I'm fucking telling you guys this could've been the ultimate sandbox experience. Did any of you play Ultima Online? This game should've had cartography, stealing, magery, healing, anatomy, etc. Skill caps so that you had to actively pick if you're a crafter, warrior, or what. This game is soooo close to being a true successor to UO with awesome PvP and PvE and instead it's just a watered down worthless piece of shit where everyone can be everything.
They really should've copied UO. Can you guys imagine visiting an orc fort. Seeing an ettin that's four times the size of your character in the wild, etc. I mean there is just so much they could've done. They could've expanded on the crafting in UO and had special crafts where you take a dragon scale and cyclops eye to create some awesome armor, or whatever. PvP could've been based on the criminal/murderer system that was in UO avoiding this stupid as fuck faction system.
As this game sits right now it's pretty much DOA. There isn't even enough mob diversity to make it remotely interesting. Is the world big? Sure, but when you see the same shit everywhere you go does it really matter??? I remember traversing UO and finding so much shit with each town having it's own unique features, etc.
I find myself sitting here in awe of the fact that one of the first true MMO's is the only one to have actual housing in the world, actual stealing, an actual criminal system, actual animal taming, actual treasure maps with treasure hunting, actual boats that you control on the open sea. How have our expectations been lowered so much? This game basically offers nothing new and the things it does have it does poorly. What is the hook to keep you playing?
Because no one wants to pick one thing. It's not 1997 anymore. Darkside fucking sucked. I beta tested UO and most of that awesome experience took place in your head. It was great at the time (ish) but way simpler. Every game has done the big creature thing. It was impressive to see hill giants in 1999 in EQ; no one gives a shit anymore.
I really do understand both your love and nostalgia. It was great being in a world with other people, and whether that game was EQ or UO, we all carry that experience with us always. I didn't like UO and didn't play much in beta nor in retail. I had played a bunch of the Ultima games and didn't get it then. It really took the first person experience of EQ for me to engage on what the possibilities were.
We'll see if this game is DOA. I now get a lot of the complaints about it trying to do a lot of things and not succeeding spectacularly in any of them. The *bones* are there for a great game. I just feels very shallow so far for me in the beta, which admittedly is just a couple days with the game. It just lacks not programatic polish but it is a very different game and there isn't any real way to figure out those difference other than trial and error. Even EQ was less *Deep END!* than this. Go Find Fiber! Good luck have fun! Also I need bird feathers. Birds have feathers. GLHF. Also Iron. Its high.
I have really enjoyed crafting so far, and finding the stuff you need to craft: It was a bit of a shock to get to the gates of Cutlass Keys hamlet and find most of the things seemingly in short supply around First Light (Hemp, Turkeys for feathers, and Iron veins all a stones throw from the gate). It's doing a lot of things, with a seemingly shallow skill tree deeply affected by attributes, skill-based combat, electable PvP Territorial control, story missions; hopefully there is a guiding hand to bring it all together. It will have an audience, at least for a while. People are obviously hungry for something new; the question is how long will they give this a chance.
To me the bigger question will be does the dev team come out of the gate nerfing or are they more nuanced, and how much can they pull this all together in the last five weeks. I have seen some projects really come together, and some fall apart. Cynical me has seen many more fail but hope always springs eternal.
In regards to polish, GW2 was the last one for me that really hit it out of the park, though; Dynamic event chains 4 and 5 events deep that would lead to really amazing events it followed through, the renown hearts, that were added super late in the dev process to help flesh out the map and direct players' engagement, all of the different stories provided so much replay, you could level 3 or 4 characters and never see some of the same areas twice. Skills were weapon based, and also classed based, so as you changed off hand and main hand, even the same weapons would provide different skills (sword and mace vs mace and sword, for instance were different for a warrior). It was impossible to get out the first 5-10 levels without knowing how everything worked, how your class functioned, what the ui meant, etc. Definitely not the GLHF approach.
