So I got into the beta yesterday and tried it out for myself to see if the game had any redeeming qualities.
Pros:
The graphics/animations, sound, music and cutscenes are all decent, but that's standard for Korean games.
I really liked the seamless transition from character creation to the tutorial.
Teleporting (recall/waypoints) is done well.
Cons:
Combat - Boring. I can't exactly put my finger on it, but it just doesn't feel very engaging to me. It's kinda like the combat designers from the NWN mmo and the area devs from FF14 (launch) got together and had a retarded baby.
World - Static and lifeless. Lore seems pretty bare other than "Big bad wants to take power from chosen ones" trope.
Travel forms - Useless. Base run speed is slowed down to make the travel form feel faster, which still isn't very fast. Bird form is just a glide and barely seems necessary for anything but avoiding fall damage. Swim form, same as land form. Increase character run/swim speed and give us a glider, same effect. The only point I can see for adding this was that they were too lazy to do mounts and they can sell skins. BDO came out ten years ago and did mounts perfectly (animation and speed) and no other game has come close. Why? It ain't fucking rocket science.
Grappling hook - Lame. Can only hook where they let you and only seems to exist because they were too lazy to implement climbing. Traversing elevated terrain is clunky as fuck.
Exp loss on death - LOL?
Stellarite - Terrible. A stackable/toggleable consumable that boosts damage by 15%. Lineage 2 had this also, it was stupid then and it's stupid now. Any time you don't use it you effectively are fighting with a permanent debuff.
Stat points- You can think this allows for more build diversity but all it really does is allow them to sell stat resets in the cash shop. Same reason they have exp loss.
Leveling - Needing skill books (in addition to skill points) to level up skills is just a bottleneck that doesn't need to be there. Side quests are fairly standard, as in boring. Questing areas seem way larger than they need to be. Always spend more time running around or listening to NPCs use too many words to tell you what they want than actually fighting. Mobs only seem to drop crafting ingredients (rarely). I guess real loot is dungeons only? Haven't run any yet.
Crafting - The game has crafting.
UI stuff- Only 3 presets for skills is kind of annoying. It would be better to let us have 2 (toggleable) presets per weapon that apply automatically when that weapon is equipped. Having to click to like half a dozen different pages to get various shitty achievement rewards is fucking dumb, but seems to be pretty standard for asian games these days. Not only could they just have them be drops or quest rewards, but if you're going to have this shit at least put them in one place for fucks sake. Small gripe, but storage isn't shared between characters and you can't mail items or gold (which also isn't shared for whatever dumb reason) to your alt. Having to go to an NPC to craft instead of just doing it in your UI is unnecessary, except I guess to get you to go to town more often?
Overall, this game feels like how an LLM would design an MMO. It has the shape of one, without the substance. There's just no connective tissue there. In my opinion, publishing this is a mistake for AGS, just adding to their reputation for underwhelming games. There are other MMOs still running that are 10+ years old and are still exponentially better than this shitty but pretty, generic waste of time.
