Okay, first impressions after getting to lvl 5 and doing maybe a dozen and a half quests, character: High-Elf Shadow Warrior:
Let me preface by saying I'm NOT an avid MMO player. I never bothered to go past lvl15 in WoW, for instance, so my opinions may not reflect that of the hardcore MMO communities. Now that that's out of the way...
The game's fun and engaging, it's addictive as it goes with MMOs, and it has some really great gameplay elements, but it seems to have some technical problems too for sure. There's pathing issues, the draw distance is weak even when maxed, there's no options for AA and AF, so you have to force that stuff via drivers, the animation is fairly poor compared to other MMOs I've played,
First thing I noticed was that it is not noob-friendly. It drops you into the world with little explanation for how things work. Sure, it gives you a billion "?" help bubbles, but no one wants to spend all their time reading all that shit.
The quest types are very diverse as far as I can tell. Some quests are just 'point A to point B', some are 'kill X number of beasts then get back to me', some are 'find this well-hidden object/person', some are 'go to this fortified enemy base and find four well-hidden somethingorothers which trigger this other somethingorother which you then collect and bring back to me' .. etc. So the variety's nice. The quest pacing is too. So far at all times I've had four or five quests queued up, and when I finish a quest I often found that the person then had two or three more available for me, which is nice.
So far the combat's been solid, even at these early levels. My character has always had two or three approaches to take for offing someone. This is nothing we haven't seen before, but it works well so it seems.
The controls are not all that great IMO. Sometimes the game doesn't know when you're trying to attack something or not. So I guess that's a technical issue more than anything. I'm pretty sure the controls and responsiveness could you a lot more polish.
One thing I love a lot: there are control point battles you can sign-up for, and soon as enough people have joined you have a blast playing it. This encourages teamwork even when you're soloing it. It's like battlefield 2 with elves and shit. You control alters and get tickets, basically, and this really lets you push you fighting skills against the other team. This shit is simple great IMO and makes up for the clunky controls.
All that said, I'm enjoying this a lot more than the first 10 levels of WoW (which, again, isn't saying much because I didn't get much past that in WoW). Also enjoying more than Guild Wars, which I still pick up and play occasionally. The game would be better if they fixed some technical issues and clarified quests a little better, or in short: made everything a little more user-friendly. But the flaws so far are not game-breakers and the pros outweigh the cons by a lot. That's my early, EARLY, NOOB impressions, for whatever they're worth.
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