Personally a lot of the issues had to do with the UI or me.
-UI large and in the way and typically covered 50% or more of the character. Which meant I had to resize it, which meant everything was tiny letters. (Going to be fixed in later phases)
-Loved the combat most of the time. Didn't get far on Warrior but got to about 13-14 with my Spellslinger. Combat was pretty much just spamming my forward cone attack while dodging all over the place or comboing the stun+plus the big shot thing.
-Monsters always hit you with their normal attacks. The only dodgeable attack is their main telegraph. As you get into the teens and in dungeons, monsters have white attacks which always hit, basic telegraphs which they spam and are hard if not impossible to dodge, and then their big main telegraph attack. I'm sure once I'd have gotten into the 20's or in dungeons I'd get overwhelmed.
-Quests are extremely boring. They're broken up by the BC/MoP style "escort these fruit people here while killing their captors" type fair or the "Hop on this hot-air balloon and put out some fires". Half of the time I didn't know what the fuck I was doing or going. But I just kept moving with the herd and got there eventually. Half the time I'd complete quests without even knowing I completed them. Do you ever turn in profession quests? Or do they just keep unlocking rewards as you progress? I really don't play these WoW-Hybrids for the quests anyways so I didn't really care.
-If you've played
Runes of Magic, that shitty WoW wannabe F2P, that's how the questing felt in this thing. I never felt engaged in the storylines or quests. Even when the dominion was burning the local wildlife I really didn't give two shits. I mean at least WoW tries to get you interested. Actually the whole game felt like a more expensive version of RoM minus the dual classing.
-Professions felt gimmicky. I did science and settler, but mostly leveled up settler. Loved the unlocks on that like extra bag space and such. Everything else was just glorified community buff pads (think engineer from Team Fortress from back in the day). Each area has a "theme". Collect the tokens found in that area, walk up to the Settler pad, if you have enough tokens you can build one of the available "buff pads" at that place. If one has already been built by another player (they are instant), you can instead upgrade their duration by a minute). No, you don't get to run around establishing settlements or making building attachments. I felt the buffs were pretty good. But the whole presentation is very jarring.. I mean... when you put a pad down it has large glowing icons to what buff it gives. Didn't try the other professions so can't comment fully. I heard Soldier was the most boring of them all.
-Extremely "themeparky". Turn left, glowing flower to collect. Turn right, trip over a glowing tree with a green icon, double click it to make it grow. Move forward, get hit by a glowing mushroom that allows you to do a jump puzzle. Atleast WoW had
sometravel, exploration, and discovery. Things in this are packed in tight. I'd argue that you are practically on rails the whole time (like the starting island on MoP).
-Gratuitous use of Phasing, which I kind of liked but may bug some people.
-Feels like everything is thrown all over the place. I know a lot of their humor and such is mature, but this really feels like it's targeted at tweens and kids, and I don't mean the graphics. I got a heavy Skylanders vibe from it minus the cool toys or voice overs. Shoot if it weren't for the vacuum cleaner (yes you vacuum up your loot with the V key) I could almost see large glowing coins floating all over the place (which by the way, when a coin is dropped by monsters it's these big glowing coins like Mario Bros).
I know a lot of folks don't like the combat, but I'm picking this up for the first free month. I'm cool with the combat and it seems like something I can waste some free time with. Definitely not a serious MMO and it'll come and go like all the others. Such a shame really.
