The gameplay is a smooth and responsive, it looks amazing without bogging down my PC. Quests are very solid, with your basic "kill x mobs" quests even having a purpose within the story. The game has some more unique aspects to it which I have yet to explore, such as the Astral system, in which you can buy/man large Astral-faring ships (less like sci-fi spaceships, more like ethereal pirate ships). PvP combat is very prevalent throughout, with FFA arenas in the capital cities and open PvP once you reach contested areas around level 20-22.
My main gripe about the game so far is the lack of population. It may just be that a good chunk of the players have had time to move on to endgame content and either have another city/hub to congregate at for higher levels, or mainly use large guilds for communication. Either way, even on their most populated server and faction (Nezeb server, Empire side) it feels pretty empty. The world channel only has a handful of WTS/WTB/LFG that I've seen, though this may also be because it takes a store item to talk in the world channel (they give you a few, but I'm not sure how many per character. May be a "teaser" item like some others).
The problem is that gPotato, the company behind the North American version of the game, lost the trust of a lot of players early on in the game's development with balance problems between free players and cash shop players. Early on, the game was extremely "Pay to Win", it was apparently almost impossible to compete with people who had money to throw down on special high-level equipment, and death meant your item's stats became reversed. This made levelling just that much tougher for free players, who most likely wouldn't have died in the first place had they had the advantages of paying players.
Even if paying players have the advantage, it's no worse than players on WoW who either bought gold from a 3rd party seller, or paid for uber raid/Arena gear (guilds reserving equipment drops for gold/Arena rating carrying). Or a combination of both. In F2P games like Allods, these Pay2Win types are actually contributing to the developers to keep making content, instead of paying a 15 year old Chinese gold farmer. I'd be more than willing to throw down some money to improve my character endgame, once I've gotten as far as I reasonably can without farming for gold for weeks on end.
Though most of the big problems were fixed not long after the official release, the damage had been done to a large chunk of the playerbase, who no longer felt they could trust the devs or that the game was broken. It also seems like it's having problems drawing new players because all of the reviews from top MMO sites (MMOHut, OnRPG, etc.), as well as many player comments, are from early in the game's life, therefore are extremely outdated, and fail to point out that the major drawbacks for free players have been removed/remedied in recent months. Unfortunately the most visible comments and reviews are from disgruntled players who have a vendetta against gPotato and the game, it's hard to find any recent favorable reviews and/or comments. They're out there, it's just that the older negative reviews have had time to gain views and priority on search engines.
I really like the game from the basics of it, just with the slow progression and lack of active population (at least through the game's normal global channels, and starting Friendly zones) it's a lonely climb. [UPDATE: Heard from Guild Leader that population took a temporary dip after the release of some new games, such as Gears3 and BF3. He said most people weren't jumping ship or anything, more like "shore leave"] I'll have to keep playing and chugging along with my character to see how things are at later levels. In the capital city I mainly see top-levels and low-levels, with not much inbetween. Could mean all those people are out busy questing and PvPing in other zones? We'll see. If the game ends up having a more active population then is percieved from the starter zones, and if the devs have relaxed on free players enough to let me have a chance of competing with cash-shop players at high levels, I'll be all for this game and help bring as many players to it as possible. At least until some other F2P title blows it out of the water.
It'd be a shame to see this $12 million title ruined by people who didn't even develop the actual product, just oversee it's US operations. I can totally understand the developer's desire to make some sort of profit on the game with it being ridiculously expensive to produce and all, but by having high-level gear obtainable only through the cash shop they turned a lot of people off. Not to mention the US prices were insanely high compared to the EU's (still overpriced) costs. Their new cheaper "pay for convenience" rather than "pay to win" direction (CS items are tradable for in-game gold now, meaning free players can get CS items with time and effort) is definitely a great step forward, but may have been too little too late to save the title. It remains to be seen.
PS. Dear gPotato, for the love of god please make there some kind of crappy mount for free players. One that goes marginally faster than walking, but perhaps not as fast as even the cheapest cash shop mount. If you guys provided a cheap, slow mount that was upgradable via cash shop, I would totally be down to give some money to make it faster down the road (you know, once I have an income again.) $11 for a low-grade mount is pretty steep IMO, as of now I'll stick to walking until I can gather the 8k+ gold it takes to buy a mount.
Goals:
Join a well populated guild:
Reach "Member" status: In Progress
Reach Level 25: In Progress (Level 15 Orc Brute - Sercrux)
World PvP with 15 players: In Progress
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