Against my better judgement I bought the game, and like so many other games before I felt that gut feeling of  "don't do it," I'm pretty dissapointed. Mind you, this isn't a troll, and maybe someone can give me some insight as to just what I might be missing here. Frankly any game I dump 50 bucks on I WANT to like and so I'm still more than willing to give FE a chance.

So far this is what I've seen in the past few days of playing.

Cons:

- Dated graphics. Yes folks, they are pretty bad. At least to me. It's not the barren landscape or the shades of brown, it's the animations and models that do it. It's true that pretty graphics don't a good game make (just look at Aion) but they certainly COULD polish these up a bit. I do run this game at Med-High settings and it still looks rather poor, like a game from the early 2000's. I know it's an indie company  that doesn't have the cash and resources like the big studios,but some improvements could still be made.

- Poor mob AI. We all know that MMO's aren't known for great mob AI. However from what I've seen in FE, the AI here is even more sub-par than normal for the genre. Heck, you can practically run right up to an agro mob and it won't do anything for a good few seconds. Half the time they don't even seem to attack despite being supposedly aggressive mobs. When you shoot at them, sometimes they react, sometimes they just stand there.  I'm not asking for a glorious AI system here, but this one is pretty bad in my opinion.

- Same basic structure as most other MMO's out there.  Very little "sandbox" about it, frankly - except for the character build system which I will touch on in a minute. You have the options of PVE questing, farming, and PVP.  Farming is rather tedious as it is in all MMO's and I still haven't even crafted anything remotely useful despite being out there farming nods and mobs for materials for a few hours straight. Eh.  The quests are pretty standard... go kill xx of these, go take this item over there...etc. PVP I haven't tried yet, admittedly, so I can't say anything on that.

- Somewhat clunky gameplay. I've played both traditional 3rd person MMO's and I've played FPS games that require you to aim and shoot.  But everything I do in FE feels... sorta stiff and laggy. The combat feels wooden and stiff to me. There is no hit collision when you land a blow on a mob, and the controls are a little awkward. Pressing tab all the time gets a little irksome.

Pros:

- Good general idea. I like the whole post apoc. theme and I even like the world setting, despite the poor graphic quality.

- Crafting almost anything you can equip.  I like this idea a lot,  but man it takes a lot of farming to get the mats to craft anything useful.

- Vehicles that don't magically fit into your pocket.

- The different factions you can join - nice basic variety, even though I've heard others say they don't "mean" much at this point in time. I still like the fact I can go be some eco-terrorist or anarchist or military enforcer at my own discretion, rather than being tossed into a faction based on class or race.

- FPS + targeting idea is a nice feature. It just needs to be made more fluent and not so clunky and wooden, IMHO.

- Classless character and choosing your own path. Self explanitory.

So now I have to ask... this game is getting good ratings. I kind of wonder why. I mean, I see the potential in a game like this, but the controls and combat feel so wooden, the farming requirements are atrocious (unless there's some method I'm missing) and the graphics are pretty awful, and there's really not much more "sandbox" to it than any standard MMO. There are no alternate ways to progress through diplomacy or owning your own shop, etc, no politics other than seemingly meaningless factions (though there is huge potential there of course) and generally a lot of unrealized or unutilized opportunities here.

Am I missing something? Am I not playing this game right? Or is it really just either not for me or being a little -too- overhyped?

Maybe because not everyone has the same expectations as you do? Different people, different priorities what they expect from a game.

Mobs AI? I didnt notice what you're talking about. Animations? I find the horse riding animations to be the best I've seen in a MMO.
My reasons why I so far enjoy FE: Mood/Atmosphere, crafting, realism. What I dislike is that it's kinda mission-driven if you don't want to miss out important mission AP.

Originally posted by KaitarBesh

Hmm, did you read up on the optimization guide on the player guides section of the official forums? I got much better graphics out of that. (like forcing 16 x AA on your graphics card, rather then let the game handle it, etc.)

And make sure you have textures set to at least 'high' at the login menu before you launch the game. (defaulted on 'low' for me and that was horrid compared to how the game looks with high quality textures).

Farming isn't much of an issue since there are nodes everywhere I feel. And once you do start crafting good stuff it get's more interesting. I do think you should play it for at least a couple more days, get some crafting skills up, train a horse (if you don't have one yet).

A lot of quests around the starter area's are fairly simple; make this, fetch that, kill those, etc. Stuff gets more interesting with bosses, masters and instanced bits later on in S1.

Also realize that the free month hasn't finished yet; there is bound to be a lot of optimizing and pollishing in coming patches, but in my honest opinion, the game, gameplay and content is pretty solid already compared to some other recent launches.

I do NOT think it is overhyped at all myself. I think it is a breath of fresh air in mmorpg land and I am really enjoying it.

Overhyped by what? Honestly, the only people hyping the game are the ones playing it. Think of it as the Rocky Horror Picture show. As a movie, I wouldn't say it's all that great, but it does have a very loyal cult following that enjoys the hell out of it.

Graphics seem to be the favorite thing to bash. Subjective and all that.  I personally don't have a problem  with them, while when I looked at Darkfall's graphics, I found them to look dated and amateurish, so I would say Darkfall's graphics are far worse then Fallen Earth's. That's my comparison. Also, there are the videos and screenshots out there for comparison. Sector 1 is fairly barren. Sector 2 and 3 introduce forests and grass, a more green area.

Yeah, the AI is pretty poor somtimes. Other times it's not so incredibly bad. It definitely needs improvement  and hopefully it will. I personally feel they need to up the difficulty of everything north of Needle Eye.

Not sure what you're looking for here. Crafting takes work and materials. You need to go out and get said materials, by harvesting them. Nodes are scattered everywhere and make sense in their general placement. Mining nodes are places near rocky outcroppings or underground, nature nodes are plants placed in clusters, and general scavenging nodes are just scattered about. You'll come across all of these as you quest around, so you don't really need to dedicate time to just 'scavenge'. Not a whole lot you can  do about quests. You can only have so much variation and they do try to mix it up a bit.

You can remap the keys to what you like to make it less clunky. Personally, it's simply something new to get used to. I don't even think about it now and it works fairly well for what it is. I have a hell of a  lot of keys to press to use skills  and such, especially in combat.

Well, what you have to ask, really, is why does your opinion not match everyone else's? The answer is pretty simple, your tastes are different. And what is overhyped? You have the players who play the game getting the word out there that this is a good game. You have dissenting opinions and you have favorable opinions. Just because the favorable opinions outnumber the dissenting ones it's being over-hyped? Chalk it up as a game not for you and move on. That simple. Sorry the game didn't turn out to be for you and your points are certainly valid, but as you have seen, not everyone agrees with it.

One thing a few folks have mentioned before is the starter town they are in. There are a few towns with quest lines that are just not that interesting, or someone needed to be a combat town instead of crafter or vice versa. You might want to travel to another town or start a alt in another starter town, a few folks have done complete 180's on thier feeling for the game after doing this.

Well, I tried for a while again today. I still think the basic idea of the game was neat and I like the amount of work the devs have put into this, but the gameplay is just too wooden and the graphics even at max settings make my eyes hurt. Matter of taste, I know, but I really can't stand looking at them.

So I uninstalled and will be waiting for a different mmo that will hopefully grab me a bit better than this one.  I see a lot of hype on these (and other) forums but I just didn't see much to this game I haven't seen elsewhere (besides the theme, which I like a lot, and the class-less system which is good) personally. Then again, I didn't see much to Aion, LOTRO or WAR either so I am probably a bit hard to please and rather picky.

Good luck to all those sticking around. Maybe in a year or so after they clean it up a bit I'll give it another shot.

Thanks for sharing your opinion. Too bad you didn't like it, hopefully something pops up for you too one of these day :) 

A lot of the cons can be improved over time.

What can NOT be improved is the concept of a game, the idea behind it.

What I see in this concept is: PA setting, sandbox system (more sandbox than 90% of other mmos out there anyway), fps style etc.

If you don't like that then you probably have chosen the wrong game indeed, tbh I make wrong choices in games all the time so don't worry :-)

I am here for the PA setting mostly, I just love post apocalyptic games and movies. I can't struggle with little things in this game because the main reason I'm here is the post apocalyptic story. A good story.

I'm so glad I'm gonna be getting this game almost 3 months after release. Hopefully a few patches and plenty of bugs fixed.

 I have to argue that the game's AI is quite good; I'd put "enemies sometimes not responding at all" under game clunkiness. When a mob does respond, it's evasion is pretty damn good. Today I was trying to crossbow a lvl 4 humanoid and I'm lvl 4 myself, and the thing was running around me in such random patterns that it almost killed me-- couldn't hit the effing thing.

Regardless of whether the game's good or bad, my experience has been that the AI is solid (almost too much so).

About the graphics: you really have to wait until you have found a larger dungeon. It makes a world of difference.

Also, ingame FSAA does not work on my pc (HD4890). I use the GPU's external forced AA, and the game is beautiful. i can see every tiny detail from miles away :D

Characters are also excellent, higher level armor looks great. Too bad that impulsive, gfx-spolied people do not see these things, as you need to keep playing for some days until you can reach these....

DB

 Picked the game up a bit ago and sharing similar opinions of the OP. The graphics don't really phase me as I've seen far far worse and had low expectations going in knowing the background of the game. Some of the graphics for the vehicles are actually somewhat good. I will agree on one point though that it does feel very "clunky" and wooden as he put it to switch weapons or engage in combat. Not so much the tabbing in and out *which is a bit annoying, kind of wish it would just change selection types based on what you were targeting like an FPS would and leave tab for when you just really need to click something in the UI*. but the actual combat itself. This may be due to the fact that you're attacks are restricted by a reuse time, so when you go to pop off another shot or give another swing, and its not quite ready yet, it feels stiff. That's actually probably my biggest gripe with the game.

I also agree that it needs to open up some more sandbox elements as it develops. Basically, this game needs town/village construction, badly.