Well, I just finished the Fileplanet beta of AoC. But even the Gamespot PvP weekend got me to pre-order.

The game is definitely hyped, but I think it has a good chance of living up to it. I can't speak for bugs, because we really didn't have access to much during these two betas. The Fileplanet beta started a bit wobbly, the client wasn't very stable and there were large memory leak issues and it was poorly optimized. But towards the end they actually patched it up to run very smooth.

HGL was more of a technical nightmare than gameplay bugs, and I think AoC has a pretty good handle on the technical side of things right now. As for the actual gameplay, the hype around the combat system I feel is pretty well deserved. It's definitely a lot of fun to execute all the combos and watch all the unique animations - much more fun than watching auto-attack and hitting an ability that shows you one of 2 or 3 unique animations. It's also more of a roleplaying game than other MMOs. For one thing, there's actual NPC conversations. There's no quick quest description and "Accept"/"Decline" buttons. Each NPC you can talk to has some dialogue trees. They're not necessarily as lengthy as some single player RPGs, but it's still a more immersive feel than something like WoW.

For me at least, it's looking pretty good on launch. The start of the FP beta was pretty nervous because the game kept crashing for out of memory errors every few hours, but after than patch I'm definitely pretty happy with how it's looking. It's going to have bugs and issues, every MMO especially does, but still it's looking good.

I tried it out and was really let down. The performance was brutal. I had all kinds of problems getting it to actually take settings changes (three tries before all my graphics settings stuck), and I had two lockups (had to CTRL ALT DEL out) before actually getting into the game world. Load times on zoning are measured in minutes.

Once there? Meh. In its current incarnation, spellcasters don't get anything like the combos the melee get. You spam a spell until stuff dies, its exactly like WoW only without the polish or balance (low level Priest of Mitra heals are idiotically underpowered, to the point that they aren't worth casting).

The melee combat didn't really do it for me either, but it was better then the caster combat. I found it mostly to be "find what direction the enemy shields are, and spam the button on the other side". Combos were pretty easy, a guide pops up telling you what buttons to push in order, but sometimes it didn't work and there was no feedback as to why.

The dialog also didn't do much for me. The voice acting was pretty meh (honestly I prefer no voice acting at all over poor quality voice acting), and while people have multiple dialog paths, I kept getting forced down a specific one in order to get anywhere. One guy in particular simply wouldn't do anything other then block a gate until I went down the specific path the game wanted me to. Why bother having forking dialog if you're just going to force people down one fork anyway?

My opinion on it is that if you ignore it for six months and then buy it, you'll wind up getting a much better first impression. The main problems are bugs, performance, and balance. All of that will get fixed later, but IMHO right now its not in a condition suitable for release.

any reason why? is it going to be worst than HGL?

You should really try for yourself but I'm not the biggest fan. There are too many reasons why it's not a game that I'm going to be playing when it goes gold. I summed it up in the AoC forums here. A few reasons why:

1. Small world
2. Every zone is instanced like EQ2/D&DO, so no seamless world. This is probably the biggest reason why I dislike this game. Think of all the city building taking place in instances. I mean in SB owning a city was already a way to show off. Every guild in AoC starts out with a private area on which they can build a city because of this instancing nonsense
3. The click to swing combat system is just as boring as the auto attack system
4. The resource system is incredibly lame. Think of WoW but instead every node is in the same spot (not in a few random locations) and they recharge. Bots are going to rule this game
5. Classes are completely imbalanced
6. AoC tried to borrow WoW's talent system but done so very poorly. They should have stuck to AO's skill system

Thanks for the honesty people, I seriously hope when warhammer comes out I manage to find people like yourselfs who arent bought over with hype, the way I see it you cant judge a game until you play it and where MMOS are concerned you cant judge them until you have played them for 3 months or more after which its to late, you have already been ripped.

I seriously dont like MMOS anymore, I perhaps disagreeably to many see the vast majority as a bit of a scam(Low standard sub par gameplay and diversity)

Either way thanks for the honesty people, this is the reason why I would rather hear from players than reviewers because half the time reviewers sensor any user reviews on their sites (I have had this happen with gamespot for merely justifying my review with the pros and cons of a certain game )

Dont listen to the naysayers. I also was in the Fileplanet beta. The basics of the game are right on track. The combat was fun, the world was beautiful.

I love these people complaining about a beta for god sakes. The world is too small? Are you smoking crack? Did you actually play the last day where they opened up the world? Alot of things could be used to describe the world, but small isnt one of them.
The zones are instas, but again, they are BIG insta areas. I'm not a insta fan either, but they dont seem like instas when the areas are as big as they are, not including the n00b areas.

We have a guild of a 100 or so that are going to play. Most of us were pretty impressed with what funcom has done. Is it perfect? No, but what game is in a beta?
The important thing is the gameplay and I liked it. So did a great deal of people.

LAWLZ man that statement is a challenge to the MMO industry and they are up to it!

Though I haven't played it, It didn't look very good on a few youtube movies I saw of it. It was very repetitive, but there was one plus: Huge Clawed Killer Gorilla!..................that was taken down relatively simply:(

I'm not sure about this one. Funcom had some articles and interviews about large scale siege PvP and it sounded like they wanted to make it so that every guild that's big enough (I think 30 people or something to be able to own a battlekeep?) to participate. The basic principle is that a guild's "pvp points" (gained through random world PvP and the PvP minigames) would determine who/when that guild can attack, and when they declare an attack their points reset to 0. So while the uber guilds will of course be able to rack up the points faster and battle more often, the more casual guilds will still (in theory) have the chance to participate. They're unlikely to be the first ones to build the keeps since there's a limited number per server, but they should still be able to compete for them.

I don't know. A lot of what's in this thread is based on no concrete evidence or gameplay experience. A lot of things have been kept under NDA. There was a complaint earlier that casters don't get a system as flashy as melee combos. Which is true... but only for Beta. What those people didn't say (or know) is that Funcom has a "Spellweaving" system for casters, which will allow them to channel and dynamically modify their spellcasts for added effects, essentially creating spell combos It's just that this system has not been put in the beta.

Likewise, those complaining about absolutely horrid performance had a point, until the May 9th patch to the Fileplanet client, which had an absolutely drastic increase in stability and performance. Every game, MMO especially, faces technical issues. For AoC it's more complicated because the game is trying to push the graphics whereas something like WoW did not. WoW itself had a pretty bad launch, I remember my server had Captain Placeholder in Menethil for months because boats kept dropping everyone in deep water because zoning between the two continents wasn't working.

The important thing, for me at least, is seeing that the developers care about supporting the game. I was doubting my decision to preorder at the start of the FP beta, as I mentioned in my first reply, but after seeing the May 9th patch I felt it justified because it showed that Funcom does want to optimize it, does want to fix issues. As for the gameplay? Nobody can say, because nobody who hasn't played the NDA'd beta actually knows how it is past level 20

The game went gold a while ago. We are in fact not talking beta code anymore. Thats the same code on the release disk. They're busy working away on patches that you'll get to download immediately after installing (day 1 patching, how very PC gaming), but saying "its a beta, ignore the problems" is a complete joke.

There were way too many technical issues for them to magically be resolved in two weeks. I mean honestly, a friend of mine was playing on a system well above recommended specs, with twin 10k Raptors in RAID 0. If his performance isn't up to par, they've got serious problems.

"Well.. technically.. it's a thingy."

Best game quote ever, from one of the best games ever