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Anyone play this? I'm unclear whether it is still in open Beta or if it's been officially released (regardless it is free-to-play) but I just started yesterday and it seems pretty cool. I'd been wanting to scratch my WoW itch for a while but didn't want to be forced to invest a lot of time and money all at once.
At first glance I was like "okay, another lame WoW clone." Then halfway through the trailer they were like "oh and by the way you can build a spaceship and travel through the aether." And I was like "huuuuhhhh....."
The basic framework of the game essentially is WoW. I'd say in the ballpark of the quality of the original version (pretty impressive given that this is a free-to-play game) ... except that instead of starting off with "Now you are a man! Go kill some pigs!" It starts off with "OMG our ship is under attack we need to get the hell out of here and fend off a giant space monster and an enemy ship and save our secret technology OMG!." After things settle down I think it ends up being a bit more like a traditional MMO, but so far it looks like there's more of an overarching plot. ("Hearthstones" seem to have an actual storyline centering around them. You don't just get handed one for no reason, there's a quest chain leading up to them that makes them out to be this mysterious technology you don't understand yet).
The feel of the game is very much like Outland from Burning Crusade, with a Draenei style mix of fantasy and high technology. I don't know what level you have to be to build an aether-ship, but it looks pretty cool. You can't man a ship all by yourself so I'm trying to get some friends into the game.
Right now I'm playing an Arisen Occultist/Psionicist. Arisen are undead, but with their limbs replaced with cyborg mechanical parts, which is a character idea I've always wanted to see and they look pretty awesome. Psionicists are sort of a weird mix between rogues, hunters and warlocks. They have some basic magical attacks, but their main ability is to spend 20 seconds forming a bond with the mind of their opponent, after which they can deal absurd amounts of damage (flavorwise they're basically destroying your mind). They have other abilities that let you form Mental Links faster.
If you're a gnome lover, the game has it's own resident "tiny" race called Gibberlings, which are more like furry mouse people. The thing I found particularly neat is that you don't play a single Gibberling, you play a cluster of three of them (they are born in pods of three and tend to stay with their siblings their entire life). If you're a gnome hater, well in this game you get to kill three times as many at once!
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Blayne Bradley
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Hrrm... At first I was like "Meh another WoW clone.... Woah is that a spaceship I can pilot!?" looking at the trailer.
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I can't tell if you were deliberately ironically copying my line, or if you just had the exact same reaction I did (neither would necessarily be unreasonable).
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Blayne Bradley
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I had the same reaction word for word.
The graphics and style in general left me with a meeerrggghhhh in my mouth but then came the space ship and I was despite reading your post previously and SHOULD have been prepared for it was like GIMME!
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I think I will try this out later tonight, the dark side doesn't really appeal to me in this game so I'm leaning to the Gibberlings now, I'll decide if I take the rouge path or warrior when I actually play though.
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I tried a few different race/class combos, unfortunately it's hard to get a feel on how something will actually play in the long term from the early sections, when you only have 2-3 abilities.
Yesterday I got out into the "real world," which was a little... meh. It was meh in the exact same way that most of WoW is meh though. Decent enough plot I guess, but a bit of a let down after the dramatic storytelling in the introduction. I think MMOs need a standard feature wherein you can tell important quests from unimportant quests. Upon exiting the sewers I saw about 10 quests available, grabbed all of them, but then felt like I didn't have any real emotional attachment to any of them.
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BTW, when I created my character there seemed to only be one server, at least in the US. I can't recall what it was called off the top of my head, but I think it started with a T. Lemme know if you end up on the same server.
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posted
I'll try to head for the same server, I have a terrible download rate so I'm just going to get it done overnight. And tomorrow is my birthday, so I should have a character started around friday. The trailers look good, and the story is already better than the other MMOs I have played.
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I think a guild will require more than four people, but a guild that happens to include all the players at hatrack would work for me.
I've played a bit more. I've found so far the quests, while technically identical to WoW quests, tend to have a bit more cleverness in their storylines. I'm enjoying and definitely intend to keep playing a while. However, I've heard that at the endgame, it takes two hours to respawn after you die, and that they charge something ridiculous for a potion at the online cash shop to bring you back to life early. When you factor in the fact that the game is free and for most of the game it doesn't necessarily take that long to rez, it's still not necessarily a worse deal than a normal subscription model. But if you're the sort of player who spends a lot of time at the endgame it might be way more expensive thatn $15/month.
I spend most of my time leveling, and I actually kind of like the idea of an MMO that forces you to stop playing for the night when you die. So I'm not sure this is a big deal for me. But it's the biggest complaint against the game I've heard.
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So, I tried out a Kanian Paladin first, and I spent a couple hours going through the first quests and it was like...It was a little draining, actually. The combat is significantly more interesting, but it literally took 2-3 minutes to kill a single mob in some cases, which was annoying.
Then I tried an Arisen out, cause they look freakin awesome, and after three minutes I was level freakin 4.
I think the game designers decided to do the opposite of Blizzard and give the darker faction the friendlier early leveling experience. Overall, not a bad game, but it is, of course, still a little over my head in depth at the moment, which is much different than WoW was (not saying that's a bad thing).
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My first experience was similar to yours, feeling really slow all the time, but I don't think it has anything to do with which race you are, it's just that the first time you play for some reason it feels slower (maybe you just get used to it). I don't think you should be noticing a permanent difference in mob-killing-time in levels 1-5, in either case I can complete the tutorial section in just a few minutes.
I finally felt like I fit my stride yesterday, that I was playing the "game-game" as opposed to "intro-game," and it pretty much felt like WoW except slightly cooler... but with a lot more gold-spammers. (every time you log on you're going to need to either hide zone-chat or add a few new people to your ignore list, and the people are going to have obnoxiously hard to type names).
I had heard that psions get a "clone spell", but assumed you were literally creating clone and that it would be a higher level ability. Turns out you get the ability at level 5, and it actually has really perfect flavor: After you create a mental bond with an enemy, you create an illusionary version of yourself in their mind, and they will spend their time attacking the fake version instead of you. So as long as you're fighting 1v1 you shouldn't take damage, but other mobs in the area will not see the illusion so you'll have to defend against them. Really neat.
Also interesting - I've only briefly played the "good guys" (Gibberlings are cute, but Arisen are just too cool), but so far it looks like they really drive home that the "Empire" is the one with the actual "Empire." Once you get into level 5-10 land, you immediately start out in a huge capital city (larger than Stormwind, but a lot of sections of it are actual leveling zones with thief/cutpurse and giant-rat type mobs).
Whereas the League starts out shipwrecked and isolated. Presumably they have a capital somewhere but you have to work for it to find it.
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Blayne Bradley
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It takes a ridiculously long time to kill mobs, they have probably twice as much health as they actually need.
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That's not till near endgame (level 35, out of a max of 40) so I haven't seen it yet. How far are you in the game, because killing mobs feels a lot less sluggish when you reach the main area and learn your class better
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I'm going to download this tonight and take a look.....If I can pull myself away from League of Legends (Over 450 games played now...tragic)
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