I know this is an old thread, but it is relevant since the game is now public.
The wife picked it up for me for Valentine's day (we do a little gift exchange these days)... anyway, been playing it a bit since then, just wondering what others out there think about it...
Coming from WoW, here are my initial observations.
Likes:
1) Character customization: I like that the user has so much control of physical features (e.g. shoulder width, height, body mass, jaw structure...)
2) The world is beautiful - They did a great job making the world look nice, and it's not too taxing on my system to turn up the bells and whistles
3) Abilities - Plenty of abilities, even at a low level. Throwing the candy at you early, but not too much or too little.
4) There seem to be plenty of resources around the world, or at least the world population is not big enough to overshadow it.
Dislikes:
1) Jumping: What the hell is up with the "I'm jumping on the moon" look to jumping. You just have to see it... wow
2) The gameplay seems a bit cumbersome, hard to describe this statement. I think it will be OK once they do some fine tuning.
3) Town layouts, at least in the zone where I am are kind of funky. Especially when trying to find binding stones, this may just be something to get used to.
4) Sony gets the big finger for trying to sell me a ton of stupid services when signing up so that I can have the uber l33t pack of coolness. $50/game, depending on subscription $15/mo... and for a few features you want another $3-$10/mo???
Important things of note:
1) When you die, then you lose experience and any unbound gear. This is a different concept for me, as you have to go find your tombstone and recover your items. The nice thing out of this, is you don't have to bind items to use them. So if you pick up a cool weapon (or piece of armor) you can equip without making souldbound. Which means, especially when leveling, that you can sell at auction once you are done. The downside is that if you die in a bad place, you may not have all of your equipment to get back in there. You can imagine my suprise when trying to do a ranged attack (shortly after falling out of a tree) and receiving a notice that says weapon not equiped. It also would have helped to read the manual before beginning
2) Many different skills to learn, while I've been focusing on adventuring you also have harvesting and crafting to work on. Then don't forget about diplomacy. I think there are some really neat elements to the game that should provide plenty of direction.
3) Another thing of interest, I haven't really looked into it, but if you pick the right crafting skill, you can actually build yourself a house.
Overall the game is pretty cool and the combat is decent. Now that I mentioned the combat I realized that I didn't address it.
There are plenty of skills to get, it's your standard bar that you can customize with the order of abilities. As you level up you gain additional skills, some of the cool ones are counter attacks or special attacks that get activated by other attacks. For example: I'm playin a ranger and when I successfully parry an attack, I have a counter attack that activates. It is only active for a few seconds and I have to have enough energy to perform it.
Other than that, I really haven't seen anthing super special or different about the combat, but it is just fine with me.
I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
~Bertrand Russell
