Opinion: Slow down, focus on the world and systems already in place

jwalshjr

My background:

• I am a long time MMO and RPG vet. I have put substantial time into WoW (many versions - but vanilla is likely over 3000 hours alone), Guild Wars 1 + 2, countless single player RPG's, Diablo 3, etc. I have also played other competative games such as LoL, Hearthstone, TFT and more.
• In WoW I was consistently a 95+ parser (top 5% of players), I am a diamond TFT player, was consistently a legend player in HS, and in Diablo 3 I was typically top 50 in multiple categories every single leader board season. I don't say all of this to brag… more just to say I have put a lot of time into a lot of different games. This doesn't always make a good opinion, but my opinions below are formed from this background.

The good:

• Combat
  • Overall it feels pretty awesome. Most abilities feel fairly fluid, the movement is fairly consistent, animations are good, and as somebody who is playing a cleric it feels nice to not be completely helpless the way healers are in some games. I look forward to this being expanded upon with dual-classing etc. in the future.
  • Class identity feels very good right now IMO - I am curious to see how well this translates to dual-classes.
• Crafting
  • I'm putting this in the positive and negative - it's a bit of a mixed bag. At a baseline, I think there are some great things in place to build off of, but it feels a bit clunky and unfinished.
    • The underlying systems are in-depth, fairly flexible, and require really getting into and grinding out the crafting. Overall this is good - but I feel like it's a bit over the top currently, I'll talk more about this later.
• The grind
  • Another mixed bag - but overall calling it a positive. The feel of the grind is correct - it feels like you really do have to put in the time and earn it for yourself. As somebody who appreciates older-style MMO's I truly appreciate the lack of pay-to-win options, and the feeling of earning it for yourself.
    • Despite this - I think some of the numbers are insane right now. Grinding out crafting skills even to 10 right now feels arduous. If the cap is going to be 50 - the early levels (1-20 or so) need to be far easier with a ramping progression. Giving people a brick wall from the rip will drive players away.

The bad:

• The world
  • This is overall my #1 Gripe with the game - bear with me a bit.
  • The world overall right now feels generic, and more like an ARPG style of events and procedural generation. There needs to be more hand-crafted sections of the world. Right now outside of the starting zone and the initial tutorial… it kind of just all feels the same and runs together.
  • My golden standard for this personally is WoW Classic - and is likely the reason me and so many others continue to play the game 20 years later. Azeroth isn't just another online zone to run through - it feels like a living, breathing world in a way that no game has managed to re-capture since, and AoC in it's current state does not give me this feeling whatsoever.
  • They need to cut all future plans of a second continent or new areas not already on the map. There is more than enough land already available that is being unused. In classic WoW - each area feels distinct with a strong sense of identity. From a single screenshot I could tell you the exact zone and area the person is. In AoC right now the only thing I would learn is "generic green area" or "generic desert area" etc. Each of these areas needs a unique feeling and a lot more handcrafted love with unique questlines and NPC's.
    • Even if the other systems are good - if I don't care about the world why would I keep coming back. Right now this game really gives me no reason to care about the zones or the world other than moving somewhere as a requirement as I progress. All these MMO's are chasing more and bigger content - but they all ignore the thing that made WoW so successful to begin with 20 years back. If I don't care about the world, I won't care about the MMO, full stop.
• Lack of Content
  • This one isn't surprising anybody really… it's an alpha. I am not going to harp on it here, but they have a long ways to go with the content available.
  • One specific call out I want to mention - many of the quests feel like generic go here and do X quests. Make more, longer, non-repeatable questlines. It's okay to have generic time-gated quests to fill in the gaps, but if every single thing is procedural generation it starts to feel repetitive. I spent 300 hours grinding out 99 RCing in Old School Runescape… and yet I am already feeling burnt out of the available content at level 12, especially when I know future resets are still on the way.
• Crafting
  • You need to manually select each item and input it while weapons crafting… if I have the items in my inventory I should just be able to hit "craft" instead of manually selecting them. This is basic QOL.
  • Why are there different "shapes" to process wood into? There is already many different types of trees and wood, each style has at least 5 rarities as well. We already have enough subdivisions - we don't need to keep dividing this further into planks vs. boards etc. I would argue it goes too in-depth. In the words of Gabe Newell "Realism isn't fun". Keep the variety of wood and building paths, but cut out meaningless distinctions here and likely in other crafting systems I haven't grinded as much yet. If you really want to keep the system this in depth - much like leveling it needs to start simpler and slowly expand out into being more complicated. Friction is good - but not every single little thing needs to feel like dragging my balls across sandpaper.