Day 2: Impressions

bstripp

I had the oportunity to spend several more hours last night playing.  A few random thoughts from that experience.

Tutorial:

This is very well done.  While I could see it getting repetitive if you have to do it every time; it has nice pace and some cool moments.  Having people actually thank you for what you did is really kind of cool.  Instances that change based on what you did there, very cool!  It's nice to play a game where you have some ability to impact the environment... yes, I know it's all on rails, but it does add to the imersiveness of the game.  More important, it shows what they can do with the engine.  That's really key for future content.

Open Zone:

It took me a bit to get my bearings.  I didn't play WAR or any other game with public quests.  Nice.  It was a change of pace for me and the Canadian zone is pretty good.  The boss fight at the end was enjoyable and I found a team to make it easier.  

Combat:

I can see where some of the complaints come from.  You do have one a few powers in the beginning and use them a lot.  I can see also where those powers will kind of blend together after a few characters.  In other words, a charge attack is a charge attack whether it's flamey or icey.  Since I have to alt, I can't comment on that further other than to say I could see it being an issue.  I think that they would have done better to have more target based animations to diferentiate the attacks a little more.

I enjoy it.  I like the blocking mechanic, I have a little of everything now which is nice.  Most important, I feel like a hero which didn't happen in CoH till mid 20s on most toons and never on others.  Of course, I played controllers almost exclusively so take that with a grain of salt.  I do think it's more action based, even if you use about the same number of powers.

Performance:

Dropped twice, other than that it's been a pretty flawless expereience.  Installed the game on three machines, none of them had any real issues.  Played with all three running at once (yes... I have 3 pre orders.  My kids and I play everything together) and had no real issues there.  Low end graphics card was a 8500 GT and it seemed ok on that.  Low end CPU was a PIVD 3.0ghz.

Potential:

Here is why I think I'll be sticking long term.  They seem to have created an engine that's very flexible and allows for some really great experiences.  Is the game going to be as deep as CoH at release.  No.  It won't.  I doubt it will have even 25% of the content that CoH currently has.  It also is missing some big systems; bases I'm looking at you.  However, what I have seen has impressed me more than what I have seen on other games.  Assuming they keep a reasonable content update schedule, I'll likely be here for some time.

When you compare this game to others, try to keep the maturity of the game you are comparing it too in mind.  Asking a released game to have the content of CoH or WoW is silly.  However, if the engine seems to have potential, and enough fun to keep you happy, then enjoy the ride.

4Renziks

Nice liittle sum, i agree...and thanks for reminding the illogical that content on a 4year old game cannot be compared to the content on a game not even released yet.