Having not kept up on this game, what's the general consensus of the actual game itself?
Very, very short versions of various aspects - of course everyone will have their own opinions, but this seems to be "most generally agreed upon highs/lows":
-Open world PVP is awesome
-Open naval PVP is even more awesome
-Non-instanced housing and farms, and especially illegal farms, gives the server competition and makes the world exciting
-The PVE is "meh" to "bleh". I'm finding it done just fine, but it's nothing special. Even in WoW I skim quest text and have a general idea of what's going on - here I have no fucking clue at all. I just mash through it. I tried a few times to read a little of it, but it seems super, super filler. So yeah, PVE questing is standard, annoying at times, some poorly thought out quests that don't give group credit for clicking a thing, whatever.
-On the plus side of PVE, the ability to turn in many quests with partial progress or overachieving is kinda neat. Although most people highly suggest overachieving everything. Better rewards, gear rewards get better, and more exp, which you'll want, so you're not lower level when you hit the higher PVP zones.
-There's some group PVE content too. Noone ever really talks about it. I've only done the 3-man. It's fun, but simple. I've heard the next dungeon, a 5-man, is brutal, and get the feeling most people skip it because of that.
-Crafting is very complex. With like...20 professions, it's pretty overwhelming. Especially trying to figure out who all makes what. Some professions, especially Alchemy, just fucking make all kinds of useful shit. It's the money maker. Guild crafters are going to be rich fucking toons, hah. Other professions, not so much
-Crafting is also a huge fucking grind. Alchemy, the major money maker, for example, also takes forever, and a bajillion mats to level up. If you bought it on the AH, it'd be super expensive. With the labor system (limited points that regen over time, have a cap, and all crafting actions cost labor) being involved, the grind takes even longer. It's seriously intense.
-I think the class system, so far, seems really really nice. There are some terrible combinations, but most of them have their place, and have their own strength and weaknesses. They're also overwhelming, due to soooo much choice and variety. Even the same classes can be widely varying. It can take a long time to get comfortable with a build and really learn how to make it rock with all the combos possible. Too bad Shadowplay is pretty mandatory for everyone.
Is it going to have legs or is it going to die off (generally speaking) pretty quickly like most everything seems to do nowadays?
Pretty unanswerable. Remember, we currently have a whopping
SEVENNA servers. If you took "dead" games, like LOTRO, GW2, SWTOR, whatever - those guys still have fucking more than seven servers. However, this is definitely a niche game. Right now everyone is in standard PVE mode with neat housing, cool class system, and farmville. That shit changes pretty quick. Most of the world does NOT want open world PVP, they absolutely hate having to join a guild and interact with people in an MMO. They just want a solo experience with a chat box. I think in 1 month queues will be extremely more tolerable. It wouldn't surprise me if we still have them time to time, but none of this "2-3 hour patron, 7 hour F2P" bullshit. In 3 months I'd expect they'll all be gone. There's no raid progression. No factions to grind. No clickies/mounts/pets/toys to collect. At level cap you PVP for shit while playing the insane RNG crafting thing trying to get best gear. It's seriously sadistic.
I guess all-in-all I think it'll have the same drop-off as every other MMO out there, but due to the majorly, majorly overpacked servers of today (I've dealt with queues in EQ, WoW, GW2 (well kinda, overflow servers a lot), FFXIV:ARR - but nothing like this), even as the population dies off you'll still see near-full servers past the 3 month point. Just the queues will die first, instead of the servers.
Are the mechanics and content pretty solid?
Most stuff is really polished. And it should - the game has been out for, what, 2 years in Korea? It's nice and responsive. The UI works, although in some places it's lacking - like your bag has this pretty neat feature where you can make new tabs, and decide what types of items show in that tabs. That's pretty fucking neat. Yet you can't search in the damn thing. The auction house will automatically tell you the cheapest per-item price of an item - pretty nifty. But you can't sort buy the Bid price (even though it says that - it actually only sorts per-item Buy It Now price). The guild list is completely unsortable, even though it has column headers that look like you could sort it. You have this cool teleportation book that records places you've visited, and works as fast travel. Absolutely no sorting or searching. Also, why isn't that shit just rigged up into your map?
Sometimes combat will be too finicky about putting mobs in the "invulnerable" state (when it can't path to you). You'll backflip onto a slight incline, and he'll bug out. That's the only common thing that sticks out.
Right now, the game is too early, I think. Most PVP is just gank squads. And if you show up to defend, they give up and leave. Not much meaningful PVP yet. I think large battles in 1-2-3 weeks when we have more 50s on the server, and go to war zones, is going to be pretty fucking intense.