Probably won't cancel my pre-order, but I am still very disappointed. The world is too static, the character creation too limited, the models and animations too clunky and the story somewhat unengaging. As it stands, I would have preferred Kotor 3 or at least a Kotor 2 remake.

I agree completely. The lack of dynamics in npc's, landscape and creatures makes the whole world look like a cardboard cutout on a stage. Combined with the lackluster models, the lack of character diversity both in players and npc's and the purely hotkey driven  combat... I am very worried about the game's potential. There is simply no justification for the state the game is in right now, three weeks before launch.

The story may be alright, but it does not make up for the completely unimmersive gaming experience. SWTOR just isn't up to Bioware standards.

I've been a mmorpg player ever since Ultima and this is probably the worst MMORPG I have ever played. Everything from gameplay and interface to graphics is bad. Even in the first half hour of playing the game there are a ton of obvious bugs.

Really wish I played the demo before spending money on this complete worthless excuse for a MMORPG.

I'm a veteran MMORPG player that is relatively new to AoC. My two cents...

* For me the game runs perfectly. No lag, no framedrops, ... even with graphics and audio maxed out. BUT I'm running it on a very high end machine. 

* A few tiny glitches aside, the server merge went very smoothly and has pumped a good amount of life back into the game. On the EU servers however, they threw all nationalities together, resulting in language based guilds. For examply... my former Twilight server is now swamped with Russians who spam the global chat in cyrillic. Bit anoying, but no big problem. The PvP balance of power has been upset quite a bit, but all-in-all I've not seen too much griefing. 

* So far... relatively low grind. I've levelled by doing quests that range from boring to very cool.

* The setting is cool of course, but there is not enough in-game story to tie all the quests together. They really need to work on that. 

* Graphics... are nice. Not as spectacular as some people claim. Just nice. But... most monster and creature models need work in every departme nt.

* Community... a lot of spammers. But also some decent folk. The upside to the game is, that if you want , you can do most of it solo. 

* Instances and such... I thought it would be worse. I normally don't like heavily instanced games, but somehow it hasn't bothered me much; As for not being able to stray from set game paths... I've found that it's not exactly true. You can climb most mountains, etc. if you find the right way and use jump a lot :)

So far, I would say it's the best release we've had in a few years. Although it still can't beat AC, DAOC, EQ or EQII in their prime. 

The screenshots are crap. But I'm fairly sure they're not representative for the game upon release. 

Played it on and off since launch. Except for the lack of balance, I liked the game a lot. But lack of population on my servers caused me to finallt lay it to rest.

Last game I left was EQII, due to underpopulated PvP servers.

Horizons

Lineage II

Asheron's Call II

Guild Wars

SWG

RoK wasn't bad, but it completely missed the mark by basically only catering to the veterans with a limited amount of content that nobody was really waiting for. In my opinion, they should do more with the original game. Add a new chapter in the good vs. evil conflict, have a real global threat with new monsters, etc.

Call of Cthulhu online. Or maybe even Nephilim online.

Originally posted by JustBe

I tried it but the character models movement and animations were all off to me

Agreed. The surroundings look good, but character and most monster models are pretty drab. As I've said before, the game is vanilla. Nothing really wrong with it, but hardly anything to get excited about.

Well, the PvP servers are pretty much dead when it comes to populations. Even being in a guild won't help you much, as many of even the larger ones have pretty much emptied out. A real shame, because the game is the best out there, still.

Haven't played on a PvE servers in years, but I hear most are just as bad.

Meh, I have the retail version and it just won't run. Guess I won't be coming back to the game after all :)

Population wasn't exactly booming when I played, but still a lot better than say EQII these days. At least in my opinion. As for the game being in-depth... I think it's quite the opposite.

Been away for a month or two now, because the population was dramatically low. I'd like to further one of my chars that is about lvl 60 and was wondering if it has picked up at all. I hate playing deserted worlds.

They're actually selling this game for five dollars around here, lol.

As for the content updates... what they've done really isn't a big deal at all, compared to certain other games.

Returned using the trial and my opinion of the game really hasn't changed that much. It's a very decent release that can be fun for a while, but doesn't grab my attention for long. I'm sure there are many reasons for others to enjoy it, but for me everything just feels too empty. With it being a franchise game, there are no real plot surprises, there simply can not be any end-game to speak of, ... And I still think the character and monster models are pretty lame.

Yes, AB has a pretty large population --also lags more than most other servers-. But the two US PvP servers are pretty damn dead in most place at most times.

I switched from Nagafen to Venekor about half a year ago. But I ended up leaving the game again a few weeks ago, because my guild had completely died out along with almost every region of the game. Some of the 70+ zones have people in them and there are always the AFK'ers in broker areas, but overall... the pvp servers feel pretty deserted.

I just just wish they would balance the pvp system, then maybe players will come back to those servers.