This game had so much potential that it really irritated me that I had such a bad experience with it.
The game was 3-d, "real-world" looking. The architecture was stunning and the textures were rich and varied. I have never seen a game where just standing and looking around was enjoyable, except for Oblivion (I am sure there are others).The game required you to build something of a history for your character and encouraged you to buy skills up front to flesh out your character. It has only a few races to choose from now, but that is easily added on later. Movement was simple and easy point and click OR arrow keys! Keys are also programmable and "shrtcuts" (macros) can be added to further customize th einterfae. Another feature I really liked; you could easily move between first person, follow mode, overhead view, or another mode that was at an angle from above. chatting with other players was easy and there was an help feature that allowed you to ask real people online for assistance or search through a limited (for now, I hope) Help file. The landscape was beautiful and quite often I could climb to the top of hills to survey the surrounding area.
BUT! The skill levelling system. A complicated system of bars that is not very intuitive. Once you read an explanation, it makes some sense, but other games are easier to understand.
Many places were unbelieveably dark. The main city, Hydlaa, was so dark I couldn't see at all most of the time except a short window around noon. A section of the path leading away from the city to the north is so dark allof the time that you miss the sharp turn between two large bolders to move further into the world and coming back across it makes it hard to find the city gates. When I enquired about this, I was told to just adjust the gamma on my monitor! He said other games like Doom are also dark, but Doom allows you to set the gamma with a few keystrokes from within the game (and remembers them). We shouldn't have to make a special foray into Windows settings just to play the game, and then have to reset it when we quit playing.
More annoying than that is the game interface was rather awkward. Multiple windowed menus that you (on the plus side) can move around the screen wherever you want, but often obscure much of the screen. If you open the inventory window it takes up half of the screen! several others do also, so if you want to see more than one or two, you can't see anything in the game even though it can be set to be semi-transparent until you mouseover. The icons were very similar in design and blended together until mouseover, making it hard to remember which one it is you want. Simple actions are unnecessarily complicated. In order to move items from the world into your inventory, you have to click on it, right click on it, and then select an action like "pick up" or "examine". Moving things from inventory to the ground is just about as complex. Another example is to place items into a furnace you had to open a window for the furnace, open your inventory, select the amount of the type of object you want to move (reasonable), then drop it into the other window. Why not click and drag directly onto the furnace and have it show up in the real world in the furnace? on top of that, the inventory menu has all your stats in it as well making it occupy more space.
Worst yet, interaction with npc's is almost impossible. It uses a text window to type in what you want to say to the npc. It was a RARE thing when I got one to understand what I wanted, and even seemed worse when I reduced my sentences to one or two words! In a game where "roleplaying" is supposedly paramount, just getting quests or information is almost impossible!
Okay, actually the worst thing is there is no map! zip! nada! The world is vast and full of valleys, so it is impossible to set your sights on a distinct feature and reference from it. What is odd, is that it has many really tall rock spires scattered around the landscape, but they all look similar enough that they do not help with direction. With no compass or map you spend a lot of time being lost, either in the city or in the wilderness.
Aside from all this, when you log into the forum and mention ways to improve the game, the creator pretty much flatly refuses! "There will be no maps, because they ruin roleplaying! Exploring is fun!" (Exploring is fine, but being lost all the time detracts from the game immensely.) "This game is about roleplaying, so I am going to force you to have to talk to npc's (who can't understand you) and others (who are all super nice, but may not have time to explain all you want to know) to get find out how to do things" (All paraphrased, or what I understood from what he said)
Then, finally, I died doing something I had done many times before with no problem. I slid down a steep incline and died. So I went to Hell. Excuse me, The Death Realm. A horrible place of endless paths that lead nowhere, with no clue whatsoever as to how to get out. "to teach us to be very careful and to make us not want to die" like any of us REALLY wanted to die in the first place! That's when I quit for good.
Add to all that the fact that monsters didn't attack back for a while ( a feature to allow players to run around for awhile without dying (shudder) and left little or no loot, then became un-attackable, apparently a huge glitch. Also, the first quest I did get required me to wander to the absolute opposite end of the world to get a mineral. Remember, this is a beginner quest and there is no way to find out where that location is!
I kept trying to remember that this is a Beta version of the game, but even so, there are so many problems, many that they refuse to even address, that I have had the worst gaming experience ever! What is wrong with having maps and compasses? If you don't feel they add to your roleplaying, THEN DON"T USE THEM! No one is forcing players to use features in a game. If you want to roleplay, you will, but having the game be especially difficult to use, just to try to force people to do it will only kill the game eventually. A game should offer people OPPORTUNITIES to do what they want, and if some agree that roleplaying is paramount, then they will roleplay. Trying to force the issue only limits an otherwise positive gaming experience. The interface should be VERY simple and intuitive. Most of us have real lives and don't want to spend most of our gaming experience reading Player's Guides that are lengthy and still may not cover what we want to know (I didn't find out much about what I wanted to know) or wandering around lost and not acomplishing what we WANT to do, or having to ask other players or help advisors about things that we should be able to either figure out or should be quickly explained when you try to do something. (you need a hammer to do that, or you have to learn skill X from an instructor like X).
So until the Death Realm dies, maps appear (or at least a compass, and npc's can understand SOMETHING I say to them, I am affraid I will be found on Runescape!
