My groups mostly lvl 40s now and have done most of the content, as we are on one of the smallest servers and have had pretty much everything to ourselves. My assessment -
- this game is a scam, though not as much as I had initially thought before I played it. What they’ve done, with the amount of time they’ve had, is unforgivably minimal, it actually boggles the mind. I’d have to give them extreme benefit of the doubt that they basically went back to the drawing board as recently as one or two years ago. The only reason it works at all is because of how slow it is to level up or do anything. It is unlikely this will ever be released in a finished state, and none of the updates are promising that they have any good future ahead of them. The pace of gameplay and progress is slow enough that people can enjoy what is there for many months atleast . You will get your moneys worth out of paying for the EA price but anyone who pays anymore any more than that or more going forward is going to get scammed .
- some classes are fun and show elements of being well designed. Others are not and can maybe be excused as due to it being early access, so only time will tell. Everything is extremely feature incomplete class wise.
- world is not nearly as interesting as ever quest. The verticality and climbing has promise but there are not nearly enough points of interest. They could easily spend a year just making silent plains interesting .
-Content at 30+ is basically nonexistent. We grinned feralings for weeks to get xp, was mind numbing, and they dropped copper only and lvl 1 gear, even tho they are lvl 35+. This is excusable as its early access
-the itemization guy is a standout. Some really nifty chase items and creativity in itemization that is sorely lacking in other mmos. (This only applies up into the level 20s range)
- encounter design is old school, in mostly a good way. Major fights are slow and endurance based. Fights can definitely be cheesed and mechanics are janky as balls, but it’s not as important in a game like this as it would be for something like wow or ffxiv.
- they captured sense of fear from eq pretty perfectly. Getting afro can be terrifying , and while frustrating it’s definitely immersive. Overall I think it’s a good thing, even though it sucks, if that makes sense. I care a lot more about what I’m doing on my character than in other mmos I’ve played in a long time. Exploration mostly needs a group for this reason.
- Halnirs is overall great, if buggy. Whoever designed this should do all their major dungeons.
tldr - despite all the positives, unless they really did most of their work in the past year, this shit is a scam that’s never going to finish, because 10+ years of dev time is nowhere near justifying what they have. It’s amazing to me no one else has really tried to capitalize on the fun elements of non instancing (I’m not on a shart server, hopefully they boot that shit once they have more content), grouping , slow travel times , and slowed down combat that this game offers because they seem like low hanging fruit that a lot of old school mmo players would be drawn to.
