Final Score

2.3
Hopeless

Pros

runs on just about any computer  u can play as a dragon  some never before seen class's

Cons

crashes ALOT  super slow servers  8 yr old graphics  low server population  underfunded devlopment staff

Ok after playing this game several years ago, and then returning to it I find it to be EXACTALLY the same.

After 3 years of devlopment what they came up with was 1 new dungeon for the uberist of the uberist players, and a few new structures to build all fluff along the lines of "hey finally we fixed the sandstone walls after 3.5 years of them being broken"

They revamped the loot tables and ended up making it virtually impossible to find all of the nessicary crafting formulas and techs

Other then that what they Don't want you to know

Client side the game is 8 years old and 32 bit coded.  Only capable of using 2gig of ram and then it just writes everything to your HDD causing INCREDIBLE ammounts of lag.

All of the terrain in game is streamed to your computer the first time you enter a new area which can cause some amazingly long loading times 5-10 minutes <- also resulting in a folder on your computer that can grow and grow and grow after 2 weeks of play mine was around 15GB

^ this streaming terrain is saved as your "world cache" which gets corrupted bascially when ever you crash . "2 - 5 times per hour"

^ resulting in MASSIVE ammounts of file fragmentation on your HDD and many a long loading times after you have had to "clear your world cache"

The server responce times are so slow that when you walk into a new area it can take around 30 seconds to 1 minute to spawn monsters around you which results in - "wow its empty out here" , "poof" , " oh look i was walking in the middle of a field of lvl 50+ aggressive monsters and never knew it because they didnt spawn"

or better yet teleport into a new area and arive dead on the landing pad b/c your avatar spawned before the loading screen was finished

The Server population is rarely over 200 players and finding a group to do anything with bascially is not gonna happen.

You can play as a dragon , which = spamming the same 5 attacks over and over and over

Crafting involves walking around a field wacking resource nodes with various tools and occationally having to dodge golems or other hostile denziens.  Then making an incredibly slow and painfull walk back to the nearest crafting machine <- sometimes they are near the field, then constructing and deconstruction an item for exp < rince and repeat for 19 diffrent but nearly the same crafting class.

You can buy and build on your plot or lair for the dragons, unfortunatly these have the singular purpose of a place to store stuff but in a non secure way because after maintence every tuesday the permissions you have set tend to get reset to default "allow all" which leads to alot of theft < read the fourms if you don't beleive me.  They are also a good way to loose a few weeks of your life just building a house and a few fluff items for decor

There are lots of quests for new players up till about lvl 20 then your bascially stuck just grinding for trophy items to turn in for exp.

In the end originally this game had an amazing concept - dynamicly changing terrain , real time invasions of enemy forces into towns, but none of this was ever implamented.  So it turned into a MAJOR grindcore mmo with dragons and plot building being its only 2 original features.

The company who own's this game has verry verry few full time employees and a whole slew of part timers.  They are famous for broken promices and half built concepts "most recently with craftable spell scrolls, they introduced the t1-t3 stuff and kinda forgot about t4-t6"

This game has 2 options , retire to the mmo graveyard. or find an investor and re-release with a completly recoded engine boath server and client side.

And as 1 last final warning if you do decide to play this game avoid customer service at all costs it's just gonna wind up giving you a migrane