Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Lofty Promises -- No chance to meet them
So I got my open beta invite to Alganon yesterday, and I am disappointed in it. I decided to just do some brief play time, and I will play some more tonight, because it's Beta and things change and QoL did the smart thing and extended the Beta until Dec. 1st. That being said I wanted to touch on some things I noticed about the game.
I know a lot of people in the game were talking about it, what I found odd were the number of people that had already gained the fanboi mentality over it. You can't point out a single problem or ask a question without one barking at you to figure it out yourself or leave. A huge turnoff. If the community and it's rabid fans can't tell you the difference then how are you going to?
I'll start though with the positive parts.
- Easy to download and install.
- Low System Reqs
- Easy to get into (this is a con as well that I will mention later).
- Very few major issues with the game itself.
- Interesting Study System
- Built in Wowhead/Thottbot/Wowwiki type feature.
The Bad Parts.
- Very Choppy Game play
- Server Lag was awful
- Easy to get into because it played exactly like World of Warcraft.
- Graphics lacked depth/looked highly outdated
- Very Confusing Map/Locations
- No character customization (it's like a poor version of WoW).
- Only 2 Races and 4 Classes to choose from
- Class Confusion in the Talent Trees
- No PvP
- Lack of Content
- Family System and Library Meaningless
I know it seems like some of the bad parts might be viewed by some as a positive but let me go ahead and talk about what I mean. I have been playing MMO's for quite some time, before that I played Pen and Paper RPGs. One of the standard parts of any RPG should be Class Continuity. People pick certain classes to fulfill certain roles. Yes, some games, including the MMO standard WoW, tend to blur class roles a good bit. In Alganon it's not blurred, it's all over the map.
Take for instance the Ranger Class. It seems like standard fare -- and it mostly is. You have one Tree focused on pure damage. Then you have 2 other trees, 1 Healer and 1 Tanking. I am not joking here. You have Rangers (aka Hunters from WoW) with the ability to tank and heal. Why? This is only going to cause more issues than it will solve. (And yes, I know this is from the same mind that gave the world Horizons and thought it was a good idea to change classes willy nilly.) Can you imagine trying to find a group as a warrior and being told they don't need a tank, because they have a Ranger or even a Magus Tanking. (Yes, Magus the Mage class even has a tanking tree.)
Class confusion like this is not only a turn off it is going to cause homogenization between the classes and lead to some really pissed off people. I thought that WoW had one to many trees for each class, and this one has the issue of the wrong trees, and not enough classes.
The game itself, in terms of getting into it is pretty easy. This is good and bad, because as I pointed out the reason it is so easy to get into is that it is nearly an exact mirror image of World of Warcraft. People don't like hearing the word clone, so I won't say it. Clearly, it's not an exact clone, rather it's an undulating, barely formed, semi-transparent mirror image of WoW. It lacks any of the polish, any of the content and any of the customization. What it leaves you with is a UI that is an exact copy of Warcraft's but somehow dulled down. (http://img80.imageshack.us/img80/7884/ripoffscamuw5.jpg)
That screenshot doesn't show the Main Menu (and all the submenus which look exactly like Warcrafts), it doesn't show the talent tree, or the ability book, the bags, and all the other UI resources which look exactly like dulled down versions. (It's a hardcoded UI that uses LUA which means more than likely they stole all of Warcraft's UI resources changed the artwork [i.e, dulled down the colors and borders] and called it a day.)
Now, I did play, and as I said will continue to play but I wanted to touch on the current world lag and why it should bother all the beta testers and everyone else. Now, one person said "it's because they run debugging software" and this may be true, but if at 6 gigs of ram and AMD quad core Black 9550 processor I get this lag, then there is some serious issues going on with the game. I was running the game and it took a steady 3-4% of my processor, so it does really have low end reqs. The issue I had was that it was peaking at nearly 1gig of memory being used. Which is a lot memory for so little CPU Cycles.
The mobs when trying to fight kind of jumped around and skidded into spot, sometimes behind you, sometimes in front. Lots of loot lag to be found. It made the game slightly more unpolished feeling and on a Beta Server, it's not acceptable to have that sort of lag because it makes testing the game that much more difficult.
The game play is in a nut shell -- World of Warcraft. You have the same professions, the same limitations on professions, you have classes that play exactly the same way, you have nothing remotely unique. Nothing. Your Soldier will play exactly like it played in Warcraft. Even some of the skills are identical (Shield Slam and Force (Heroic) Strike, Mangle (Rend), Shout (Battle Shout)). It is of course in the nature of all MMOs to be similar but this is essentially an exact copy.
Now to step back a moment to the idea of Magus and Rangers tanking, here is one of the fatal flaws in the scheme of it all. The creators have given each class a core task -- i.e., Rangers do damage with Bows, Magus do damage with spells, and Soldiers Tank. Now each class has 3 talent trees. 1 of those talent trees augments the natural abilities of the class and the other two give them skills they to do a secondary skill. So the idea that you can have a Magus or Ranger tank has a couple major flaws.
One, even if you could have one of them tank would you want to? You could make your Kia Rio go 150 MPH with some tweaks, or for the same price as the Rio with the tweaks you could get a Mustang that can do 200. The idea of having anyone without innate tanking abilities tank fails because some of those base skills get augmented by the tanking tree. If you are trying to tank, it's easier to use a shield slam that gets a ton of defensive bonuses for aggro then it is to use Frost Bolts that primarily cause damage and then might cause some aggro when modified. I hope that makes sense. I guess what I am saying is that, even if the choice is there, when it comes down to it people are going to want the tank that is easiest to keep alive and who holds the most aggro not the niche tank.
Now, I want to touch on the lack of content and this is a huge one. Currently the game is a quest/grind model that you can solo through. Just like everyone's other favorite game. That's fine, but the problem is there are no instances (the proposed first instance comes after a long launch event), the quests stop at a certain point (around level 15ish) and you can only get more experience by grinding on Mobs. Essentially after level 15 you hit a brick wall of content.
Another point is that the cities don't feel like cities at all, they feel like outposts. Imagine Razor Hill/Crossroads a million times, that's what all the towns look like. It isn't fun.
The graphics are bland, and one of the bigger issues is that some of the poly meshes don't join right and the textures are completely lifeless. Even on Ultra, there is nothing special going on. The water, the shadows, the lighting is all flat and lifeless. The textures that don't join correctly make the characters look disjointed and out of place. Even the animations have little life to them and are bland to watch.
Now, I will give QoL a lot of praise for going out and creating a social network for their game, it's actually nice to see and maybe something Warcraft with it's 115 million dollars a month should do. It's also great to see them trying to add some offline features, which really amount to a whole lot of nothing, since they can be run while you are in game playing and don't interfere with what you are doing. But it seems like it's some extra fluff that could have been used else where in the game.
Anyway, this is my experience with Alganon. I won't say don't play it, because some are sure to like it, but I will say that I don't expect a whole lot from the game, and from my experience it has been a lot of empty promises by the developers. If you are interested in the game, give the open beta a shot. If you like it play it, if you don't right now, give it 6 months and hope that it gets better.
I still worry since it is a David Allen project that he may pull a "take the money and run scheme." To be honest Horizon's was full of empty promises as well, and this game already used some bad mojo to pull in some capital to keep it going. The developers may not want to say it, but they knew the game wasn't close to ready for release on Oct. 31, they pushed that date simply to get some capital from would be early subscribers and it worked. Now, those who paid are left with a one month delay and more beta. So, if that is something that might bother you as well, steer clear of this project.
Comments
TL;DR Version --
Give the game 6 months to find out whether it will live up to the promises or it will crash and burn. Also, I think David Allen pulled a pretty scum bag move by putting the game out as available Oct. 31st to bring in capital and then knowing it wasn't going to be turned around and pushed the beta back after having people pay as early adopters.
(Hint at least 6 more month before it's ready to be playable.)
They just announced they pushed the launch date back to December. Three days out from launch is a pretty bad time to make an announcement for a pushback, but it's needed. I still don't see them being able to implement anything significant in that time period, but I could be wrong. Either way, six months isn't going to be enough time as far as Alganon is concerned to be fleshed out. It should still be in Alpha if you ask me.
Regarding the "fanboi-ism".
If you're participating in Beta and spending your time complaining about how the game is so much like WoW (which seems to be your point here), I can understand fans getting impatient with you. I got into Beta today myself, and I saw a lot of losers logged on there apparently just to slam the game and not actually, you know, Beta test it.
It's funny how you complain it's the same as WoW, but you then also complain about features that don't fit into your WoW worldview (any class can fulfill any role? No way! Only Paladins should do that!). Some people just want to complain, I get it.
The access to three class roles is a feature, not a bug. It's one you don't like for your own personal reasons. Fine. But no one at this point has any idea how homogenized it could make the game or not. You have limited talent points, from what I understand, so a character can't choose to do all three roles. In my view this feature is going to give individual classes more flexibility and give users more choices.
In the WoW world you compare it to, a Hunter, Warlock and Mage can DPS and that's it. Kinda sucks to have chosen that role if DPS are a dime-a-dozen as they are in WoW. But in Alganon, you have a few other options if you chose to be a ranged DPS. Doesn't make the game bad. Makes it different. Think out of the box. Why can't a mage use magic to be able to deflect attacks and mitigate damage? No reason, unless you're can't get your brain out of WoW-mode.
And I got a kick out of the fact that you also complain about lack of content yet say you only played a very short time. That's like saying "I played a Night Elf, and really found all of WoW to be lacking in content because I made it all the way to Teldrassil from the starter area." You really are in no position to voice such a complaint.
I agree that the game is choppy and doesn't flow well. It does need to be fixed and quite honestly that would be a game-breaker for me if they can't. That problem takes into account the odd mob movement as well. I'm sure it's the same issue.
The graphics aren't bad in my opinion. You have to realize that there are technical limitations to making a game accessible to everyday people with everyday systems. Full-on realism just isn't worth it. The number of people who can't get past WoW-level graphics really is small, so programming/designing for that small number is a poor use of your investors money. Return on Investment just isn't there, especially on a tight budget.
One big complaint that is legitimate to have is that the game isn't finished, with many of the more highly-touted features still in development. What they claim will make them different isn't there to actually MAKE it different. I think they should be more up front about that and not highlight those unavailable features as being part of the game.
Right now the game uses some of the same UI concepts as many other games do, making the barrier to entry for a new player virtually non-existent. I don't see that as bad. Lots of games are quest-driven, so they broke no new ground there. Then again, no other games have either. I also see a story developing in their quests so far, which is pretty cool. And in comparison to LotRO, I see these quests as laid out far, far better.
Lots of games, not just WoW, have quests, reputations, crafting, etc. Those are popular with folks. Why not use them?
Is Alganon, in it's current incarnation, ground-breaking? No, it isn't. But it does have a few things up it's sleeve that sound pretty cool (Deities with dynamic in-game missions for players for example).
You, however, seem way too stuck in WoW-mode to really appreciate anything about the game that does break from your pre-conceived notions.
I don't get why people say the graphics are like that because there catering to low end PC's when the minimum system specs are above Aion's and really not much different than AOC. Also I'm kinda amazed at your lotro comparison for quests, most quests i've done so far really had not much of a story and were basically 5-6 sentences each.
I guess since graphics are not a big concern of mine, I can't really get excited either way.
The quests that I've been trying all have a common thread to them and are crafting a story when taken as a whole. I like this. Luckily I knew the story of Lord of the Rings, because I really didn't seem to follow any kind of thread in their quests when I started out in the Shire.
And I was focusing more on the quests being fairly centralized geographically and minimizing any time wasted running about. I hate spending half my game running back and forth and back and forth. There will always be some of that, but LotRO took that to the extreme.