- The Good (positives)
- It's wonderfully pretty.
- Since we've gotten out of beta, performance on my system (i7-930, GTX 470) is surprisingly good for the graphical quality.
- The city-specific story arcs -- at least what I've seen of them -- are pretty interesting and uniquely positioned; you're not the star of the story at first, which is a refreshing change of pace.
- The Armory System lets you build whatever character you want, which is tremendously neat.
- You can solo effectively, but that's no amazing thing these days. EQ2, WoW, CoH, CO, and more are all designed for soloing. Still, though, I think it's a good feature to have.[/list:u]
- The Bad (negatives)
- The lack of content is agonizing when combined with the guildleve content and limits. This alone will likely see me ending my subscription at the end of the extended trial; there's just nothing to do.
- Performance is egregiously poor on non-high end systems, especially with nVidia cards.
- Skill point gain is questionably executed, with perverse incentives for poor play (such as dragging out a fight to improve SP gain).
- Synthesis is overly difficult, especially without any clear guidance on how to do it and what affects it. The lack of a recipe book is crippling.
- The economy is utterly broken at this point.[/list:u]
- The Not-So-Ugly (thoughts, hopes, neutrality, etc.)
- Even though the UI has issues, it's a clean design that keeps your focus on the characters in the fight. Most other MMOs can't claim that, as you generally have to look off-center to monitor character resources in their stock UIs. I look forward to seeing what they do with it.
- SE is generally aware of the issues with the game and is willing to work on fixing them.
- The mechanics are terribly opaque; the game provides little guidance on what stats affect what.
- I'm glad to see Nobuo Uematsu composing again outside of Distant Worlds, but the soundtrack's a little low key. I want my rockin' battle music, please.
- The lore is rather sparse at the moment. I'd like to see more available information about the game world.[/list:u]
The Freelance Wizard
Quality RP at low, low prices!
((about me | about L'yhta Mahre | L'yhta's desk | about Mysterium, the Ivory Tower: a heavy RP society of mages))
Quality RP at low, low prices!
((about me | about L'yhta Mahre | L'yhta's desk | about Mysterium, the Ivory Tower: a heavy RP society of mages))
