Funcom downloader locked at 50 kbps meant I paid $5 for early access but was unable to participate because the download did not finish till after release.
Yeah I had this experience, the downloader started off at 500k and slowly trcikled back to 50k It took me two and a half days to download.
-None of the patches have fixed my out of memory, assertion failure or random crashes. I crash every 30 minutes. Minimising freezes my PC. My system specs smash the recommended for the game.
I havent had this experience, in fact I have been impressed with the quality of the client in that behaves exceptionally well on my machine. I can switch between the client and the OS without issues and I have had 3-4 hour gaming sessions without serious issue.
I have noticed the client does have an issue in that after several hours play my character appeared to not have any armour. When I zoned it fixed itself.
But thats been the only issue so far.
-Extreme amounts of downtime during Aussie peak time have meant 12 out of 30 (so far) days have been unplayable. THey have now scheduled 2 days of this per week claiming it will not impact anyone's peak time. In addition to this, the Oceania recommended servers are ot actually labled so in-game.
I guess there is pros and cons to this, some other popular MMO's didn't bother fixing things in a fast and timely manner at launch and therefore suffered from it. I see the downtime at this stage as Funcom working as quickly as they can to fix issues and help flesh out the areas of the game that are lacking.
The combat system was great. It's far more intelligent than the typical auto-attack (it wasn't a problem with UO but it was for just about every other MMO that followed). It makes fights a little more interesting. However at higher levels with a focus on lots of abilities, it starts to feel like the old auto-attack button mashers again. Where I focus on my hotbar rather than the gameplay.
The combat system in theory has a lot of potential on paper. What I want to know is that not only using your combos effectively for offense, does using your shields effectively for defense increase the gap between good PvPers and the average button masher?
The starting area is EXTREMELY linear. It's a very heavy story based element that really destroys any sense of being in an MMO. It starts to improve once out of the starting zone, but it's still the same Everquest style questing/leveling/combat only gameplay.
I noticed this, but I also noticed that I can get into PvP very quickly as well, first five minutes at White Sands and I was attempted to be ganked by some dude. It was a good experience for a second as I killed him, then his mate 5 levels higher than me ran over and nailed me. They then proceeded to do this for the next 10 minutes until they became bored and moved on.
Ill give AoC another couple months and see how it and Funcom progress in fleshing the game out. The games less than a month from the public launch, lets hope the potential of the license is realised.
I like the fact that they have an M rating and therefore NPC's are not afraid to tell me they will shove a sword up my a r s e or when I kill them theres blood and gore everywhere :gun: