Just a quick drop in to give you a quick impression of my open beta experiences:
- I've played a Barbarian, Demonologist, and am starting an Assassin once I complete this post.
- Buggy, as Daishus says, yes. Some of the same problems that I saw in the PvP beta weekend are still there but the game is very playable and pretty smooth for a beta. While disappointing, I don't think this means a horrible launch - they just need to put in some overtime in Norway.
- The game is friggin beautiful! I was seeing 35-45 FPS with my graphics set to High (computer specs below) and rarely saw anything less than 60 with them set to medium. And as I said, it's beautiful. AFAI can tell, we're running and only have access to the DX9 version.
- Combat is different, yes, but I can't say it's "revolutionary." Shields are represented by three chevrons that surround your character, mobs and other players. These chevrons are always displayed at your target's left or right or above them (indicating shields at their front). For me, combat has so far existed of little more than watching for where the shields aren't and attacking there while I wait for my specials' cooldowns to end. Speaking of specials, they're used by clicking the special attack (or combo as they call them) and complete it using the directional attacks. So, in short, I can't say this combat (spamming attacks as appropriate) is all that different from that of WoW, CoH, SWG or practically any other MMO. It was a creative attempt to make something new but it's only slightly different, IMHO.
- Quests have yet to really grab me. Between the flakiness of the beta client (yes I know that part should improve), the UI and NPC interaction, I'm not enjoying the quests. I do them for the XP and that makes me feel like all I'm doing is grinding - not the way I want to start a new game.
- NPC interaction (all of it apparently) takes place as a cutscene with your questions and comments available as a menu of selections. IMHO, the cutscene presentation does not add a cinematic feel or anything like that, rather it detracts from the immersion - a very important factor for me. Further, a couple of them seemed to hang for a while - long enough for me to start to wonder if the client had crashed. This is a little bug and I don't hold that against the game as I know that should be pretty easily fixed, just thought I'd mention a specific example of the types of issues.
- The music is awesome. Period.
- The sounds are awesome. Period.
- The voiceacting is better than most games although the accent and voice sometimes do not seem to match what I imagine the people should sound like.
- The UI, as I suggested earlier, ain't nothing to write home about. So far, it doesn't sound like we're going to be able to write mods for the UI, only re-map keys. Having seen what I've seen of the game, I would make allowing for UI customization a major priority if I were Funcom.
This is what comes to mind right now - please feel free to ask me questions and I'll do my best to answer them.
Computer Specs wrote:
- Intel E6850 @ 3.0
- 4 gigs high-end Corsair RAM
- Nvidia 8800 GTX
- RAID 0 (yep, this matters - two pathways for data )
- Killer NIC