It is always good to hear a studio that treats their employees good. Its unfortunately they didnt hire the right game designer an d the right artists however. And the result, well take a look for yourself. Its probably 30% there, no more.

On the other hand, I believe this is their first attempt at this, and some forgiveness can be found in this, or at least so, if they do fire the game designer and the art director and find some more capable people.

I reach level 8 yesterday, after their CS guy Allison gave me a free pass because of the issues with "set subscription failed". They did write that they are working on this issue, so ill imagine its going to work soon. I do like they are just allowing people in right now though, this is good customer service. Also the emails i send them was answered almost immidiately. Thats just something very rare in the world of MMO's, good customer service.

I also got a wow experience when the first graphics came on to the screen. Although a little later I came to the conclusion that, yeah the graphics fair, but there are still some places where they must have well.. overlooked.

The animations are pretty chunky and really sends the signal of  a lowbudget (and unfortunately a bad artist's work). I really felt send back to 2002, when this was the standard.

The best thing they got right is the running speed. yay, Im really getting somewhere. I found myself just running around for a bit. 

Combat is the usual 2002-style, except, the mage is really exceptional powerful, at start. Never seen that before in this way.

The missions are the usual :; kill 10 pink rabbits and return to me. However the landscape and the mythical beings made this feel a bit different and I found myself exploring the world as well. 

The world layout is ok, not as good as the superb Entropia, nobody is, but better than rift and wow. Here you actually can explore places without an overly risk of dieing.

Overall I do tend to agree. On todays market, this game is to be classified as a F2P quality. It has some UP's, but the general polish is not compareable with the competition (which right now is mainly Rift). If they make the game F2P, it is however worth playing. They would probably also earn more money this way, so when they figure this out,  you should try it.

So... what were your questions and answers?

My Ratings:

Quality of what is there : 10

Graphics : 7 (still some work left on character agility and animation)

Combat system : 6 (way too old and done before, however working)

Character design : 8 (the free blending of character classes have been seen before but are stil the best out there)

Number of new innovative systems : 0 (nothing new at all, not even a single isolated system, what a disaster)

Was there anything new in this at all???

Its very simple. If you know that the product you are making is going to suck, working on it must be hell. But if you are convinced that the product is going to be great and actually know something about game design, then you will be excited to work on it.

As far as I know, the game is already being developed and will be out 1.5 to 2 years from now. Anyone know more?

If you are from the UK, you most definitely know who Jonathan Ross is, could say he is the UK version of Jay Leno, the host of "Friday night with Jonathan" for the last decade. In cooperation with Tommy Lee Edwards, a comic artist as well as a film aritst (Batman Begins, Superman Returns etc). the two created a new short comics series called Turf. http://comics.ign.com/articles/108/1082473p1.html

Turf has proven to be very succesful, and a film has been discussed with Mathew Vaught as the director (Mathew just did X-men First class). http://www.slashfilm.com/matthew-vaughn-to-direct-jonathan-ross-turf/

Now rumours are florishing that they are thinking of creating a new MMO as well, based on the Turf universe, to be called Turf Online.

The scene is set in 1929, in a hard gangster world of New York, with Vampires creeping around as well as Aliens and corrupt cops. Sounds like an interesting setup to be followed.

Right now the best looking graphics is found in AoC. The Pvp is the same as all the others, just different playfields.

With all those people voting fun which was not was this was about, i think we should just make an online tetris game, that would be fun.

Its tough to prioritize in the development of a new MMO, but what would you put on the top of the list of things to make sure you get right?

I just might be the only one in .. the world.. that did not have any problems with Anarchy when that launch. Not only could i log in with no problem, but i never crash either.

WoW had me waiting a bit a few times,

Aion was never a problem, a bit boring game, no new innovation i mean at all, but no problems either.

SWG nah.. didnt have problem there at all, remembering a very good experience until i ran out of content.

Age of Conan... nope no problmes, ran pretty well, was lack of content of course, but no technical problems to speak of

then i bought, yeah i know.. Fifa Manager 10... omg, crashed in the main menu, couldnt save the game, crashes very often during gameplay.

Conclusion: It is my experience that MMO's are a lot better quality assured than standalone games. The customer amounts is about the same, but a lot more effort is put into making the MMO work.

regarding Offensive names

Why not add this to the parent control features of a game. This way the individual parents could decide what is allowed or not. No matter how we turn it around, each parent has different standards anyways.

In my language the word "Reanim" means rape. What action will you do for me to not see that name on these servers?

That are very good ideas however there is one drawback to more intelligent AI's and that is the computational requirements. You should think that with the computers we have today that shouldnt be a problem, but if you multiply with the amount of entities that lives on a server, both players, grass, orcs and so on, it becomes a significant problem and has been the reason why MMOs so far has not attempted this.

Another reason is that qualified AI programmers are not available, there just isnt many people who can figure out how to make a good AI, even though it seems simple, it is a complicated task in a 3D world. Yes simple things as if the sun is up, the grass grows, but developers think of AI as being a little more challenging and it is going to take some time before anyone improves on the "15 year" old stand-around-till-i-get-shot AI.

OMG 100,000 users, what happened to this game in the last 6 months? I have confirmed from personal contacts to management level  insiders that 6 months ago Runescape had 5,5 million users and 1,1 million subscribers.

Where did you get those 100,000 from?

Originally posted by paulscott

Wurmonline - Game I played for the longest the only real mmo "GAME" that is eligiable for this sites requirements(the whole graphical thing that is still a fully player controlled world.   It even puts EvE and Darkfall to shame after you look at aspects like being able to build your house/town/outpost anywhere(literally) on the map amoung a few other touches.

Guildwars - A class based game where it actually made sense to go class based.   This should be a staple for ANY mmo or even gamer.

Runescape - what can I say I'm not the UO hardcore guy I started on this game when I was a kid.   It has some interesting design decisions in that permemently altered how I was going to play MMOs(for great sandbox) from those decisions in the game. 

Mabinogi - sillily enough what I'm playing now.  Biggest laugh in the face to wester MMO developers because an Asian F2P low quality grind endgameless budgetless bad graphic sadist maoistic game gets away from the holy trinity when the best aspect of the game is raiding, while they(our developers) can't imagine a game that is otherwise(holy trinity).

Right PaulScott... I just lost all faith in you, Mabinogi? seriously? WurmOnline? Could you pick worse games? Even The Matrix (which is otherwise the worst MMO game ever published), beats these games.

It is without a doubt the lacking interface that prevents other producers making MMO's for the consoles. We have found a way, but are still investigating the market potential. We are working on a game that will be released for Wii, XBox and possibly PS3 as well. It is easy for the Wii, but we are considering delivering the XBox and PS3 version together with a new interface, a virtual glove, that will make players able to be part of the action. The game will be ftp (free to play). We will see how that goes.

Both Warhammer and AoC has done some overhauling and for what they present has become quite good games now and worth a try. You will have to like their special kind of fun though, but if you like WoW and Lotro, chances are you will be entertained by those two as well.

For some, this is "just a game", but scaringly enough for the most part, MMO's is a lifestyle.