Played it for 2 hours then got refund for now (hey why not, thanks gabe). Has some nice ideas but just felt very, very dead. And for every nice idea there are a bunch of terrible ones.
From 2 hours play (ie totally not a fair judgement):
Pros
-Some old school vibes, like nighttime being nighttime, talking to NPCs like the olden days of UO/EQ, no handholding
-?
Cons
-Combat is a joke, would be better off completely abstracted in some way than the current floaty nonsense. And that's coming from someone that thought combat in Vanguard was pretty rad
-Doesn't feel like an open world at all. Feels like playing Neverwinter nights, with each area feeling like a map - not even a zone like in EQ which at least often felt continuous with the world, but rather isolated bubbles of content that you effectively teleport between. The "world map" view feels dumb and totally kills any sense of immersive travel. Especially with houses, the villages the player housing seem to be in are just zones you can choose to enter from the world map, but I don't really see why you would unless you lived there. You can move right through the abstracted village on the world map without seeing or interacting with a thing. So yeah, gonna be no such thing as a crossroads (UO) n this game, and no seeing/hearing travellers pass by when you're sitting in your house.
-Having a choice between single player / friends only / fully online is as I feared, no benefit for going into open multiplayer. So nothing learned from Trammel - open MP will be like felucca, and "trammel" (single player) will just be even more rewarding and dull. This makes the game world non-MMO in my mind, just like Elite isn't an MMO despite some claims.
-Boring generic levels with talent points. Was hoping for something at least vaguely along the lines of Asheron's Call, if not something new and original. But instead it's just levels, talents and free respecs. Bleh.
I mean there's definitely more depth than I was able to explore in 2 hours, but first impressions have not led to "UO 2" as some people have claimed. I also have absolutely no fucking clue why they went with a 3d engine. Name one low budget 3D MMO that didn't look and play like a complete asshole? It can't be done. What's more, 3D MMO combat is so tired and lame. Look at how huge MOBAs are, notice the isometric viewpoint, and ask yourself why the fuck would a low budget spiritual successor to UO not go that route. As any dota player knows, isometric gameplay can be just as skill-based and intense as 3rd person, and in fact suits fantasy / heavy melee much better, in general. PvP in 3D MMOs never fails to look derpy on some level. Rant over.
where you can basically do everything in single player / solo mode at no risk? In other words, like having a trammel with even less interaction? Or are there some incentives to doing PvE stuff in multiplayer, like better drops, etc?
