Or trying to? It just started, and I think it’s only over the course of this weekend for the open beta. And I gotta say, so far I’m not overwhelmed by its goodness. As soon as I enter the starting city, it’s laggy to the point of unplayable. Looks like it might be fun if this weren’t the case, but I just can’t accomplish anything with the lag and screwed-up graphics.
Daniel
I’m not but I’d be interested in hearing a little more about it from you. Does the lag seem to be on their end? What do you think of the game otherwise?
I won’t be able to play anything until I get a new computer. This one is outdated and is prone to send me to BSOD if I do anything more than surf. I need to hurry up and get one, too, because it sounds like WoW is starting to get ready for market.
Well, I tried playing it for about another hour last night, and a few minutes this morning.
This game is barely beta. I ran into the following issues:
-Terrible lag whenever anything was going on, even with the graphics settings turned to minimum.
-Several times, the graphics became gibberish: all I could see was a flat blue ground, with occasional planes like building walls flickering in and out of existence. On such occasions, all text, even text on video options buttons, became gibberish as well.
-Every time I entered a fight after the first fight, all text turned to gibberish, and my icons for special maneuvers disappeared, and frame rates dropped to 2-3 per second. I could still perform special maneuvers if I remembered where the buttons were located.
-Twice the game hard-froze; three times it rebooted my computer.
I reported all these bugs, but I’m pretty unlikely to start playing it again unless they completely overhaul it. The game was unplayable for me.
Which is a shame: it’s awful pretty, and the skills look varied and cool. I was able to raise scary-looking undead creatures from the corpses of slain enemies, able to suck their life out, and so forth. I’d like to try it if they can get it up and running smoothly.
Daniel
My boyfriend and my sister are playing it now and it’s running smoothly for both of them. My boyfriend is impressed with the shadows, and he thinks the game is very, very pretty.
Interesting! Poking around on the GW forums, I find that a lot of people are reporting problems with their GeForce cards running this game. My drivers are up-to-date, but that’s the card I’ve got (a 5600 Ultra); maybe they just need to tweak the game a bit for GeForce cards, and it’ll run fine.
Daniel
I’m not having many problems playing. A bit of lag here and there, but that’s all.
Until you can invert the mouse, I can’t play it. Supposedly a fix for that is on the way, but I doubt it’ll be in before the free weekend is over.
Played it for about five minutes this morning, then it locked up and I got a display device not responding error. It was a bit laggy while I played, but that computer has a sucky graphics card, so I expected as much. Had to leave it to go to work, but maybe I’ll try again on another computer this evening.
Played it for several hours the other day. Ran quite smoothly except for a little load-lag in the main-city.
I was entirely underwhelmed. I’m a veteran of tons of MMORPG’s and this one is great for grouping but…
I found the class selection pretty limited and most of the skills really boring. Monster drops are locked to a player in your group so no-one else can pick it up. However it appears the system tags drops depending on how much you contributed to the death of the creature. So my tank would get tons of drops. But my support ranger barely got anything because he couldn’t come close to the same damage output. Rangers can do cool damage but you have to chain together 2-3+ skills and that drains all your power.
Now given its just a Beta test you can’t start your character from the ground up and you’re limited to whatever preset focuses they give you. All warriors start with Hammer Mastery so you can’t select axe or sword etc at the moment.
Its a pretty game, but there are issues with the camera, the camera also locks in place when you’re in combat which is annoying.
It seems to be lacking a decided “fun” factor. So I seriously doubt I’ll be playing when it goes live.
I’m agreeing with you at this point, with a couple provisos:
That said, even after I got the graphics problems with it fixed, I’ve encountered the following problems:
-Monsters all look pretty much the same to me, and their graphics aren’t especially attractive. They remind me for some reason of the graphics in Sacrifice–spiky mutant creatures that all look like the result of a mad scientist experimenting with Elder Gods. It’s a legit aesthetic, but not one that especially appeals to me.
-The item drop thing is pretty annoying. I was playing a necromancer, and some of my best skills involve cursing enemies, but near as I can tell, you’re right about the damage-keyed-to-item-drop thing. At the very least, you’ve got to close with the enemies; when I was hanging back casting ranged curses and spells, I wasn’t ever getting any drops. Finally I started running right up next to enemies to do curses and spells, and started getting a few more. Always less than what the warrior got, though.
-The questing system needs serious retooling. A single quest can take a long time to do, and once you go on it, you’re locked into that quest. Log out of the game, and you lose all progress in the quest; go back to town and you lose all progress in the quest. Near as I can tell, there’s no option to have multiple quests going on concurrently. I really don’t like this.
-Quests are very linear, and mostly involve running along a road killing monsters until you reach the end of the road and kill a boss monster. There are occasional elaborations on this–e.g., you go along the road killing monsters until you retrieve a treasure, then you go along a road killing monsters until you rescue some villagers from a boss, then you go along the road killing monsters until you reach the destination town, at which point the villagers get kidnapped from you anyway–but the underlying format is too similar on all three quests I’ve done.
I’ll be interested to see how the game ultimately turns out, but at this point I’m not really convinced by it.
Daniel
I have not played many MMORPGs. I played the first preview event and the most recent event over this past weekend. Everyone so far has failed to mention the most desireable aspect of this game - You pay only for the retail box - There is no monthly fee!!!
I had a limited time to play overthe weekend, and I was only able to play through the first three co-op levels and got my Monk/Warrior up to level 17.
This preview event did seemed to have a few more problems than the first one, several times I got disconneced and there were some lag issues, but overall I had a great time with the game, and will definetly be picking this up.
Graphics were fantastic
I played this the last time they had a “preview weekend” (sometime over the past summerish), was was…well, underwhelmed. Felt more like online Diablo to me, which doesn’t really appeal to me (though I know that would attract lots of other gamers).
I’ve preordered EQ2 and WoW (am in the beta for both, so basing that decision off gameplay…I actually had no intention of playing EQ2 in release before I got into the beta), so I imagine between those, Utopia and message boards, that will take up plenty of my time. =)