Difficulty:

Very Hard

Time Spent:

100 or More Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Disappointing"

I so wanted to like this game. The cut scenes are very well written. The combat is original the lore is familiar yet very original for a game of this type. The quest design is well thought out...but at the end of the day this game is just way too big a pain in the ass to commit to unless you are totally in love with it. Very quickly into the game you will find that you can't keep doing unique quests but you will have to do the same quests over again, quests with timers on them, which is fine at first, until you run into a brick wall and have to go way back into the game in order to accomplish anything. And then do those quests again..and again..and again...yeah WoW's quests are very redundant too, but at least getting the same quest slightly modified by a different quest giver gives you a greater sense of accomplishment then actually going back to the last zone you completed in order to progress in the next zone you're already half way finished with.

Then there is the non-linear leveling. Yes it's very inovative and very over thought out. Each skill is unique and certain skills work well together to create a very powerful attack.. and they give us guides called decks to help us figure this out...fine. But at the end of the day I would like some opportunity to use my skill points to improve skills I like, rather then buy a new skill that may or may not work as well and I won't know until I try it out and if it doesn't work well I need to buy other skills to help imrprove that skill but then I need to replace other skills I like with those skills since I can only equip 7 active and 7 passive skills at a time. For example, I got a very nice AOE skill early on.... months later, despite regulare character improvement and the purchase of many other AOE skills... the one I got my first week of playing is still the best one I have. Who the hell designed the skill system? Who the hell beta tested this? Using a basic skill at high level because the high leve AOE attacks are less affective is ridiculous. I know this from constant game play, from wanting to believe that no way could a game be so lame as to make a basic AOE skill better then more advanced skills. But that's the sort of crazy non-leveling leveling you have to deal with here.

I don't mind a hard game. In fact initially I liked the idea of playing a hard MMO again. I played EQ for years. But EQ had a great community. It was easy to find groups, it was easy to get into a guild. This game is not big enough or popular enough to create anything close to tha kind of community. If I could get a group easily I may not be whining so much. I'll probably hang in there with this thing a bit longer just because I love the lore, and like the graphics. But I'm already waiting for Elder Scrolls Online.