I thought I should give it a try. It was supposed to be a kickin expansion with tons of new items, player owned businesses and new graphics. When I logged in to the open beta, much to my surprise it was essentially the same old game just given a different look. The graphics have been converted over to direct-x 7/9. Whoever is creating the skins for the characters obviously doesn't have much experience using the tools they are using. They've gone from cyberpunk-y to cartoon-y and the animations are almost ridiculous. They did move things around quite a bit (as far as rearranging the shops), they did create a new city (Dome Of York), they did create Hacknet. But under all this smoke and mirrors, it is essentially the same old Neocron.

Before you purchase this game, I would suggest that you take a good, hard look at the posts in the Neocron forums. You'll probably be surprised at the overwhelming number of posts in there that point out this bug, or that bug, posts by players that are whining about this feature or that feature, angry posts by people who can't understand why the developers won't fix something, or can't understand why people have to be such jerks in-game.

I found this quote as part of the game reviews (located here: http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/setView/ratings/gameID/29/setRView/comments) "On a sidenote, for those saying Neocron is dead and so on, don't forget to look through the forums, this is where it all happens..."

I honestly couldn't agree with this poster more. All the action does happen on the forums. While some posts contain well thought out and well written discussions about all kinds of topics, most just contain rants and trolling by immature posters that are whining about all sorts of crap. But who wants to play a game where all the action happens OUTSIDE of the game?

Honestly though, don't just go on my word here. Go out and try the game if PvP is your thing, just don't be surprised when you experience bad customer service, grief play or a buggy game system.

To download the Neocron game go here: http://www.neocron.com
To access the Neocron forums go here: http://www.neocron.com/index.php?name=NeoContent&op=modload&file=index&pageID=27

Only Free Minds Can Form A Free Society