Right now the cash shop will only be cosmetic items. Once the game goes F2P who knows what will be in there. If you are worried about or hate cash shops stay away from this game. If you hate F2P games I would also stay away from this game. There really should not be a doubt in anyones mind that TSW will go F2P its just a matter of when.
if they are aiming for millions of wow level subs yes it will fail and be f2p. Im not convinced they are doing this. They made a niche market game and havent spent tonnes hyping it. Its possible this game can be successful and never go f2p.
Good expected it to be usual funcom bug fest - it wasn't Expected linear as hell swtor type game, played through tutorial thought oh god it us another swtor, then game opened way up, I could just go off and find stuff. I normally hate questing but a combination of tsw and gw2 has made me like pve again.
Love the combat system. Those that don't like it, its not wow, don't play it like wow, switch your decks before fights, don't try and be a jack of all trades in one deck, keep moving, learn to read the mobs, learn to time your big moves so they don't get telegraphed, learn to use double finishers (and finishing openers), learn to gear your deck for auto resource building. Don't stand there spamming a rotation.
Atmosphere great, great graphics apart from horrible jump animation and plastic skin, great music, great way the music scaled to the danger like a horror film, some sounds need work.
Going to sub this and play gw2 also, beta changed my mind, really annoying 2 great mmos coming out at once. Luckily neither is your raid or die style game so should be able to play both without dropping behind the curve.
Glad I've got 2 games worth playing while I wait on TESO and Archeage, been mmoless for 2 years
Compared to recent beta I've been on I give it 8/10 as a beta Gw2 being a 8.5 Rift being a seven War a 5 (but I played the bigger for 18mobths) Swtor being a 4
Right now the cash shop will only be cosmetic items. Once the game goes F2P who knows what will be in there. If you are worried about or hate cash shops stay away from this game. If you hate F2P games I would also stay away from this game. There really should not be a doubt in anyones mind that TSW will go F2P its just a matter of when.
if they are aiming for millions of wow level subs yes it will fail and be f2p. Im not convinced they are doing this. They made a niche market game and havent spent tonnes hyping it. Its possible this game can be successful and never go f2p.
I believe they planned on TSW being F2P all along. I think they are only using a sub based platform to recoup developmental costs off of the box sales, 3-6 months of sub fees and anyone who would buy a LTS. They have seen that F2P is more profitable for them. It is just a matter of time.
I'm not a fan of horror or zombies but I do love a good mystery, so I took a chance and pre-ordered so I could get into the beta and see if it was a keeper or cancel. On Friday, I went into it feeling like I just needed to drop everything I know about video games and experience it as a total noob.
I played during the beta, maybe 14 hours total over three days. Like others have already posted, I found some great things, some awful things and much in between.
Things that get an A:
I'm in a minority but I like the combat animations.
Kiting and casting at the same time was great.
I thought the environmental art was quite good, and Kingsmouth has a great spooky, creepy feel to it.
I enjoyed the voiceovers and laughed out loud in places. And I appreciated that the voiceovers had regional accents appropriate to the locale.
And I loved the riddle/puzzle quests - lots of fun there, with the dangers of both under and over-thinking it.
I really liked questing on the landscape.
Things that get an F:
Horrible character faces and animations, especially obvious in cutscenes.
Clothing has no physics, so it looks really fake and glued on.
Missing tutorials for SP, AP and crafting on the 1st beta weekend is mind-boggling.
London is dead; NPCs standing around might as well be zombies.
Presumed bugs:
Using a portal to Agartha sometimes strips your inventory, gear, clothing and changes you into a naked man. (LOL)
ESC closes bags, quests, the game and cutscenes but not conversations?
I'm not a fan of the zombie genre, so was pleasantly surprised. I pre-ordered and will keep it rather than cancel, as I have the wolf pet and am curious about the other locations. But I doubt I'll sub at this point.
Interesting to read all the different comments in this thread. Like others, I was pleasantly surprised by the game and gave it an 8.
I gave it a 7, but I got the lifetime sub and am not regretting it.
My biggest complaints are everyones, characters being ugly and animations a little stiff or repetative.
I actually couldn't get myself to log in just because I couldn't stand staring at my character. The environments were gorgeous but having my character be attractive to me is also important.
I know theyre going to fix this so Im not worried about it when the game releases.
I'm not a fan of horror or zombies but I do love a good mystery, so I took a chance and pre-ordered so I could get into the beta and see if it was a keeper or cancel. On Friday, I went into it feeling like I just needed to drop everything I know about video games and experience it as a total noob.
I played during the beta, maybe 14 hours total over three days. Like others have already posted, I found some great things, some awful things and much in between.
Things that get an A:
I'm in a minority but I like the combat animations.
Kiting and casting at the same time was great.
I thought the environmental art was quite good, and Kingsmouth has a great spooky, creepy feel to it.
I enjoyed the voiceovers and laughed out loud in places. And I appreciated that the voiceovers had regional accents appropriate to the locale.
And I loved the riddle/puzzle quests - lots of fun there, with the dangers of both under and over-thinking it.
I really liked questing on the landscape.
Things that get an F:
Horrible character faces and animations, especially obvious in cutscenes.
Clothing has no physics, so it looks really fake and glued on.
Missing tutorials for SP, AP and crafting on the 1st beta weekend is mind-boggling.
London is dead; NPCs standing around might as well be zombies.
Presumed bugs:
Using a portal to Agartha sometimes strips your inventory, gear, clothing and changes you into a naked man. (LOL)
ESC closes bags, quests, the game and cutscenes but not conversations?
I'm not a fan of the zombie genre, so was pleasantly surprised. I pre-ordered and will keep it rather than cancel, as I have the wolf pet and am curious about the other locations. But I doubt I'll sub at this point.
Interesting to read all the different comments in this thread. Like others, I was pleasantly surprised by the game and gave it an 8.
about the london thing, that seemed to be just where you go if you follow the trial so to speak.
if you entered darkside - like i did the npcs were busier moving about talking etc.. I get the feeling they disabled the npcs near the start area for all the players joining at once. Also several vendors seemed to be disabled like bankers and arms dealers
8/10. I did not follow TSW at all until about 5-6 days ago I decided to preorder it and take a chance. The game was a lot better than I was expecting and I was suprised to see the PVP information (albeit unplayable) looking the the frontiers on DAOC.
I'd give it a 3-4 at best from my limited experience.
The epic-failure of this company not allowing Mouse 4 and 5 to be bound in yet another game is beyond my understanding. This was a major turn-off for me in AoC and again in this game... The "solution" is not to force players to re-map mouse buttons. They should support mouse 4 and 5 like every other game ever released (just about).
As others have stated, animations are bad... Climbing up a ladder and down is exactly the same (and slow). When I was climbing back down and watching the climbing up animation I couldn't help but laugh and cry at the same time....
Targeting is pretty screwed up. Maybe a special combination of settings fixes it but it should DEFAULT to a working state. Imagine playing a Rogue in WoW (or any other combo point builder class) and having your target randomly switched around constantly... Makes it difficult to build and use combo abilities doesn't it?
Very, VERY, easy to gimp yourself. Some builds are god-like compared to others. One build I found myself mowing down everything in my path without issue while another I struggled to kill 1-2 guys before having to sit and rest for a while. Also, the pre-built templates are pretty useless considering you have to basically be end-game level to create them. They really should have suggested builds for leveling up not for endgame. People who have maxed out several trees already know how to play and what they want to build... New players need the help.
Limited number of quests/tasks you can have at one time is pretty annoying. The "Pause" feature when picking up a new quest (it claims to "pause" the quest you're currently on while you do the new one) doesn't work very well. Found myself losing a lot of progress on past quests.
Maybe I missed a key feature of the game, however I find it difficult to judge the difficulty of an enemy. Some monsters I'd mow down by the 100's while others I could barely take 1 on 1.... all in the same area. The only real way I could guess on difficulty was the targets HP number, however this wasn't very useful in most cases.
Chat is very buggy. Either no one was talking ever, or I often found myself in a situation where no chat channels were working. Relogging sometimes fixed this. Finding players for group content is pretty bad. This is probably biggest complaint in MMO's for me. They're multiplayer online games and should make it VERY easy to find groups. I know lots of the MMO community is against group matching tools but I personally don't care what they "think" is best for the game/community. Not all of us want to join up with a Nazi military guild environment where we have to log in every night for 4 hours... Ok maybe thats a bit extreme, but the idea still stands. I want to log in when I want to and play when I want to... Find groups when I want to and not spend hours spamming chat channels to do it. /endrant
Long story short, this game is Beta and still needs a lot of work. It has a solid foundation but a lot of polish is needed if they want people to take it seriously. I'd bet BIG money that any respectable review sit would give this game a lot of negative points for all the polish issues (animations, buggy this or that, lack of tutorial for complex things... IE crafting).
P.S. Forgot about crafting! Yeah, I eventually managed to craft a few items that were useless to me after hours of messing around. The interface for crafting and moving icons around is pretty bad as it is. Let alone you really have no idea what the heck you're doing. I'm all about complex and interesting crafting systems but at least make the UI good for it! Try to combine 100 low quality materials into higher quality.. Each set of 5 you combine turns into a single higher quality that does not stack by default. You have to manually stack each and every item you create.... *Cry*
8/10. I did not follow TSW at all until about 5-6 days ago I decided to preorder it and take a chance. The game was a lot better than I was expecting and I was suprised to see the PVP information (albeit unplayable) looking the the frontiers on DAOC.
its more like a thindraki, but with 3 facilities(keeps) and a temple(another keep) in the centre.
instead of rams you capture anima wells that give you a charge you can take to blow the locks on doors, you need to escort 5 charges to open a door. Inside there is a guardian, that you reprogram to fight for your faction when defating him.
Its fully persistent, with a society wide buff for each keep held and an additional buff if all 4 are held.
Its late game only (must complete egypt)
It has a cap of 50 max per side, but if you have less than 50 - tough
So cosmetic clothing is P2W? Please do us all a favor and dont play this game, we don't need your kind.
Seriously man? Guy even complimented the game overall just gave his honest opinion as to why he won't be purchasing it. I don't agree but no reason to go there. Can't say having "your kind" in this game is going to be a real thrill judging by your attitude towards things.
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.
I gave it a 6...I think the game is pretty mediocre for the most part...The cutscenes drove me insane after awhile.....Not much variety really.....Im glad I got in beta, would have been pretty upset had I bought it.
One of the best "beta"'s...[snip]...bastadidgery ways.
Why not just purchase it and not use the cash shop then if you enjoyed it so much. I mean long as there aren't p2w items in it what's the harm?
Because for me any item they could sell in the shop would be p2w. For me outside influences such as wealth should never have an influence on the game world, I disagree with the item shop model and the only way I can effectively make my protest is to boycott them. Ordinarily I wouldn't care but from the small amount of the game I got to see it was exactly what I was looking for, gutted tbh.
I agree with this. Think that once you buy the game and especially if you pay monthly.. you should have access to everything. Now if you got the game for free, or even B2P its different. But comon.. greedy! you take money monthly, I buy the box.. now if i want to be able to use a cool shirt I like I have to buy that for my ingame character too?? I dont care if it doesnt give me extra stats or not im vain damnit.
I agree with this. Think that once you buy the game and especially if you pay monthly.. you should have access to everything. Now if you got the game for free, or even B2P its different. But comon.. greedy! you take money monthly, I buy the box.. now if i want to be able to use a cool shirt I like I have to buy that for my ingame character too?? I dont care if it doesnt give me extra stats or not im vain damnit.
if the combat would have been good this would have been a day one purchase if not a pre-order for me. It was an amazing experience for me, except for 90% of the gameplay which is combat.
The combat is a deal breaker/game breaking mechanic for me. It is really bad. It feels like some of the worst combat I have seen in an MMO in a long time.
I really wanted to like it, in concept it sounds great, but I didn't. There was nothing horrible about it, it just didn't grab me. I'll be honest in saying after playing the GW2 Beta events not much else (game wise) has interested me, and this includes TSW.
On a real plus note though, I had some account issues with my beta invite (when i clicked on the link in the email it kept taking me to the Anarchy Online webpage) and my invite ended up attached to an account that could not play the beta. I used the on-line support chat and the GM who helped me was supper nice, managed to fix the situation, made sure I would have a good contact point to reopen my case from if it didn't work (but it did), and all at 12:30 a.m. my time. If all their customer support staff is as good as the GM who helped me, I envy those of you who do end up playing.
As far as I can tell the main determiner of score is how much importance people place on atmosphere and the harder investigation quests.
Without those two it sounds like alot of people would be rather unhappy.
And the modren them, do not forget that.
Your right, with out these 3, it would be just like all the other MMO's out now and set to come out soon that have had any beta testing, so yes we like what makes it different form all the rest.
I really need to update my computer. That startie/ stoppie/ freeze, freeze, freeze is going to make my head explode! I thought the password quest in the newbie area was cute. It made me feel ess em arrr tee. (Yes, I left the 'A' out for comedic value.).
Comments
if they are aiming for millions of wow level subs yes it will fail and be f2p. Im not convinced they are doing this. They made a niche market game and havent spent tonnes hyping it. Its possible this game can be successful and never go f2p.
Expected linear as hell swtor type game, played through tutorial thought oh god it us another swtor, then game opened way up, I could just go off and find stuff. I normally hate questing but a combination of tsw and gw2 has made me like pve again.
Love the combat system. Those that don't like it, its not wow, don't play it like wow, switch your decks before fights, don't try and be a jack of all trades in one deck, keep moving, learn to read the mobs, learn to time your big moves so they don't get telegraphed, learn to use double finishers (and finishing openers), learn to gear your deck for auto resource building. Don't stand there spamming a rotation.
Atmosphere great, great graphics apart from horrible jump animation and plastic skin, great music, great way the music scaled to the danger like a horror film, some sounds need work.
Going to sub this and play gw2 also, beta changed my mind, really annoying 2 great mmos coming out at once. Luckily neither is your raid or die style game so should be able to play both without dropping behind the curve.
Glad I've got 2 games worth playing while I wait on TESO and Archeage, been mmoless for 2 years
It's somewhat similar to gw2 in that,regard, not open world, but not stuck in fantastic corridors in disguise like a few other games.
I give it 8/10 as a beta
Gw2 being a 8.5
Rift being a seven
War a 5 (but I played the bigger for 18mobths)
Swtor being a 4
I believe they planned on TSW being F2P all along. I think they are only using a sub based platform to recoup developmental costs off of the box sales, 3-6 months of sub fees and anyone who would buy a LTS. They have seen that F2P is more profitable for them. It is just a matter of time.
I'm not a fan of horror or zombies but I do love a good mystery, so I took a chance and pre-ordered so I could get into the beta and see if it was a keeper or cancel. On Friday, I went into it feeling like I just needed to drop everything I know about video games and experience it as a total noob.
I played during the beta, maybe 14 hours total over three days. Like others have already posted, I found some great things, some awful things and much in between.
Things that get an A:
I'm in a minority but I like the combat animations.
Kiting and casting at the same time was great.
I thought the environmental art was quite good, and Kingsmouth has a great spooky, creepy feel to it.
I enjoyed the voiceovers and laughed out loud in places. And I appreciated that the voiceovers had regional accents appropriate to the locale.
And I loved the riddle/puzzle quests - lots of fun there, with the dangers of both under and over-thinking it.
I really liked questing on the landscape.
Things that get an F:
Horrible character faces and animations, especially obvious in cutscenes.
Clothing has no physics, so it looks really fake and glued on.
Missing tutorials for SP, AP and crafting on the 1st beta weekend is mind-boggling.
London is dead; NPCs standing around might as well be zombies.
Presumed bugs:
Using a portal to Agartha sometimes strips your inventory, gear, clothing and changes you into a naked man. (LOL)
ESC closes bags, quests, the game and cutscenes but not conversations?
I'm not a fan of the zombie genre, so was pleasantly surprised. I pre-ordered and will keep it rather than cancel, as I have the wolf pet and am curious about the other locations. But I doubt I'll sub at this point.
Interesting to read all the different comments in this thread. Like others, I was pleasantly surprised by the game and gave it an 8.
I gave it a 7, but I got the lifetime sub and am not regretting it.
My biggest complaints are everyones, characters being ugly and animations a little stiff or repetative.
I actually couldn't get myself to log in just because I couldn't stand staring at my character. The environments were gorgeous but having my character be attractive to me is also important.
I know theyre going to fix this so Im not worried about it when the game releases.
about the london thing, that seemed to be just where you go if you follow the trial so to speak.
if you entered darkside - like i did the npcs were busier moving about talking etc.. I get the feeling they disabled the npcs near the start area for all the players joining at once. Also several vendors seemed to be disabled like bankers and arms dealers
8/10. I did not follow TSW at all until about 5-6 days ago I decided to preorder it and take a chance. The game was a lot better than I was expecting and I was suprised to see the PVP information (albeit unplayable) looking the the frontiers on DAOC.
(\ /) ?
( . .)
c('')('')
I'd give it a 3-4 at best from my limited experience.
The epic-failure of this company not allowing Mouse 4 and 5 to be bound in yet another game is beyond my understanding. This was a major turn-off for me in AoC and again in this game... The "solution" is not to force players to re-map mouse buttons. They should support mouse 4 and 5 like every other game ever released (just about).
As others have stated, animations are bad... Climbing up a ladder and down is exactly the same (and slow). When I was climbing back down and watching the climbing up animation I couldn't help but laugh and cry at the same time....
Targeting is pretty screwed up. Maybe a special combination of settings fixes it but it should DEFAULT to a working state. Imagine playing a Rogue in WoW (or any other combo point builder class) and having your target randomly switched around constantly... Makes it difficult to build and use combo abilities doesn't it?
Very, VERY, easy to gimp yourself. Some builds are god-like compared to others. One build I found myself mowing down everything in my path without issue while another I struggled to kill 1-2 guys before having to sit and rest for a while. Also, the pre-built templates are pretty useless considering you have to basically be end-game level to create them. They really should have suggested builds for leveling up not for endgame. People who have maxed out several trees already know how to play and what they want to build... New players need the help.
Limited number of quests/tasks you can have at one time is pretty annoying. The "Pause" feature when picking up a new quest (it claims to "pause" the quest you're currently on while you do the new one) doesn't work very well. Found myself losing a lot of progress on past quests.
Maybe I missed a key feature of the game, however I find it difficult to judge the difficulty of an enemy. Some monsters I'd mow down by the 100's while others I could barely take 1 on 1.... all in the same area. The only real way I could guess on difficulty was the targets HP number, however this wasn't very useful in most cases.
Chat is very buggy. Either no one was talking ever, or I often found myself in a situation where no chat channels were working. Relogging sometimes fixed this. Finding players for group content is pretty bad. This is probably biggest complaint in MMO's for me. They're multiplayer online games and should make it VERY easy to find groups. I know lots of the MMO community is against group matching tools but I personally don't care what they "think" is best for the game/community. Not all of us want to join up with a Nazi military guild environment where we have to log in every night for 4 hours... Ok maybe thats a bit extreme, but the idea still stands. I want to log in when I want to and play when I want to... Find groups when I want to and not spend hours spamming chat channels to do it. /endrant
Long story short, this game is Beta and still needs a lot of work. It has a solid foundation but a lot of polish is needed if they want people to take it seriously. I'd bet BIG money that any respectable review sit would give this game a lot of negative points for all the polish issues (animations, buggy this or that, lack of tutorial for complex things... IE crafting).
P.S. Forgot about crafting! Yeah, I eventually managed to craft a few items that were useless to me after hours of messing around. The interface for crafting and moving icons around is pretty bad as it is. Let alone you really have no idea what the heck you're doing. I'm all about complex and interesting crafting systems but at least make the UI good for it! Try to combine 100 low quality materials into higher quality.. Each set of 5 you combine turns into a single higher quality that does not stack by default. You have to manually stack each and every item you create.... *Cry*
Doh!
its more like a thindraki, but with 3 facilities(keeps) and a temple(another keep) in the centre.
instead of rams you capture anima wells that give you a charge you can take to blow the locks on doors, you need to escort 5 charges to open a door. Inside there is a guardian, that you reprogram to fight for your faction when defating him.
Its fully persistent, with a society wide buff for each keep held and an additional buff if all 4 are held.
Its late game only (must complete egypt)
It has a cap of 50 max per side, but if you have less than 50 - tough
theres a second simmilar zone in mid development.
heres the guardian dude
Seriously man? Guy even complimented the game overall just gave his honest opinion as to why he won't be purchasing it. I don't agree but no reason to go there. Can't say having "your kind" in this game is going to be a real thrill judging by your attitude towards things.
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.
I gave it a 6...I think the game is pretty mediocre for the most part...The cutscenes drove me insane after awhile.....Not much variety really.....Im glad I got in beta, would have been pretty upset had I bought it.
I agree with this. Think that once you buy the game and especially if you pay monthly.. you should have access to everything. Now if you got the game for free, or even B2P its different. But comon.. greedy! you take money monthly, I buy the box.. now if i want to be able to use a cool shirt I like I have to buy that for my ingame character too?? I dont care if it doesnt give me extra stats or not im vain damnit.
Then it's the price of vanity.
if the combat would have been good this would have been a day one purchase if not a pre-order for me. It was an amazing experience for me, except for 90% of the gameplay which is combat.
The combat is a deal breaker/game breaking mechanic for me. It is really bad. It feels like some of the worst combat I have seen in an MMO in a long time.
I really wanted to like it, in concept it sounds great, but I didn't. There was nothing horrible about it, it just didn't grab me. I'll be honest in saying after playing the GW2 Beta events not much else (game wise) has interested me, and this includes TSW.
On a real plus note though, I had some account issues with my beta invite (when i clicked on the link in the email it kept taking me to the Anarchy Online webpage) and my invite ended up attached to an account that could not play the beta. I used the on-line support chat and the GM who helped me was supper nice, managed to fix the situation, made sure I would have a good contact point to reopen my case from if it didn't work (but it did), and all at 12:30 a.m. my time. If all their customer support staff is as good as the GM who helped me, I envy those of you who do end up playing.
As far as I can tell the main determiner of score is how much importance people place on atmosphere and the harder investigation quests.
Without those two it sounds like alot of people would be rather unhappy.
And the modren them, do not forget that.
Your right, with out these 3, it would be just like all the other MMO's out now and set to come out soon that have had any beta testing, so yes we like what makes it different form all the rest.
You understand
+1
5 in average from me
biggest drwaback was the combat mechanic and the awkward animations . its really bad no excuse in 2012 they cant fix it 2/10.
On questing and story line especially investigate ones i give it 8/10
I really need to update my computer. That startie/ stoppie/ freeze, freeze, freeze is going to make my head explode! I thought the password quest in the newbie area was cute. It made me feel ess em arrr tee. (Yes, I left the 'A' out for comedic value.).