I've played just about every MMO out there and have several thousand hours invested in playing them (Over 2000+ hrs in Rift + ArcheAge on Steam alone) and this one is just painful..

A couple of my major gripes..

1) Graphics look like they are from the Everquest days. However, the inexusable part is the terrible modeling done by the designers. The textures/models are so heavily reused.. they need some variety and stop painting the world with the same generic rock terrains.

A simple example was the frill grass poking up from the starting towns fountain.. just raise the base height to hide the frill. That's just lazy modeling by the developers. It looks terrible to have the grass poking out of the middle of a stone fountain.. (Which used the same stone texture without any shaders.. Very ugly to look at - Ingame is far uglier than the screenshots)

2) Combat was ok.. The fact that archery hits are calculated client side on the archer's machine is a bit annoying. It doesn't account for leading or latency.

I admit that I didn't give it much time to get into deeper aspects of combat, but I can't get past how ugly the game is..

3) Min/Max builds only - It seems the game has only a few viable builds, though it offers numerous skills. So, this leaves most people with a cookie cutter planner for maxing their toon.. It seems you end up with a minimum of three characters to experience the full gameplay - One PvP, and two crafters.

This was off putting for me.. I have a full schedule, so leveling / managing three characters is not appealing. I prefer to have one character that I can spend building up.. I really don't want to waste time switching characters just to keep the cash flowing - that seems like just a time sink to avoid creating content.

If you enjoy hardcore pain.. (Such as drowning in a fountain, lol) You might like this one, but if you are like me and want to play a game that is less work and more entertainment, then stay away. The full loot and heavy PvP lured me in to give it a try.. but ultimately, it was just too ugly to give it much of a chance.

I've played just about every MMO out there and have several thousand hours invested in playing them (Over 2000+ hrs in Rift + ArcheAge on Steam alone) and this one is just painful.. A couple of my major gripes.. 1) Graphics look like they are from the Everquest days. However, the inexusable part is the terrible modeling done by the designers. The textures/models are so heavily reused.. they need some variety and stop painting the world with the same generic rock terrains. A simple example was the frill grass poking up from the starting towns fountain.. just raise the base height to hide the frill. That's just lazy modeling by the developers. It looks terrible to have the grass poking out of the middle of a stone fountain.. (Which used the same stone texture without any shaders.. Very ugly to look at - Ingame is far uglier than the screenshots) 2) Combat was ok.. The fact that archery hits are calculated client side on the archer's machine is a bit annoying. It doesn't account for leading or latency. I admit that I didn't give it much time to get into deeper aspects of combat, but I can't get past how ugly the game is.. 3) Min/Max builds only - It seems the game has only a few viable builds, though it offers numerous skills. So, this leaves most people with a cookie cutter planner for maxing their toon.. It seems you end up with a minimum of three characters to experience the full gameplay - One PvP, and two crafters. This was off putting for me.. I have a full schedule, so leveling / managing three characters is not appealing. I prefer to have one character that I can spend building up.. I really don't want to waste time switching characters just to keep the cash flowing - that seems like just a time sink to avoid creating content. If you enjoy hardcore pain.. (Such as drowning in a fountain, lol) You might like this one, but if you are like me and want to play a game that is less work and more entertainment, then stay away. The full loot and heavy PvP lured me in to give it a try.. but ultimately, it was just too ugly to give it much of a chance.