I was somewhat looking forward to this game and some high hopes with the little bit that I've seen of it, yet all I see is a wall of negative threads.  Does anyone have anything positive to say about this game?  Or is it destined to die a lingering death?

By the way, waiting to download a beta client, or having issues with a beta install is not a deal breaker for me, and it really means nothing.  I'm talking about the gameplay and feel of the game.  Anything good at all?  Or is this a one that should be passed?

The first clue about this would be when they offered LIFE time subscriptions to people, but only to those who hadn't actually played yet.  You get one chance at a life time subscription, and thats before you actually start the game.

What does that say?  It says:

"We know we have created a game that no one will play for more then 2 months, so we are trying to get as much money as we can up front."

That, my friend, is not what you want to hear from a game company.

Oh, and by the way, give this game a pass.  It truely is just a wreck.

Clunky graphics engine, looks like they completely raped and pilaged their old engine based on COH/COV and added some bloomy effects and cell shading. Honestly nothing to see here, same old crap. Engine lags like a mofo meanwhile it has the same level of poly's as wow with bad coded bloom crap and cell shading effect on top of it to hide the low quality graphics and textures.  I am sticking to wow since everything just tries to be like it and fails miserably and people wonder why WOW keeps gaining subs. Stick with what you know and stick with what;s good is my motto for now on.

Originally posted by mmodanno

The first clue about this would be when they offered LIFE time subscriptions to people, but only to those who hadn't actually played yet.  You get one chance at a life time subscription, and thats before you actually start the game.

What does that say?  It says:

"We know we have created a game that no one will play for more then 2 months, so we are trying to get as much money as we can up front."

I reluctantly have to admit, that was my very first thought when I heard about the lifetime subscription, but I was still hoping aganist hope that I was wrong.

Sigh.  Some people will see conspiracies everywhere and always think the worst.  Why complain about lifetime subscriptions?  Makes no sense.  It's another subscription option.  No one is forcing you to take it.

Lifetime subscription?  When I heard that, I thought..."Great...it'll save a lot of people some money."

If someone is giving away cookies, do you automatically assume it's poisoned, filled with needles or maybe they are trying to make everyone fat?

As for the game, so far, I'm having a lot of fun.  I rather like it.  The combat, the style, the graphics.  My only issue at the moment is that Cryptic took a lot from City of Heroes....costume pieces, powers, animations, etc.

It really does feel like City of Heroes 2...which is mostly a good thing.

I liked it for the 30 minutes I played before bed last night :P

Combat seemed really good and ran good for me.

Centhan

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/335/view/forums/thread/247816/Amazing.html

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Originally posted by Centhan
I was somewhat looking forward to this game and some high hopes with the little bit that I've seen of it, yet all I see is a wall of negative threads.  Does anyone have anything positive to say about this game?  Or is it destined to die a lingering death?
By the way, waiting to download a beta client, or having issues with a beta install is not a deal breaker for me, and it really means nothing.  I'm talking about the gameplay and feel of the game.  Anything good at all?  Or is this a one that should be passed?

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I tried CoH and i didnt like it. Recently i tried CO, and i liked it so much i bought lifetime subscription. Hovewer its not going to be my primary MMO, it will be my way to do something else than AION. And i tried all the recent games/betas and only Aion and CoH are both looking interesting to me, though i prefer Aion if i would have to decide to play one game - but i ll play both 80% Aion 20% CO.

Yes there are some issues. It gets somewhat laggy sometimes, but in general it seems to be a good game, and fairly polished compared to the other MMOs recently released. I adivse you to go into the beta and try it.

I'm not gonna give any review on it, that said, when friends asked me about the game i would say the Cell shading it gonna make or break the game.  As we can see already many people are having issues with the graphics.

I have never been a fan of Cell Shading, so throughout the beta i had a hard time getting used to it, don't know if i ever really did or not hehe.

(yes i know you could change things graphic wise in many ways, but i wanted to play it as they intended)

Originally posted by mmodanno

The first clue about this would be when they offered LIFE time subscriptions to people, but only to those who hadn't actually played yet.  You get one chance at a life time subscription, and thats before you actually start the game.

What does that say?  It says:

"We know we have created a game that no one will play for more then 2 months, so we are trying to get as much money as we can up front."

That, my friend, is not what you want to hear from a game company.

Oh, and by the way, give this game a pass.  It truely is just a wreck.

LOL seriously?  You can only get a lifetime sub if you go in blind?  WOW that does scream avoid-at-all-costs.  TBH I was going to skip this anyway since I have zero desire to play a superhero MMO and console port MMOs are fail, but I think they just pushed me off the fence on STO.  I'll be skipping that, too.

Not many people.

There will always be some that are pleased with any game. But, this game doesn't appeal to the masses. Some people enjoy the combat, world, quests and have no issues w/ the performance. But, they are in the minority. 

I'd cettainly suggest against paying the lifetime sub, b/c this game hasn't proved its worth yet.

It reminds me of the Tabula Rasa launch - Tons of beta players saying the game isn't ready or elements need to be changed. Some people enjoyed it. Most observations went ignored. A -mostly- negative reacion after the NDA was lifted.

I don't thin the similarites will end there either. I think CO will see about 100-150K intial box sales, and see a huge drop in subs after 2-3 months.

After that, who knows what Atari will do.

I actually think it will see over 200k initial sales.  Been a looooong time since we had a new non sword/magic MMO come out.  However, I agree that after 2 months there will be very few people playing this game, mostly people who got swindled into buying the life time subscriptions.

Poor bastards.

We should have more comments today.  I'm guessing most people that stayed up half the night patching were willing to deal with less imperfections. 

Several comments.  However, I was not a closed beta tester.  I did pre-order and was able to get the game running last night with some minimal fuss and effort on my part.  If you looked around you followed the steps of:

(1) Install old pre-load, start launcher.
(2) Copy HOGGs into the PIGGs folder
(3) Install new Fileplanet client
(4) Copy HOGGs into the PIGGs folder, overwrite
(5) Start patcher, it is patching 74mb, but only downloaded 20mb. 

Took me about 30 minutes of fiddling to make it work.

I also have no problem with them having problems in beta, especially in a stress test.  They failed and made a mistake, that's what the stress test was supposed to find.  Kudos!  Well done.  Fix the problem and make sure it doesn't happen when you go live.  I'll be quite disapointed if this now happens on launch day.  Anyone ragging on them for a bad open Beta patch issue doesn't really get the whole concept of a stress test.  For those that said they were canceling their pre-orders, they're loons, and are showing the maturity of a kindergardener.

Now for some first impressions:

Character Creation:
I loved it.  I really had enjoyed the CoH one, but this is significantly more flexible at this point.  I can only imagine that it will get better as the engine matures.  Lots of options and I could have spent most of the night playing around.  Are there some pieces that I would have liked to have had, sure.  However, for a start, it's pretty amazing.

I was slightly confused by the stats as they weren't really explained well that I could find.  You have some ability to change them, but without knowing which stats were going to affect what I was doing, I kind of guessed and went with it.  They are channeling people into frameworks which will be good for those that don't know what they want.  

Tutorial:
So far so good.  I did not get a chance to finish it.  After being away at Gen Con for four days, my wife might have revolted if I burried myself in the computer all night.  The missions seemed decent enough and the zone was fun to run around in.  I felt like I was helping with an invasion which is a good thing.  I had some confusion on what to do a few times, but all in all it does what it was supposed to do.

Graphics:
While I can't speak for anyone else, but I am running in 1920x1080 with no real glitches.  The graphics are smooth and very stylized.  I didn't like most of the screen shots of the game, but I personally think that they look better when playing.  I thought this would be a negative for me, however, after about 30 minutes I really kind of liked them.

Performance:
I am running a Core Duo 6600 along with a GeForece 8800 GTS 320mb at 1920x1080 w/ 4gb of system RAM on Vista.  Not cutting edge stuff.  However, it ran smooth except for one of the into movies which hiccupped a lot.  Frankly from what I read on these boards, I expected it to be more of a slide show.  Considering that there are some twitch elements to the combat (with the limited three skills I have now) the lag would have been a real issue.  However, their instancing works very well, giving you good performance and being in a zone that feels just about right with heros/content.

Sounds:
About average for a title.  Nothing leapt out at me, but it didn't make me turn the speakers off either.

Overall:
I like it.  Which is good because if you don't get a good first impression on a MMO you likely won't stick around long.  I think that it will sell pretty well and keep many of the people that sign up at least long enough to work their way through the game.  Whether there is enough to do once you get to the end, who knows.  CoH was pretty repetitious and I played that for three years.  If this engine stays as enjoyable as it was so far, and Cryptic puts out content, I'll likely be here for a long time.

Final note:
Can people really be more stupid on the lifetime payment plan?  It's a plan that you can choose up until 9/1.  Yes, you can buy it sight unseen... you'd be a fool if you did.  However, there is this open beta thing running.  You have a chance to play the game for the next couple of weeks, make a decision and then go back and choose it.  It's a reward for those who were in CB or have preordered.  I'll likely take a 6 month pack and will be happy to do so.  It's not a conspiracy, you aren't expected to buy it without seeing the game.  Why people lie about stuff like this is beyond me.  They aren't making you take it.

I actually quite enjoy the game. I believe I'll be playing it for a long time.

As far as the lifetime subscription, they had that on LotRO, and people didn't complain. I hear they are still doing well for themselves. Maybe everything isn't a conspiracy?

The people that enjoy the game are busy playing it. Understand that the forum community for ANY mmo comprises of a very small minority. As well, typically that minority is also very vocal about the negative instead of reinforcing the positive.

Welcome to MMO forums.

Let's see, the Swinging travel power is fun and your character has fingers instead of a mitten. The Power whatever training center is a great idea. Apart from those things, I found the game to be severely lacking on all counts. The bottom line is that you are playing a game designed for a console version that will likely never see the light of day. If you want to have the opportunity to pay more to play this game than any higher-quality game on the market, go for it.

Basically, Cryptic has created a game for people with excess cash and very low expectations.

some very early impressions....

the energy gain/power charge combat has been a lot of fun so far.

character creation is great.

public or open quests, whatever they call them, are a nice as well....grouping without having to deal with other players (lets be honest, sometimes you dont want to deal with em) is win.

my character feels strong, as a hero should.

so for now, the game gets a passing grade, imho.

edit: i want to add that im sick to death of the sword and sorcery fantasy setting at this point, so that may be influencing my opinion.

character costumization is AAA.

the game performance, still needs tweaks

over graphic design is nice with a lot of scalability

easy to get into and easy to play

has enough adds to and numbers to keep the nerds happy

crafting, seems to be a little deeper then LotrO

and the community is having fun

As long as Cryptic doesn't use NcSoft or Sony as the publisher, they should be sailing with a great launch .

I agree with the poster a few posts back who said that the people enjoying the game are too busy playing to be posting on forums.  You'll almost always get predominantly negative posts on mmo forums, and especially here at this site.

I played closed beta off and on over a couple months, but the game never really grabbed me so I never got much beyond the first few quests in the Desert zone.  It's not a bad game, but it's not my style, it feels extremely linear and from what I've read of high level testers, once you play through it to max level, you've seen everything, as there are few alternate paths.

My advice to you is take advantage of the open beta, form your own impressions, and perhaps talk to some people actually in and playing the game.  That will probably give you a fairer representation than just looking here on mmorpg.com.

 I played for a few hours this morning, I enjoy the combat, but the cel shading is not my thing, its ok but very bland. I will give it the rest of the week but I am leaning towards not buying it.

I have been enjoying the game a great deal. I was in CB too and liked it enough then to get a 6 months sub. I did not go lifetime because I know myself enough to know even if I go a year or so i will be playing other games. I like:

Cell Shaded art: Nice change to me. Following the same theme that Boarderlands took

Combat and energy buid: The action level and combat building powers had the same effect on my that AOC combat had for a while making other MMO combat feel slow and boring.

Character customization: Better than COX because you can also change the colors of your powers. Also, there are advantages which you get at odd X levels that enhance, level up, or add a freature to your existing power. This makes even similar power characters different.

Story line: The Open quests are fun as are the Missions. Going into a super villian lair or instance is a blast. Quests are well written and a lot of them are NOT kill or Fed Ex quests (though those still exist).

Travel Powers: Are great and you get them early on. Each has its own set of rules and plays differently. Even each of the flight type powers are different. I do think that the non-fyling travel powers are at a little dissadvantage in PVP.

Things that I am not fond of:

PVP: It is OK at best. Not a after thought but just a sideline for me to get some extra stuff from the PVP arenas. This is a PVE game first and foremost.

Community tools: While the on line character profiles, etc are cool the community tools don't seem to drive a sense of well "community". Could be I just have not explored it much. at least you always know where what instance your friends are in.

Redoing the tutorial: They need to give players a way to skip this if they want too.

My two cents. Overall I think this is a solid entry and will appeal to fans of the supers genre. Fast action and well paced, the game is not clunky to me at all nor lacking depth.

Originally posted by Mistmouse

 I played for a few hours this morning, I enjoy the combat, but the cel shading is not my thing, its ok but very bland. I will give it the rest of the week but I am leaning towards not buying it.

Did you try turning off the cell shading?

Originally posted by LordDraekon

Let's see, the Swinging travel power is fun and your character has fingers instead of a mitten. The Power whatever training center is a great idea. Apart from those things, I found the game to be severely lacking on all counts. The bottom line is that you are playing a game designed for a console version that will likely never see the light of day. If you want to have the opportunity to pay more to play this game than any higher-quality game on the market, go for it.

Basically, Cryptic has created a game for people with excess cash and very low expectations.

Way to insult anyone that likes it. 

From looking at your post history I can see that you had already dismissed the game months ago.

I get it, it's not WoW, you hate Bill and Jack, and it has MT...but you don't have to insult people that might like features of it.

wish i could say if the game is good or not, but the coding sux, just downloaded the beta a second time first would hang saying was locked on a file would not write just moved the file out of folder, now patcher just sits there doing nothing..