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One month playing the beta.
TheAncient
Member Posts: 67
The biggest issue with Alganon, isn't the WoW like interface, the bugs (it is a beta after all), nor even how derivative it clearly is of the genre. Here are Algonon's biggest issues.
It's boring.
It doesn't have the majestic sweep of LoTRO's background, nor the silly love stories of WoW entwined amongst the lore of Azeroth, indeed it has nothing which is likely to make it indearing to anyone. What there is of the Alganon storyline is disjointed and doesn't grab any attention at all. There is no drama, nothing that makes you feel you're being carried along by events, and your place in them is somehow significant. At no point after four weeks of play did I feel anything about about any of the characters, nor any reason to care.
Oh there are sub-plots, the farmers need this resolved, and the fishermen that, but then those chains which were not particularly exciting to begin with quickly die and you are somehow left with the feeling that these were just fillers except there was no major contruct around them to make sense of it all. This is where is all gets disjointed. None of these stories connect. Like the plague in Westport. It surfaces for a few very short quests, then is never to be seen again.
Later it gets worse as newer factions get involved. Who are the HUD or the Peacemakers, why are they important? None of it make any cohesive sense as you are sent to kill X, Y & Z and collect A, B & C. There is no feeling that you are doing anything that changes this imaginary world in any amount for good or ill.
That's the story out of the way, so, how does it play?
Well that's not too good either. Often, and this is especially true when you hit the level 30s you come across areas where the level class of nasties jumps by 10 or more. There seems an awful lot crammed into too little. Haggon Shores and Teldis for humans seems to be patchwork areas and almost all of it from start to finish is in forested areas, broken only by the level 13 to 25 beach area. No rolling plains anywhere, no desert. Everything seems hemmed in either by much higher class or terrible terrain choice. Again boring.
Of those you have to kill, the menu is of meagre choice, consisting mainly of Wolvar, Humanoids, Skittlar(insectoid) and some some sort of generic comic walking froglike race and a borrowed character from Star Wars Jabba The Hutt, called a Niglet. None of these creatures vary much however high you level. Even the boss types are barely indistinguishable from the rest. Of the other fauna it is the basic fare of bear, cat and deer and precious little else.
The character types seem so DirectX5 it is horrible to behold in late 2009, as is the excruciatingly bad animation. Set in a DirectX 7 setting the graphics seem not only less than ordinary but very dated also. There seems to be no innovation or style.
Put simply there is nothing that sets this game apart from anything that has gone before. The term derivative should now be called Alganon.
I have deliberately avoided many of the WoW comparisons, and also due to the term beta, avoided many of the problems the game has on a technical level, but can say one thing clearly after a month. This game is far from ready. There are outstanding quest issues not resolved as yet, despite Dev comments to the effect of that they are easy to fix if known. These are known and thoroughly well reported issues. They are in the Starter areas for example although many others exist, and have been griped about for many weeks and longer, but not as yet fixed. This is worrying enough. Moreover, during the beta time, more content has been added, adding more issues that also need fixed now whilst others seem forgotten about. It is hard to do basic crafting whilst nodes fail after once after a visit until a server reset. It's hard to do anything when the game crashes at the fall of a hat and quests cannot be completed. The ingame quest helper is often as much a hinderence as a help.
There is much broken in the game at the moment that if it was an early preview or a late alpha then the above comments would seem harsh and unfair, but this is a game that was due for release last month, and now supposedly in nine days for the head start phase. After the latest patch of a few hours ago fixed very little but stability issues when so much needs sorted, what can anyone expect of Alganon at this stage?
Keep playing your WoW, Aion, LoTRO or EQ, there's nothing to see here at the moment especially after level 40.
Comments
Niglet?!
Not only does this game play and look horrid, but the devs are racists on top!
S.C.I.F.I
<Sights, Clouded, In, False, Illusions>
Niglet?!
Not only does this game play and look horrid, but the devs are racists on top!
Ya, I always wondered about that naming choice as well... seems pretty non-pr friendly. Heck, Blizzard changed the name of a non-combat pet (Maine Coon) just to avoid any potential PR blunders. The worst part is said mob is simply a Kobold/Goblin thing.
Darzin -- A Gnome in a Night Elf World
The name of that monster is Nidget not Niglet.
Niglet?!
Not only does this game play and look horrid, but the devs are racists on top!
Ya, I always wondered about that naming choice as well... seems pretty non-pr friendly. Heck, Blizzard changed the name of a non-combat pet (Maine Coon) just to avoid any potential PR blunders. The worst part is said mob is simply a Kobold/Goblin thing.
I have a cat who's a Main Coon, and you have offended him! MeoW!
Ummm, he actually PLAYED the game long enough to get a good feeling on if he likes it or not? Unlike the people I was pointing to who play for a blink of an eye and make assumptions? He played it for a month, got to decent levels and posted his major concerns/problems with the game. In fact, it's along the lines of how I feel about some of the stuff with the game and why I feel it's not ready to be released and should have six months to a year more of development.
My problem is with people who look at the art style or interface and go "Complete copy of WoW" and decide everything about the game is just a WoW clone and don't play it long enough to see if that assumption is true. Then they begin posting weak arguments on why Alganon is garbage when they never really even played the game for any reasonable amount of time.
splat
You're correct, thanks.
Ummm, he actually PLAYED the game long enough to get a good feeling on if he likes it or not? Unlike the people I was pointing to who play for a blink of an eye and make assumptions? He played it for a month, got to decent levels and posted his major concerns/problems with the game. In fact, it's along the lines of how I feel about some of the stuff with the game and why I feel it's not ready to be released and should have six months to a year more of development.
My problem is with people who look at the art style or interface and go "Complete copy of WoW" and decide everything about the game is just a WoW clone and don't play it long enough to see if that assumption is true. Then they begin posting weak arguments on why Alganon is garbage when they never really even played the game for any reasonable amount of time.
Wrong, your problem is you simply don't want to accept reality. I have been playing the game since Oct. 28th, yet does that actually prove anything? Not really. It doesn't take a month to know the game is terrible. Your so called "weak arguments" are the exact same arguments this fellow made, but he prefaced with "I played for a month." Get over yourself and the game.
Darzin -- A Gnome in a Night Elf World
I've heard a lot of arguments about why Alganon sucks, but I've never heard anyone come out and praise it. Aside from the developers, of course. Those folks who think Alganon is any good, please tell me why.
Important facts:
1. Free to Play games are poorly made.
2. Casuals are not all idiots, but idiots call themselves casuals.
3. Great solo and group content are not mutually exclusive, but they suffer when one is shoved into the mold of the other. The same is true of PvP and PvE.
4. Community is more important than you think.
Have fun finding any here. You might have luck on Alganons official forums.
S.C.I.F.I
<Sights, Clouded, In, False, Illusions>
"Because once you play it, you realize how different it is..." I believe that is going to be the answer you get from the people who play it. Ask them why it's different and you will get the canned "Play and find out for yourself..." response. Because apparently, quest/mob grinding and clicking buttons in one fantasy based MMO that uses talent trees it different from another. I guess having no Instances along the way is the big difference, or pvp, and only 2 races... and I sound like a broken record.
Darzin -- A Gnome in a Night Elf World
It's primarily a PvE game and has been described that way for months; why ding it for not having PvP initially? That's would be like dinging Shadowbane because PvE content sucks...
The instances will be added after the Dawning event is complete and the other classes/races/etc, which were never planned to be in the initial release at all, will be added during the completely free expansions. I don't see how this is bad? You get exactly what you've been told you would get and additional stuff for free later. You either like that... or you don't.
Personally I enjoy the game and will continue playing it. It's obviously not a game for someone who is bored with the standard fantasy mmo theme park quest based progression system. That sould be obvious though so I do not understand why people are blasting a game that's obviously not meant for them nor do I understand why they stick around to continually beat it down instead of moving on? My time is very important to me and I most definitely wouldn't waste it on commenting about a game that I had no intention of playing.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alganon
Darzin -- A Gnome in a Night Elf World
http://www.alganon.com/world-evolution
"These future additions, known as World Evolutions, will contain additional races, classes, domains, and even new gameplay systems, and will be available to subscribers at no additional charge."
It has also been stated in interviews that the future expansions will be free of charge.
Yes, the instances will be released after the Dawning event, but all the winner will be doing is meeting with the development team online to help name some pre-determined set of items/npcs/etc.
As far as size of the world goes.. it has been stated several times that the planned size of the initial launch world has ALWAYS been what you see now. If you compare how large those four zones are you'll find something almost comparable in size with the launch world of WoW. Those older games have had years and years to expand with new content... no game can hope to compete with the breadth of what is available there without similar amount of time to do so.
I played a hunk or two of Alganon throughout its betas and I have some major issues for it right up front.
Not showing facing on the minimap? Not having timers or tick-down animations on enemy buffs and debuffs? Putting the enemy's level in a big, opaque circle over their heads, rather than just illustrating its relative difficulty with a color or a small level rank on their portrait bar? Allowing character models and animations that Asheron's Call 2 had beat years and years ago, while they game runs like an awful chopfest on my monstrous gaming machine that runs Crysis maxed-out and silky smooth?
Just about everything in this game, from the obvious borrowing from other games (hey, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, but at least put some variety of spin on it that isn't 'it's on the other side of the UI') to icon artwork and inventory framing, looks amateurish. If this were a totally indie, low-budget title, I might be more willing to accept that; this isn't indie, it isn't low-budget, it's just amateurish.
The entire presentation looks generally poor, quests and lore (as far as I've found) don't make a lot of sense, voiceovers are laughable at best, and the gameplay brings just about nothing to the table except to add EVE Online's advancement system in on top of a thoroughly standard RPG progression. All of this seems strange.
None of it seems good.
I'm all about these folks trying to make a gamer's game, but I'm not seeing it. I appreciate their effort, I like where they're coming from, but where it brought them just seems like an unfortunate half-effort of a game patched onto the bulk of another game.
I for one am increasingly convinced that David Allen has lost all his creativity and origionality. If you read the interview snippets that I posted earlier he basically says that the reason people are attacking Alganon for being like WoW is because every other mmo that has been launched recently has spent millions of dollars in advertizing trying to convince gamers that similar is bad.
Not that we are tired of low quality WoW derivitives and want somthing new and different. What we really want is more games similar to WoW we have just been brainwashed into thinking otherwise.
Dem hibbies! Dey be wrong!
The majority of what you list above is already resolved. Minimap facing? Check. Buffbar with duration? Check. Performance and stability enhancements? Check.
Also this IS an indie product by a small company on a small budget self publishing the title.
All I can say is that I quite enjoy playing the game. You just have to be able to get past the similarities and play it for what it is. I also like where the game is going in the future. Maybe look at it again 6-12mo from now and see if your opinion has changed if you still haven't found a happy MMO home to call your own.
I just can't see sane people pay for this pile. Throwing the money out of a 5th story window provides more entertainment, and more content.
The Vision (TM) lacks direction, and results.
..but we are beating a stillborn horse here.
Sorry; the minimap-facing thing works, but the world-map facing thing doesn't, it's just a dot, which was my issue. Also, performance and stability enhancements? The thing runs terribly, today, on my gaming rig, and my gaming rig is very strong. Even Warhammer Online, a game notorious for bottlenecking, runs silky-smooth in big 100-man battles. Also, something I didn't mention is a general lack of polish surrounding the ranger class; arrows have no up-or-down lean. Fire them downhill and they travel, perfectly perpendicular to the horizon, for the entire way. It shouldn't be that hard to get an arrow to point at its target vertically as well as horizontally.
EVE Online was an indie game developed by four guys for short money. They were just smart enough to not -attempt- this kind of thing; EVE is in space and not in medieval England partially because space is cool and fantasy is beat-up, but mostly because creating animations for every character and object around wasn't feasible at the time. Alganon's team should have figured something else out, here; they worked hard, clearly, but their engine doesn't seem to be holding up and a lot of things a game of this kind should have are just not present.
I'll take another look in a few months when the game has been out for a while, but frankly, I don't see them doing all that well. Even as a free game, they're offering the same things WoW offers, plus a bell and a whistle, minus years and years of polish, content, and lore. I'm no WoWhead; my account has been inactive for literally years, but I can see no reason why someone would choose this over Blizzard's eight-hundred-pound gorilla.
I can see where you're coming from on all of your other points just mentioned. I don't understand the performance issues though.. I regularly sit at around 60fps with very few dips. I have a nice machine, but still... I'm sure if i didn't have it vsynched it'd be quite higher.
Win7 x64 installed on a 10k rpm raptor with 6gb ram, a core i7 and an nvidia gtx 280
1) If you are familiar with the Bartle test of gaming motivations you will notice that every Alganon player can tag himself as either an Achiever, Explorer, Socializer, etc. This helps players with common goals and attitudes get together easily. I think Alganon calls these "families". I belive this is an excellent and unique feature.
2) The devs have promised a world map which stays blacked-out until you actually explore that part of it. Many single player games have done this in the past but I'm not aware of any mmorpgs going that route. It encourages and rewards exploration which is a fantastic idea. I'm not actually sure if this is implemented yet.
3) Some (but not all) of your character development advances offline in real-time using a system rather silimar to EVE Online. Not everybody likes that system but I always have.
I've never played WoW so I don't care about those issues. As to video performance I have had no serious issues on my two-year-old computer. It does crash a lot though.
Unfortunately the art style is not to my taste but such things are purely a matter of opinion. I won't play Alganon past beta because I am enjoying other mmorpgs right now. But I don't think Alganon is really all that bad.
I for one am increasingly convinced that David Allen has lost all his creativity and origionality. If you read the interview snippets that I posted earlier he basically says that the reason people are attacking Alganon for being like WoW is because every other mmo that has been launched recently has spent millions of dollars in advertizing trying to convince gamers that similar is bad.
Not that we are tired of low quality WoW derivitives and want somthing new and different. What we really want is more games similar to WoW we have just been brainwashed into thinking otherwise.
Yeah... I read that bit from the interview, too, and thought "Oh, what a spin-tastic crock of s--t".
Newsflash, Dave: Most people are capable of thinking and deciding for themselves what they like or not, and why they do or not. Though I guess if he assumes people are that weak-minded, that they'd believe his BS also.
Read forums for MMORPGs in general, and the problem is quite consistent and quite clear: People are tired of sub-standard MMOs that try to ride WoW's coat-tails to get a slice of that pie, instead of putting some originality and effort into at least *trying* to do something original and different. Ironically, that would be kinda like what Dave Allen attempted with Horizons. It may have been more than could have been realistically achieved, but at least it was its own game with its own identity. He was trying to do something new and original, not simply riding another MMO's coat-tails. I respected him *far* more for what he attempted with Horizons than I ever could for Alganon.
and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops
I for one am increasingly convinced that David Allen has lost all his creativity and origionality. If you read the interview snippets that I posted earlier he basically says that the reason people are attacking Alganon for being like WoW is because every other mmo that has been launched recently has spent millions of dollars in advertizing trying to convince gamers that similar is bad.
Not that we are tired of low quality WoW derivitives and want somthing new and different. What we really want is more games similar to WoW we have just been brainwashed into thinking otherwise.
Yeah... I read that bit from the interview, too, and thought "Oh, what a spin-tastic crock of s--t".
Newsflash, Dave: Most people are capable of thinking and deciding for themselves what they like or not, and why they do or not. Though I guess if he assumes people are that weak-minded, that they'd believe his BS also.
Read forums for MMORPGs in general, and the problem is quite consistent and quite clear: People are tired of sub-standard MMOs that try to ride WoW's coat-tails to get a slice of that pie, instead of putting some originality and effort into at least *trying* to do something original and different. Ironically, that would be kinda like what Dave Allen attempted with Horizons. It may have been more than could have been realistically achieved, but at least it was its own game with its own identity. He was trying to do something new and original, not simply riding another MMO's coat-tails. I respected him *far* more for what he attempted with Horizons than I ever could for Alganon.
Red is QF100%T.
When it comes to making an SUCESSFUL mmo in the current market that is dominated by WoW and saturated by low quality wannabes you either need to be 1. Very different from WoW. (Ala Runescape, EVE, Darkfall) or 2. Good enough and origional enough to stand in WoW's shadow, (Lotro,) 3. Beat WoW at its own game.
As far as a small company with limited resourses goes I'm going to say they would be insane to do anything other than 1. The market is SATURATED with low budget WoW derivitives. Make somthing new and exciting, price it right and they will come.
1 is very possible if you have a half talented Dev team and are willing to start small and polished to attract the initial clientel.
2. is kinda pointless to try not only because so many have tried and failed but also because you are limiting yourself greatly.
3. Is impossible unless you have BOATLOADS of cash and an INCREDIBLE dev team and even then your likely going to have to resort to dropping a 5000lb bomb on Blizzard's HQ.
Dem hibbies! Dey be wrong!