After about 250 hours from the release I could say I've beaten the game now. All bosses downed on normal/elite/NM, my gear is full of 10,1 and 10,2 purple quality gear, most of the lore/achievements are done.  My SPs are at the cap, and I have about 50% of all abilities from the skill wheel; please note the gameplay hours were made in rushing pace, I skipped most of the cut-scenes, since I'm more interested in gameplay than story, thus I could be labelled as the "Locust" - according to Ragnar. I'm usually pretty negative about new games released lately, the only few I can think of I enjoyed in the recent years was Fallen Earth, Vanguard, EVE, and AoC. I think, TSW is probably the best MMORPG released in the past decade, or better to say, it's the one I enjoyed the most, subjectively.

What positively surprised me about TSW:

1) Combat. I haven't play beta, I never play betas, however I read the impression of beta players about the combat and I was slightly concerned. The reality is different. Combat is extremly fluid, edgy, responsive and, given the skill wheel, either risky and fast or safe and slow. You can build your character to have huge burst DPS with very low survivability, in such case the combat is a question of 2-4 seconds, or on the other extreme, you can pile up health to 5 decimals, slot healing abilities, and survive most of the fights without risk, however, fightning in such case can take even up to a minute, or of course your character can be anywhere between these two extremes. The choice is yours. Apart from that, the combat is extremely responsive, there's active dodge function, which has to be used a lot. I have yet to hear a single good critique of the combat system, since all I read so far was basically - it's too slow, well my response is, YOUR BUILD IS SLOW.

2) Technical state is simply flawless. I was worried after the AO / AoC fiasco, TSW is however a 360 degree turn. I only encountered a few bugged missions, which were still doable when I changed dimension, and most of them are fixed by now anyway. All the bugged missions were in the early areas, I haven't encounter any single bugged mission in Egypt nor Transylvania. There are some other bugs with the GEAR MANAGEMENT, which is annoying if you're swapping between healing/dps/tanking gear often, there are some bugs with party frames, all of which can be fixed by /reloadui. Single server technology is something, which we will hopefully see more in the future. Enough of 150 servers at release capped at 3000 characters, which are always merged after awhile down to 5 or 6. Single server technology, where you can chat, meet, be in the same guild, do PvP / dungeons together regardless of original dimension, is something that FINALLY MOVES THIS GENRE FORWARD.

3) Instance mechanics. No trash mobs and basically progressing from boss to boss is the best thing that ever happened to dungeoneering. Nightmare boss fights evolve around timing, constant movement and dodging of AoEs and aggro management during adds phases. You still have to be aware of the position of the boss, positions of the adds, AoE effects, while dealing damage, tanking or healing. In addition, there's a lot of planning involved, since each character has access to huge list of abilities, you will often swap between some even during the run. Which brings me to the best feature of TSW:

4) Character building is the major selling point of TSW. At this stage it's all about discovering and experimenting, we had spent a great deal of time thinking of the best combinations before each NM boss, and even if you solo hard missions, the system motivates you to look for best combinations for that particular fight. It's a bit like building decks in Magic the Gathering in fact. Over time, I assume the situation will change however, there will be numerous guides and templates for character building, which also exists for Magic the Gathering. Even if at some point, the most active players will learn all skills from the wheel, you still will have a chance to be unique by choosing your own combinations of abilities. The system is better than any other character customization systems, including those I've seen in pure sandboxes such as EVE. On the subject of customization, crafting is also a nice surprise, since AoC's crafting is just bad, and I expected the same. Crafting in TSW fits well into the game's system, the obtaining of glyph toolkits and making of blue/purple signets is part of the end-game customization.

What surprised me negatively:

1) Animations and Graphics. This is a slightly disappointing aspect. On dx11 client, it looks a bit worse than Age of Conan, animations are not even close to AoC, there's lots of fog and distant-blur effects and it's just worse than what I expected after AoC. On the other hand, it's well optimized, my FPS is stable at 45 even during huge PvP fights which sometimes include more than 100 people. Regarding, the PvP, especially Fusang Project, they really need to add RAID INTERFACE, otherwise healing during large fights is simply impossible.

2) Character creation at the beginning. This is probably even slightly worse than the one in AoC, The facial appearance is lacking greatly. Clothing isn't the best either, but that improves a lot once you start obtaining unique cosmetic items via decks or mission, or buy some cosmetic gear in-game.

Given the above, I'm staying subscribed, I'm eagerly awaiting the 4 more upcoming nightmare modes that should come at the end of the month and I hope the raid frames will be added closely after along with the release of first raid encounters. I have found my home for some time, thank you Funcom.

Nice write-up.  My impressions from a non-locust pretty much match yours, right down to the comparisons with AoC animations and CC.  Glad you are still enjoying the game and finding things to do even after devouring the content.

Excellent write-up!  It's actually refreshing to see a positive review from a "locust" type of player.  That's not something you see often, imo.

I'm uber casual in TSW, as Rift is (still, since beta) my MMO of choice, but I am having an absolute blast.  I love the lack of hand-holding with the investigations and such.  I love the combat system.  I find it very fluid and exciting as well.

I believe, from what I've read, is that I am currently playing it as it "was meant to be played", as in a casual manner.  If this were my one and only MMO, that would be a *little* different, but not much.  I don't have a great deal of time to devote to gaming at all these days, but I do still enjoy it.  I greatly enjoy my raiding and other activities in Rift, and TSW is perfect for those times I'm in the mood for something completely different.

Anyway, Thanks for taking the time to write this up.  Nicely done.

Originally posted by Thillian

After about 250 hours from the release I could say I've beaten the game now. All bosses downed on normal/elite/NM, my gear is full of 10,1 and 10,2 purple quality gear, most of the lore/achievements are done.  My SPs are at the cap, and I have about 50% of all abilities from the skill wheel; please note the gameplay hours were made in rushing pace, I skipped most of the cut-scenes, since I'm more interested in gameplay than story, thus I could be labelled as the "Locust" - according to Ragnar. I'm usually pretty negative about new games released lately, the only few I can think of I enjoyed in the recent years was Fallen Earth, Vanguard, EVE, and AoC. I think, TSW is probably the best MMORPG released in the past decade, or better to say, it's the one I enjoyed the most, subjectively.

 

 

 

Now you can get a job....lol jk nice write up

Originally posted by ElSandman

Nice write-up.  My impressions from a non-locust pretty much match yours, right down to the comparisons with AoC animations and CC.  Glad you are still enjoying the game and finding things to do even after devouring the content.

Yeh I think the longevity of an online game, apart from the frequency of content updates, depends on its group-mechanics in dungeons and bosses, skill system and combat. In my opinion, TSW is great in all three aspects.