I'm currently giving it a whirl. I didn't play the beta, so jumped in at launch. Playing a Templar (think WoW Paladin meets DAOC Valkyrie) and got up to level 29 so far. It's a real mixed bag - there's some features which are absolutely fantastic and there's some design decisions which are jaw-droppingly terrible. Overall I'm enjoying it, but some of the negatives are wearing me down already. Here's a mini review:
POSITIVES+ Looks beautiful, lovely environments and attention to detail - although in that sort of drab style that all Elder Scrolls games seem to have (not previously a fan of it, but it's growing on me).
+ Game world is expansive and things aren't all crammed together theme-park style. The game rewards exploration and there's lots of it to explore.
+ Gear looks great. Proper medieval style armour and weapons. Sadly no dye, but I sort of understand why (see the drab thing above).
+ Quest progression is quite organic and the game world changes via phasing as you progress (but you still see others on same step as you).
+ Voice acting is mostly good, although a bit stilted at times. Too many recurring voices though.
+ It's not theme park, but it's not sandbox either. Certainly feels different to most other MMOs.
+ Combat system is fun for a twitch based system. It flows well and the combat animations are fluid.
+ Class system is flexible - any class can perform any role by specialising their skills and wearing appropriate gear. Within reason you can swap roles just by swapping some skills and bar, but I'm sure min-maxxing and cookie-cutter builds will eventually become prevalent.
+ Character customisation is good, it's possible to create quite a lot of variety, though there's no true tiny or giant races.
+ The crafting system is well handled and very interesting, but it's totally wrecked by the truly terrible inventory system (see below).
+ Public dungeons, PvP dungeons. Wonderful, good to see a game with those.
+ The PVP zone is excellent, has the Daoc Frontiers feel to it. But it's perhaps too big, with too much travel to reach the action. However, this does create more chance for skirmishes away from the zerg.
+ RvR is 3-way with keep seiges etc. It's better than GW2 and WAR, but nowhere near as tactical as DAOC because of the reduced ability set all classes have.
+ The game plays really smoothly, even on my ageing system. I was amazed that it even handled the huge PVP seiges and zergs without too much problem. A bit choppy, but far from the lagfest I was expecting.
NEGATIVES- It's inventory juggling HELL. About the worst I've encountered in a subscription MMO and worse than most F2P titles. Bag space is limited and expensive. But most importantly you only have one bank account shared by ALL your characters. Even fully expanded it's nowhere near enough. There's a huge amount of crafting components and general collectibles to clog things up and they all get lumped and muddled together. Already at level 29 my bank is jammed full and I'm spending way too much time when out adventuring juggling crap and deleting. Totally tedious. This is a top price subscription MMO, not some F2P cash shop wannabe. It's nowhere near acceptable.
- It doesn't FEEL like a MMO. There's no nameplates, no chat bubbles, rudimentary chat channels and not much reason to team up other than in a very loose way. It's often really unclear who is a player, who is a vendor, who is a mob etc and the console style interface just makes interacting with other players clunky and cumbersome. I'm sure the roleplay purists will love the "immersion" but as a social MMO it fails to build any real sense of community.
- The starter zone and main story arc is shared by all classes and all factions. It's identical as far as I can tell regardless of what race, class and faction you join. It's scripted well enough with big name voice actors, but there's no decisions to make, no choices, it's on railroads.
- Whilst regular quests are well written for the most part, there's very little decisions or choices to make. There's usually no options, you are forced to do what is scripted. Any choices presented turn out to be illusory. Disappointing.
- Some huge gold sinks - skill respec and gear repair costs are huge and punative. Even just grinding mobs for a bit wrecks your gear. It doesn't really encourage risk taking or trying out skills and tactics you aren't sure will work. Seems devs never ever learn. End result, gold spammers (see below).
- There's no global Auction House. Only way to sell stuff is to join a trade guild or spam the trade channel. You can guess the rest.
- There's no language filtering on the EU megaserver. All languages thrown into the same limited functionality chat channels. You can guess the rest.
- There's too much travel time in PvP. Enemies not respawning staight back into the action is good, but they took things too far in the opposite direction. This may improve as players upgrade their mounts (but then there'll be people at different speeds - tricky for groups).
- No real way to control the zerg in PvP - no mass CC etc. You can guess the rest.
- Console style UI is too clunky on a PC. To be fair, you get used to it, but it still could be a lot better.
- Reduced ability set (similar to GW2) makes combat start to become very repetitive, even more so than normal in a MMO.
- Bots and gold spammers. OMG, never seen so many in a MMO. Quite crazy. They are banning them, but they still spring up rapidly again. The devs made a rod for their own backs here with how many huge gold sinks they added to the game.
- Bugs. All MMOs have launch issues, but there's some real showstoppers here. Broken story missions, crashes to desktop, some people are having their banks wiped and character skill points lost. On the plus side, they are fixing the bugs quite fast, on the minus side this means lots of downtime for maintenance.
CONCLUSIONA good game, potentially very good. But there's some serious issues which if they don't address them I can see things going pretty rapidly to F2P, even quicker than SWTOR did. The bugs will get fixed, but some of the design flaws might not. The major downer for me is that there is a lot of potential fun to be had in the gameplay but I'm wasting WAY too much time pissing around with inventory juggling and repair bills. When will MMOs ever learn that this sort of crap is not fun. Perhaps the bank wipe bug is their way of helping people with their inventory issues
