Thanks to Headrush, I was able to give it a try this weekend, and played quite a few hours. There’s definitely a lot to like about the game. Here are my impressions in a huge wall o’ text.
One thing that stands out is the variety of gameplay available. You have your standard fetch-quests and “Go kill ten X” missions; those are a given, though they’re better justified than most. You also have:
[ul]
[li]Defend point X (fairly common, but not as much as killing ten rats).[/li][li]Follow environmental clues to target.[/li][li]Solve riddle/obscure information puzzles.[/li][li]Guard dodging. (Avoiding being seen by mobs that can’t be fought; being spotted automatically triggers a penalty.)[/li][li]Escort missions. (Personally, I generally hate escort missions, so I didn’t take the one I was offered. As a result, I don’t know how they play.)[/li][li]Security puzzles. (Finding a way through a minor maze while avoiding traps and detection)[/li][/ul]
That’s a lot of different mechanics for an MMO, and they were integrated pretty seamlessly into the gameplay. I liked that. I also liked the fact that a lot of missions are acquired from things you find and decide to investigate, rather than being assigned by a person; it feels much more proactive and dynamic that way.
The map and waypoint system is excellent, possibly even better than City of Heroes, which is my gold standard for such things. I like the fact that mission waypoints lead you to a search locus, rather than an exact location; it adds a little more immersion. It falls short in not allowing you to set your own waypoints–map locations, contacts, or arbitrary coordinates on the map. (At least, I didn’t manage to do so.)
The atmosphere of the town was pretty good–an interesting mix of gloom and gallows humor, for the most part, but with occasional very silly bits. I was probably excessively tickled with one particular side mission, in which an abomination from the abyss apparently had a craving, and sent its minions to pick up some take-out. The rather dysfunctional townsfolk are good for an occasional laugh, too.
The graphics are decent, I think, but far from spectacular. The PC character models are good; I felt very constrained in character creation compared to City, but I can’t argue with the final look. NPCs, on the other hand, are often rather ghastly, especially in cutscenes–and I’m talking about people, not mobs. Architecture and terrain are generally pretty good, but trees and plant life may be a bit lacking. (Mind you, this is after I upgraded my drivers; prior to that, a lot of the environment was in black and white, and everyone had an ashy pallor and pitch-black eyes with vividly colored irises. It was kind of cool, actually.)
The combat is generally fun and engaging. It’s certainly dynamic. I played a pure sorceress type most of the way, focusing exclusively on Elementalism until I had maxed it out, then branching into support abilities from Blood Magic (healing/shields). The pure assault approach meant a lot of touch-and-go fighting, but it was definitely a workable approach, at least for the available content. Adding just one support ability though–the resource-consuming Blood heal/shield–made things substantially easier, though. Aside from the clusters of zombies in town, spawns scaled pretty organically, providing a variety of challenges.
At the very end, with a big pile of AP and everything I wanted from the Elemental and Blood paths, I switched my primary over to fist weapons. It made a very large difference in gameplay. For fists, at least, the game does seem to hang onto a bit of melee=durable that’s common in other games, even though everyone is likely to spend most of their time in melee range in this game.
One thing I did not like about combat was the lack of auto-facing. Seriously, devs, this does not add challenge, it adds annoyance. If you require my character to be facing a target to attack it, then turn the character. Don’t go “thud” and give me an error message. It’s a nuisance, especially when your style of reticle isn’t very visible in the middle of a scrum (which is to say, nearly every fight with multiple mobs). Leave this bit of clumsiness to WoW.
The game could definitely use more in the way of tutorials. The crafting system, in particular, needs more explanation than the Help window provides. A workshop in the starting area with an NPC who offers an optional tutorial would be good. They may be working on this–I know I got at least one placeholder that said “Tutorial Needed” when I tried something or other.
