The awesome folks at Trion Worlds were nice enough to send a bunch of ArcheAge founder's packs to the editing office and I was one of the lucky people to receive one. I have just taken my first few steps into the game and while I haven't seen the game's most promising features like siege battles or travel at sea, what I did see was a bit... underwhelming. I'm converting a gameplay video right now, so be sure to check my Youtube channel or this blog later.
It looks decent, but it runs like shit.
ArcheAge uses the CryEngine 3 and is easily one of the most visually stunning MMORPGs I have ever played. It's also the MMORPG with the poorest performance I've ever seen. The game stutters and freezes like crazy and apparently my GTX 780 and my quadcore CPU are no match for this title. Another thing that bothered me right away was the music. I have picked the race of freaky, bipedal cat people for my starting character because duh. And the music in their zone sounds like the kind of stuff they play at Chinese restaurants. It's slow-paced, whiny, annoying and the first thing I turned off right after disabling public chat.
The varied landscapes are a lot of fun.
It's a Free2Play MMO and while access is currently limited to founders and a lucky few, who have been invited to the beta, I've already stumpled across players named "Pussy" and there was a whole lot of flaming, trolling and talk about boob milk going on in public chat. That's hardly the fault of the game, but it servers as a gentle reminder why I don't really care much for online games anymore these days. On that note, be prepared to compete over quest items and mobs with other players, because there is no GW2-style sharing on here, where you can just gang up on the same monster and every player gets their progress. Well, I assume it still works if you group up first, but I don't want to be in a group with a guy named Pussy.
I choose to fight alone.
Everything else I have seen so far was utterly generic. You fight baddies by clicking stuff on your hotbar, just like every other MMO before ArcheAge, save for the handfull of titles with more active combat systems. It's a lot faster than, say, WoW, and there are no long cooldowns, but in the end I found myself winning most battles by simply mashing one or two buttons. I'm sure things will get a little more entertaining at the higher levels, but the noob experience was dull and not remotely challenging.
The quests offered nothing new, either: kill 5 of these, loot 3 of those, rinse, repeat. You do get some speech here and there, which is usually accompanied by some still artwork or even a little engine-cutscene, which is nice. That said, this feature wasn't fun or entertaining enough to keep me interested in the boring quests.
Worst ArcheAge feature: My fucking mount.
Founders get a certain amount of item shop currency, so I went and bought a mount - and immediately regretted it. If you dismount your four-legged companion, he'll follow you around rather than getting unsummoned like they do on WoW. Sounds amazing, but I found myself randomly clicking and mounting the damn thing whenever I wanted to rotate the camera or interact with quest items and the stupid animal just got in the way.
Another fun feature is being able to have an extra passenger on your mount. People would constantly hop on my mount, even when I wasn't riding it, because I was fighting monsters or waiting for a boss to respawn (hellooooo 2005!). There's a button to kick unwanted passengers off, but it only took about five minutes until I had some asshole following me around and hopping on my mount over and over again, no matter how many times I booted him off. Great feature, thanks a lot!
Some quests come with cutscenes, which usually run at or below 5 FPS.
My biggest concern is a resource called "Labour". You see, enemies don't simply drop coin when you kill them. They drop a purse. Wanna open the purse and get the money out? That'll cost you a certain amount of labour. Want to identify an item? Costs more labour. As a premium player I never ran out of labour, but limiting your amount of daily actions is a dick move and it'll probably be a much bigger problem to free players.
A good Free2Play game should reward you for paying a little extra (e.g. cool costumes, experience boosters), but not punish you if you can't or don't want to afford paying up. And if you can only perform so many actions a day and then you're forced to wait for several hours before you can loot money or identify items again, that's not okay. That's punishing people for not wanting to pay and it sucks.
This is by no means supposed to be a fair, objective review. I've only played the game for an hour or two and those were my first impressions. That said, the only reason why I've stopped playing the game so early is because it didn't grip me at all when I started it and it bored me to tears a few minutes later. Again, I should probably see the PvP, the exploration and combat at sea and the post-noob content before I can fairly assess this game, but until then we're off to a bad start.
On a funnier note, Claire has hatched a new Kubrow (read: space dog) on Warframe aaaaand... well.
Oink!
Both the most fun and the most annoying feature of these companions is that you don't know what you'll get until you've hatched and raised them. My Kubrow turned into a tall, slim, gracious, almost regal creature wit long, pointed ears and long legs. She runs across the battlefield alongside my character, fights by his side, turns bad guys to shreds and everyone is happy. Like so:
And then there's Claire's new pet. Heh.
Her Kubrow is the one on the right. Eat ALL the pies!
She raised a fat, disgusting little pig, whom we can almost smell through our computers. That thing is about half the height and five times the mass of my kubrow and when it tries to keep up with its owner it causes little earthquakes and lags the servers. Okay, it's not that bad, but let's just say it's very comical and a bit tragic to watch.
I'm actually quite pleased to see just how much diversity there is from one Kubrow to another and I don't hate the little fatty or anything. Pretty much the opposite - it gives them personality. It's just funny to see a rather nice, slim, dangerous-looking Kubrow and then Claire ends up with this... pig. It's dirt-coloured, it snorts, it has a dull look on its face and it wrestles enemies like a bear. Which is pretty cool, I suppose. A bear kubrow.
And then he ate Obelix.
She said she hates her Kubrow and thinks about neglecting it until it dies (which can actually happen). Can you believe she runs a pet shop for a living? I hope she'll change her mind and that ugly, hairy booger will grow on her over time.
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