As an avid MMORPG player since Everquest's beta I was intrigued and delighted to find Ashes of Creation was now in playable Alpha two. Here then is my feedback of my early AoC experience with just 168 hours currently played.
Really enjoy the current character classes, my wife is overjoyed at being able to play a bard again. Its so refreshing to find each class has its own identity rather than the trend for all classes to be able to do all skills which has crept into many MMORPGs. Your character and their skills should and do feel needed.
After playing Amazon's New World for a few years it's great to have proper character buffs back that last longer than a second or two.
The death penalty with a meaningful experience debt is a great idea and adds real risk to our adventures.
Beautiful looking world, I especially like the water courses, lakes and seas and the fact that you can swim around in them.
I dread having to visit the towns as the lag really trashes the experience. The market place vendor is currently a huge disappointment with a clot of characters squashed into a small space. A very difficult to use player market interface although I like the idea of player store fronts. The item search is far too basic.
Have done some basic crafting but the games poor interface with dated and cramped menus and icons make it a poor experience for me so I hope to see that side improved as time and testing go on. The gathering animation for plants is too basic.
As I have stated it is visually an awesome looking game but for me the sound effects and quality of some of these effects is very poor and lets the game down. Again the scratchy clicks and fuzzy noise of gathering some items, the sound of the wolves biting is like an old man's wheezing. The games theme tune is excellent btw, it's just some of the in game sounds which I hope will be improved.
There's a lot of rubber banding and hitching experience at the moment so I would assume that will improve going forward.
Overall so far we are enjoying the experience of the early days of AoC and taking part in the alpha two. I hope the testing is going well. It seems so far a mix of a stunning world, interesting character classes, but work on some dated and cramped interface menus is sorely needed and the game is let down by the quality of some of the sound effects which seem to be on par with the old Daggerfall games.
