First off... thank you Goblinworks! Even in the Alpha state, the game is entertaining and I've played for about 15 hours now.
We've come a long way since the technology demo.
So, first off... right out of the gate, everything is a little clunky... its an Alpha, I get it. It was not too hard to get my bearings. Once I found out CTRL (Run) was a toggle, not a hold, I was good to go.
I've heard others say that that the "look" feature and "turn" feature were off a bit, but they were slightly slower than a FPS for me which is just right for an MMO that I am playing.
So now I go to train. What do I train? I want to be a fighter/rogue. I press F11 and bring up the "I forget what its called window". The window basically tells you the things you need to do to get achievements. So I look at Fighter 1.
I'm not sure why, but the details of Fighter 1 appear in a transparent window behind the F11 window, so they are kinda hard to make out... but you can move the F11 window. More on this in a sec.
So I go to the fighter trainer and want to train me some fighter feats. There's a big list of feats. So I hover over one. Nothing. I click on it. Still nothing. In game, before you purchase the feat, no information about said feat is displayed. I open up F11 and match two of them up and purchase.
I purchase all the stuff necessary from the fighter trainer and head over to the Dreadnaught trainer. I purchase everything I need from the Dreadnaught trainer. No achievement or anything pops up. I press F11 and go over the list again. I think I've bought everything... but there is really no way to tell.
Instead of having that transparent word bubble appear for the requirements for role achievements, I think a color coded bullet list would be more suitable. When I press F11 and click on Fighter 1, all the requirements should expand below it. If I have satisfied a requirement, it can be green. If I haven't but it is available to me for purchase, it can be yellow. If I can't purchase it yet, (for whatever reason) it can be red.
Now for the trainers... you can't move the trainer window. Its locked... or I didn't know where to grab it or how to unlock it.
Once in the trainer, hovering over the feat should give you some clue as to what it does via a text wrap version of the transparent word bubble we have for the F11 window. Clicking on it should give you the full low down on what buying that feat does. Clicking "False Edge 2" should tell me what the attack is and what the increase is compared to "False Edge 1". If "False Edge 2" increases my STR by .33 it should say that there. If False Edge 2 is a requirement for "Fighter 5" it should say that.
The Unavailable Feats tab does a decent job of this, but I'd still like more information.
At this point I tabbed out and started bringing up various guides. (Thanks to everyone that made those possible!) I figured out where I wanted to go with my character and tabbed back over... crashing the game for some reason.
Reloaded that game, went out, killed some stuff, harvested some stuff. Collision is turned on for the harvesting nodes which I thought odd... until I was pulling some mobs via ranged attack and backed right up against a log node and 4 melee mobs were on me. After a second or two, I jumped over it and thought, "Wow that was a pain in the butt." but I kind liked the idea of having to be aware of my surroundings.
There is some weird mouse recenter thing going on that is annoying during combat and lead to me looking at my character and having to move the camera to see the mobs and where I was going again. At first I thought this was due to lag or a simple glitch, but it happened quite frequently during my time playing... but only occurred during combat.
Aside from that, combat was smooth PvE wise. There is a little delay... not sure from what, but the mobs are slow to react, which could be attributed to a "surprise round" and after mobs are dead, if you have an attack queue, it still goes off. No issue at all from my perspective.
So I gathered and killed and gathered and killed. Time to try my hand at crafting. Or refining. Well, from the looks of it, they are identical, but they aren't. I had enough stuff to refine a stave and twine for a bow, but no varnish. I will say this, even in Alpha... the whole crafting/refining system is robust. The recipe drops are a little skimpy and you have to know where to go to harvest and what to kill to salvage, but over all, not too shabby and has LOTS of potential.
Why do some folks have a red triangle to the right of their health bar? No idea.
I accidentally clicked a question mark while trying to trade and ended up smacking the person trying to give me a bow. That was awkward. A bit of a slight panic on my part... I didn't know if I was gonna get attacked or what, but it took me a moment to whisper an apology. It'd be nice to be able to "lock-sheath weapons" in town and turn it off later once you know what you are doing.
So I'm a clicker... I like to click my hot bar buttons. The primary / secondary weapons swapper in between the 1-3 and 4-6 keys is VERY annoying.
Trade. Trade was bugged in town so we had to leave town to trade. After I accepted, there was like a post-accept offer thing that you had to click as well. I don't know what the function of that was besides having you reconfirm your trade.
All in all, I had fun... lots of fun. No PvP because I wanted to be able to visit town. I'll probably test it out next weekend.
I'm sure most of the stuff I mentioned above has already been mentioned by someone else and they'll get around to changing some things based on their priority and I'm totally fine with that. Most things, like trade in Callambea being bugged, are annoying at best and none of which significantly impaired the ability to play the game. The game is very playable in its current state. It won't knock your socks off, but the ground work for most things is there.
What I did notice is this... the primary content currently is PvE and Escalations. Now PvE is fun but in its current state gets very repetitive very quickly. Now I know once there are merchants and storage and loot drops from PCs, that PvP will increase, but if you want to be welcomed in town, you're kind of handcuffed.
PFO was marketed as a game where players would be each others content. I'm hoping War of the Towers will bring more PvP content to the table. Still, a large portion of the players that are invested in their Settlement will be primarily defensive wanting to ensure their settlements get every edge that they can for OE. I hope that PvP is encouraged in other ways as well to off-set the redundancy of PvE this early on.
While I am a bit concerned, the progress that Goblinworks has made thus far is very encouraging and I cannot wait for EE to kick off!
-Areks