I've got over 600 hours on this game. I'd start off by saying I've had a long break from games, for over a year now. Just lost that spark, hadn't found anything that kept me interested for longer than a week. When this game first came out on early access.. I instantly got sunk into it. ~300 hours, before the lawsuit came. I found out it was back two weeks ago, and put another ~250 hours since then (working from home). This game feels like a very modernized old-school RPG. Grind-intense, open-world, community-based, slow character progression, AFK skill grinding.. The vibes it brings are very much similar to something like Ultima Online, Everquest or RuneScape. If you've played those games and enjoyed them, you'd love this game, without a doubt. People who've enjoyed less grind-intense MMOs like World of Warcraft, or survival/building open world games like Rust, Ark, etc .. you'd most likely enjoy it as well. But you'd probably want to invite friends to play with you, or join someones guild in-game. This isn't meant for solo'ing, for the average player. If you intend on solo'ing this game .. intend on pouring dozens of hours per week to see any significant progress. This game doesn't really start opening up with more avenues of game play until you start making decent progress into your character progression. At first the game is very slow, you'll still enjoy it since there's a pretty large learning curve that stays pretty intriguing all the way through. But it isn't until you establish a good base, tons of workbenches, decent amount of skill progression -- that you finally start being able to venture out into the harder parts of the map. At first, you'll die to about anything. Within about 20 hours you'll start handling just about anything in your starting area. Depending on your play style, character skills focus, guild population, etc.. you could be exploring deep across the massive map (emphasis on massive .. probably takes an hour+ to travel from one end to the other) within 100 hours. Or, if you're solo and focused a lot of crafting skills.. you could be waiting 300+ hours before you can venture that far out into the map. Your characters level doesn't mean much .. it's the skills you've leveled that determine your characters ability. Overall I feel like the game is awesome, filled a void that has been missing in the gaming industry for decades.. If you're a hardcore grind-fest MMO type of guy.. This game is what we've been missing. I can't speak much on the PVP, since I've stuck to a PVE server this whole time. But -- I do plan on transfering to a PVP server after release -- with some friends. That is another cool aspect to the game .. your character isn't stuck to one server. You can transfer your character to any other server within your region. You can even establish your guild across servers, and make a base in any of them. There are a lot of CONS though. Most are ones easily ignored, some probably worse depending on PVP/PVE servers. 1. Translation. It's terrible. It's not just the wording, it's the formatting as well. In some cases there is valuable information cut off the screen, because it fit in Chinese, but didn't fit in English. So in those cases you have to switch to Chinese just to see a number you needed. Not only is the translation still needing major polishing (which I suspect they may do after the 1.0 release), there are too many instances where things are referred to as different names, depending on which screen you're looking at. A particular attribute could be called "ABC" in one page, and then called "ZYX" in another page. 2. Server regions aren't locked. Meaning EU, Chinese, NA can all join whatever region they want. And the Chinese players take major advantage of this. The map contains areas that can be 'claimed' by your guild marker, particularly farms. And it's also advantageous to build near mines. 75% of the best spots to build your base have already been claimed by Chinese players. And once it's claimed, very unlikely they'll ever leave as you can prevent your base from decaying for 2 weeks. Major problem on PVE servers. On PVP servers -- technically you could raid their base and try and claim the land. But ... again .. since it's not region locked Chinese guilds usually established dominance on every server. So if you're playing PVP .. probably want to avoid messing with Chinese guilds. If you're playing PVE, you don't have much to worry about Chinese guilds (other than losing out on prime building areas). The game is also set up so that guilds can become "magistrates" or in other words "King" of the server. In that case they can receive taxes on all players in that server. Chinese guilds usually hold that title in every server. This game would be a ton better with region locking. 3. Combat, it's almost there. But still feels very clunky. You can play with 4-direction combat, or 8-direction. I will say 8 direction is best, and the hit boxes are actually very well-done for direction based melee combat. Shields are broken. Literally useless, only time you actually block is if you continuously walk backwards and prevent NPCs/players from getting face-to-face with you. Once they are directly in front of you, their attacks just clip through the shield. Parrying works very well, but it's extremely difficult, as you need to parry the direction of the swing. Often times hits just don't register, although the animation/voice registers. Certain animals are still very broken in terms of pathing .. especially bears. They just seem like they're whacked out on pure Colombian snow. Movements are spazzy, they randomly go from normal pace to lightning pace.. From what I've read -- PVP is mount/polearm only. Two-hander is backup when on foot. Supposedly you can just 1 shot anything with horse/polearm. Bows/crossbows are pretty much useless at end-game levels of PVP. One handed is okay, it's fast and you can almost stunlock. But two-handers do much more damage, much more capable of AOE, and they have a special talent suited for PVP -- heal upon killing an enemy. All in all, the combat is very similar to Mount&Blade .. just a bit less polished. 4. Music. What music. Seriously, with 600 hours of game play, I've probably heard about 1 hours worth of music. Very quiet, mind-numbingly quiet. Great for watching videos on the other monitor though. 5. I haven't looked much into it, but it looks like ever since the lawsuit and they had to privately sell the game -- they've adopted micro transactions. Most of them seem cosmetic only. But some of them seem eerily pay-to-win with resources being purchasable. Extremely lame. Hopefully they smarten up and get rid of that. 6. The game has virtually no helpful content online. What's out there, only really covers like 20% of the game. Most of the videos, articles, posts you see about this game just cover early level stuff. The other 80% of the game, you're a pioneer and learning things for yourself. This isn't directly a con, because some might appreciate that aspect. But if you've got a specific question about something .. chances are you aren't finding that answer. All in all -- amazing game. MASSIVE potential. It's currently already very much a full game, with enough polishing to be enjoyed for a long time. But if they truly focus on optimizing the game -- and not going down the silly road of over-stuffing it with new features.. they have the opportunity to create a new longstanding classic in the hardcore MMO genre.
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