i've been playing hours no issue - not saying that means it is ready for release - but I believe it means it is somewhere near ready for release
not from my perspective (yes i know others may not get these issues but my machine isn't exactly weak and you shouldn't be getting this many issues so soon before release - they have what 20 days to fix everything?):-
- massive fps issues
- incredibly laggy cursor
- laggy interface (even witha keyboard it is always a second behind keypresses)
- easy to get lost
- clicking on interface options sometimes works
- i was given about 3 pages worth of quest text at once which i had to scroll up through and then down again to see what had been said
- the map sucks really badly (no zoom or panning?)
- minimap is laggy - takes a second or two to change the direction the arrow is facing
- help system is not helpful. At all. It doesn't tell you anything useful - eg ("when you complete a mission approach teh glowy thing" - i walked upto it. Then into it. Nothing happened.
- combat - i tried attacking a rat which was the name of a creature i was meant to kill. It would not let me attack it at all. Then after looking for more rats i find rats which have icons over them - i assume only the mission owner can kill quest creatures - it would have been nice if the game told me that first. Now this is something i'd expect to see early on in an open beta, but there's just soo many other issues i wonder if it will get fixed for release.
- i have skillpoints to assign but there is no hovertext saying what the different attributes actually do
- choppy animations - maybe because of my iffy framerate but the animations although well designed playback in a very choppy fashion
- load times - loading times are rediculous - i can load crysis levels off my slowest hard drive faster than this game loads small instances
- interface - i went from fullscreen to windowed mode to try and fix some issues and found my whole interface was still rendered off-screen as the window was smaller than the original full-screen size. So if i get a new lower-res monitor i can't play?
- It's quiet. Very quiet. Now i'm not asking for voice acting all the way through but you'd have thought there would be some basic voice acting for the beginner questlines - the mouthes move but no sound comes out. All the new MMO's i've played have at least some voice acting for quests (at least beginner ones). This late in the day i'd expect at least placeholder voice acting if there was going to be any.
- The damn thing crashes as soon as it loses focus - in fullscreen alt+tab and boom! in windowed mode if you highlight a different screen for more than 10 seconds the game crashes and closes.
- The in-game menu - it takes up 1/3 of the screen to give you what? 10 options? It doesn't need all that space. In fact it doesn't use that space - most of it is blank space which just covers up the pretty scenes behind.
I
know it is a beta. I know how betas usually play (and a couple of alphas too) - i've been in a LOT of alphas and betas in my time, and this is the worst MMO beta i've been in by a looooong way. Instead of me finding issues with missing quest items, or massive inbalances in skills/classes or exploits or holes in the terrain I'm not even able to properly test that as there is soo much wrong with the interface and the whole UI experience. It is just about playable with a keyboard, and impossible with a mouse - these are basics which should have been fixed before the beta.
My feeling is that this game needs 2-3 months of serious polish on the entire UI and on the graphics performance and animations before this is ready. The ambient sounds are very poor at this stage as all i hear is music. That's it. I'm in a busy area and there's no wind, no background npc chatter, just some quiet music.
I have no idea how the latency to the server is because everything is so laggy on the client side i could have 1500ms ping and wouldn't know.
Saying all that the game
looks pretty - a lot of work has gone into the environments and characters, which isn't bad but it seems everything else has suffered (UI, basic performance, user experience).
So far i give this game a 3/10 - if they completely re-did the UI to be as responsive and easy to use as every other MMO out there ever, fixed the terrible client-side performance, re-designed the help menu system (no more options embedded through 3-5 sub-menus you must navigate with up/down arrows, enter and escape on the keyboard which takes about 1 second to register input) and added more sounds (background sounds, key mission vocalisation) then i'd be looking at an 8 or 9 out of 10. This game is not ready, nor will it be up to scratch in 20 days when it releases.
/rant off.