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My Late Review of Horizons
stormfrog
Member Posts: 12
When Horizons was still in beta I was one of those who followed it with great interest. Not untill now as athe European servers started offering 7-day free trial Ive actually been able to try the game out. These are my two cents of the game Horizons: Empire of Istaria.
Introduction
You start out in a character creation section where you can browser the different races and their difference. After checking them all out I realize the races offered in Horisons are all standard high fantasy races with a few exceptions. A feline cat raze, a scaled lizard race, a race of darkcoloured humans called Fiends and ontop of that Dragon. I would have gone with the dragon if it hadnt been for the fact the it was so poorly modelled. It doesnt at all look like dragon, more like a huge lizard with wings. To me, that doesnt make a dragon. Okay, big disapointment! Well... I decide to go for the race called Sslisk and venture on into the World of Istaria.
The control system is fairly easy to figure out. The interface in itself is rather ugly. the inventory system looks more like a spiced up filemanager. Alot of functions seems to have been split up into different windows for some reason. For example inventory and equipment are two different windows. This gives me alot more shortcut-keys to keep track of. Moving on into the world getting suggestions form a stupud tutorial guide I move onto the part where I am to choose a school to train. Mind now that this has taken me over 30 minutes just to get to the part where I choose what school I wish to practise. Wouldnt it have been alot more simple to just choose that while I created the character? The temple where you choose your different schools is an area with small rooms which you enter, talk with a NPC and do a small task to prove yourself (waste of time imho).
When I finally get out of the pesky temple and leave the training area to enter the real world I am looking for some action. I enter out of the portal into a small town. I see a dozen of signs cluttering up the landscape. They inform me of stuff like "Town", "Resources" and even "Monsters"... huh, very informative. Odd to put down a sign which says "Monsters, this way" in a world that is supposed to not be static. I tread down a hill and into a small town. A town in horizons is apperantly made up of for example: ne house, a tent with some crates under it and a binding stone. The house has one room with a desk and is otherwise completely empty, okay... the head of the enforcment have been here and done a seizure? Beacuse no one could be living / working in a place like this. The tent with the boxes is apperantly what they call a shop in Istaria. (So, all I need to do to become a shopkeep is to get a box and stand by it... voila! Im a shopkeeper!?).
I leave the pesky and quite ridiculous town and head on out to danger, a kind dwarf tells me he will help me If I run back to him. Good thing! However, there are no monster around from what I can see... actually. There is not a single living thing. It is completely and utterly dead except from an occasional player running by. I travel quite a long distance and there is no monsters, nothing! 
By now you might have noticed I have a somewhat srcastic tone on my opinions, and you are correct. I don't know what is wrong. This was a good game once, in theory. But what I see now is a shallow clone of EverQuest with some hot graphics. I played the game for 3 hours and I ound nothing, absolutely nothing that made me even the slightest interested. What is the purpose of Horizons? Did they just create another mainstream mmorpg and hope ppl wouldnt notice it has no more content than mmorpg's 5 years older has? :P
Graphics: the engine is slow. It performs very well in some aspects. For example it has some cool lightning effects going on from time to time in different areas. As a landscape engine it is very, very bad. The landscapes looks just static and have a synthetic feel to it. There is no "theme" between the objects in the world. It feels like something rendered with a really cheap 3d program; like "Bryce". Some player models have potential but are horribly textured. The dragons for example are usually one colored. Most models are simply ugly. Just like in EveryQuest. When I picked my race character-creation I constantly thought, "I dont want to play this race. It's just to ugly!". Well, whats more... architecture. Also a big disapointment. The quailty is sometimes astonishing but then there are places so horribly done it looks more or less like the original EverQuest zones... :P.
Sound: apart from depressing music its nonexistant. I went into the options screen twice to chech if I had by misstake shut off ambient soundeffects! There is no ambient sountrack! This is just ridiculous. When I travelled by the sea I could her neither waves, neither segulls or anything. I didnt hear a bird singing at any point at all actually. Not as much as a fly buzzing around did I hear. Comon! This is just pathetic, you could have done alot better than this!
Gameplay: To put it simple: no. Maybe, If you play this game for a long time you will get to the core of the game and maybe that is really interesting and breathtaking. But I dont have that patience. Dont get me wrong, Ive played alot of mmorpgs. I know it takes quite some time to get completely accustomed to a new game and how it works. But in Horizons, I was never presented with a purpose and point of playing it whatsoever - except that I was a "gifted" and I could cheat death and that was good because I could kill badies. Thats probably the lamest excuse of a background story Ive ever heard.
If you are wondering if this game is worth your time I would say, no, no, no and NO! There are games that does exactly this and does it alot better. My suggestion is instead to try one of the more original mmog:s. Horizons is history, it seems to cling to old ideas on how a mmorpg should be: complex and boring.
I am not saying Horizons doesnt have any value at all. I am saying that in the short time I tried it out I didnt find anything of value. Feel free to complement my review with what you think Ive missed out on.
Comments
Well, I never said this was an in-depth review. How could it be for the brief time I played it? I dont think that makes my opinion any less valuable thou.
Stormfrog, your review could not have been farther from the truth. I have been playing this game for months now, and while reading your review i was wondering if you were talking about a different game. Nobody can form a proper opinion on anything in a matter of 3 hours as you did. Why did it take you so long to get to a starter town? If you would like to try an give Horizons a proper try, feel free to look me up. I'd be more than happy to show you what this game truly offers.
Komier Nainhammer
Order Shard
Komier Nainhammer
Vestige of Hope
Order Shard
I have to agree with flem and komier.I played the game for about 3 months(stopped becuase college started and can no longer afford mmorpgs)and it was great.Even after 3 months i still didnt explore half of the world.So how can you give it a proper review after 3 hours of being in one town?Like flem said, you also didnt mention the great things like crafting, guilds,being able to be any class you want, etc. Please, dont give another review unless you really try something out.
Rynd-the last of the forgotten-Order Shard
Whilst there is no way that Stormfrog can be qualified to review Horizons after a few short hours, the tone of the 'review' is fitting. I played on the ICE server from release until earlier this week, when the server was taken down for the merge of the 3 Euro shards, so I feel I am in a pretty good position to comment on the game.
The whole premise of Horizons: Empire of Istaria was that we, 'the Gifted', would be tasked with rebuilding our shattered world (repairing Community structures, freeing races, etc) and that we would be engaged in an ongoing battle with the Withered Aegis to drive back the blight wherever it had taken hold. Make no mistake about it... the backstory and rationale for the lore of Horizons was excellent, and a major factor in many players (mainly the more RP-oriented among us) joining. This was to have been an epic battle, with truly dynamic results- we all had expectations that we would be able to actually make a difference, and that the actions of our community would have a direct and measurable effect on the world in which the game took place. This has not been the case.
It was stated that each shard would be able to progress at its own pace, and that the overall conflict would therefore develop differently across the different servers. This has not been the case. In actual fact, even back in the days of freeing the Satyrs and the Dryads there were occasions- mainly in NA- where shards had to wait for the others to catch up before the necessary patches were applied. This flies in the face of the promise that each shard could be patched 'on the fly' to accommodate such advances (this was also, apparently, to have been the mechanism used to control the advance and retreat of the Blight in response to players' actions).
Many people have complained over the last 10 months about lack of RP being immersion-breaking. This is no doubt true, although it is something that I personally have always been able to ignore. However, I'd be interested to know how anyone is supposed to maintain their feelings of immersion through the upheaval of a shard merge... it is bad enough to one day log in to discover that the entire world has been remapped or that the fauna of the world they inhabit has gone through something comparable to the KT boundary extinction event, without suddenly having to come to terms with the fact that everything they have worked for since Day 1 now counts for precisely nothing- no plot structures built, no machines repaired. The countless hours of running resources to finish a community project, the countless deaths at the hand(?) of invisible foes while we pounded away to destroy a machine... all for nothing. [note- I recognise that unavoidable real world business constraints have necessitated the merges, but that doesn't alter the irrevocable damage that is done to the RP framework of Istaria]
The performance of the client itself, in particular that part of the engine which deals with combat and databases, is also open to criticism. Lag, the nemesis of all online games, can be horrible and the experience is not helped by the lack of collision-detection which left us unable to utilise such genre staples as dungeons (not a big issue for me, but they seem to be essential to so many others) and doors. How many of us have been chased by mobs that scale vertical cliffs to get to us? How many times have we been killed by something before it has even been rendered on our screen? Something is fundamentally wrong with the nuts and bolts of the game and yet we have all been prepared to turn a blind eye to it- does anyone honestly believe that these issues will improve now that they will be packing more players onto each shard?
That said, I must give credit where it is due- the environment is beautifully rendered and it has been a pleasure to wander the world. The interface- flamed by stormfrog for reasons I can't quite grasp- also deserves massive credit: it may well be the best GUI I have ever encountered in any game... kudos. The sound? well, the creature and combat sounds are pretty basic, but effective, and the music is excellent but it's just not enough.
So what now? What is the future of Istaria, in its newly slimmed-down manifestation across 3 servers globally? Many people are trumpeting the end of all things at the moment, and they may well turn out to be right. There is no doubt that the major upcoming releases on the mmorpg market will have some impact on subscriber numbers but I am not convinced that they alone will spell an end to Istaria. Leaving aside the real-world factors relating to the court case, and assuming that there is a company to continue with the development my gut feeling is that Horizons will be able to continue in a niche role. Those players who are still paying to play are obviously not the type of people to give up easily, and it may well be that, given a carefully managed approach to WM-involvement on the remaining shards to kick-start the backstory, a solid community will form and perhaps even grow as time goes on.
I hope against hope that this last possibility turns out to be the case. Too many people, whether they be on the real-world (business) side or the in-game character-side, have invested too much time to just give up now. On the other hand, it may well turn out to be the case that the whole sorry Istarian saga becomes an internet legend- a horror story told to future generations to illustrate just how badly wrong things can go...
Good luck Horizons, I (and others) will be watching.
The thing which has to be remembered is that this game is just now coming to its first year. Lots of games have come out not very good, but have shown improvements by the first year. This game has bugs in it, that i would never argue with, but it is gettin better. If you have never played this game before they changed the landscape would you think it was worse now? Personally i think the changes so far have been to the better. The thing that makes any mmorpg are the players, it doesnt really matter about graphics, sound or game bugs. If you are surrounded by players who make the online experience fun then thats what counts nothing else. That is something that not all players get to experience which is too bad, there is nothing like being in a guild with players who make it fun for you. See ya in game
Komier Nainhammer
Gm- The Last of the Forgotten
Order Shard
Komier Nainhammer
Vestige of Hope
Order Shard
Yes it's been out a year and they _still_ haven't fixed the LAG and MEMORY LEAKS! They're still nerfing and buffing like crazy without any sort of obvious plan and even small patches break loads of often unrelated stuff. Jeezz this game is hopeless.
Things that were reported in beta constantly and yet ignored.
Gotta wonder why they think that using the same team that fooked this game (and changed it from Horizons to the bland wet paper bag of an mmo it is now) and naming them something diffrent and being run still by same people,will actually turn this into a #1 game?
Never in a month of days ending in Z will that happen.
the only review that matters is 15K players world wide and dropping. The latest financial numbers posted in AE's now soon to be chapter 7 pegs their total subs at around 11 to 15K world wide with a whopping $21,000 in pre paid accounts.
In the end the MMO player community has spoken and given Horizons a very firm and fitting two thumbs down.
Well I have played for a solid 9 months. Recently left because there is no reward for killing monsters any more apart from some XP and maybe some coin on pygmies. There is no useable loot, to a large degree adventurers are dependent on crafters.
The crafting system is good, simple and effective. However the placement of monsters in resource field combined with the removal of processing machines have made it a lot tougher.
The introduction of expert (Tier 5) forms and tier 4/5 techs is promising and ancient RoP and lairs are being worked on. Blight anchors sounds interesting too, perhaps this is the start of a truly dynamic blight system. If it works as intended and will make crafting easier I will probably return.
But Horizons is loosing players (especially after they completely foobarred the EU merge), maybe they will return who knows. I'm mystified as to how AE can survive with so few playing, they must have some persuasive lawyers.
Since I was on EU servers they seem to need maintainence more so than before.
7-day trialers are still having problems getting the actual trial to work which is a great shame.
Please think long and hard before subscribing and if you do go for a month or two.
i played HZ for about 2months and i can honestly say i had a good time doing so. the game is seriously lacking in alot of ways which was a huge bummer. the game content changes so much and so often it leaves your head spinning. i dont like paying for beta...and this game IS beta...and i have a feeling it always will be.
after beta testing EQ2 and WoW. (EQ2 is king btw). it's hard for me to believe that games like HZ, DAoC, AC and others of merit will stand a chance in the months to come.
while HZ does alot of things right, they do alot very...very wrong. (no dungeons? u have got to be kidding me!)
But i just wanted to say thanks to AE for filling that MMO void in my life for a couple months waiting for EQ2 to come out. now that that time is upon us, i bid Horizons farewell and nice try.
P.S. Maybe u guys could just start making that amazing in game music for other MMOs. Least that way u could make some money.
Joined 2004 - I can't believe I've been a MMORPG.com member for 20 years! Get off my lawn!
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Frodo has failed. Bush has The Ring.
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"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb." -- Batman
The game did have some of that "magic" feeling that EQLive had in its first year. Not a bad game. I'm playing EQ2 now, so I don't know that I'll play Horizons as well, but overall this game is okay and I sort of regret not giving it more of a chance.
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Frodo has failed. Bush has The Ring.
yes the Vault boards has a bankruptcy thread that is stickied. There is a link that is being given out via PM that has all the AE chapter 11 filings including financials.'
The last two months September and October have AE losing over $200,000.
Chapter 7 is soon to follow with the hope the judge approves the asset sale to Tulga Games which is just David Bowmans pet project atm.