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Just plain horrible, in every regard

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 38 / 40
Date: September 19, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I was in the beta...well...I never actually played in the beta because I could never get the game to work. Then I was dumb enough to buy the game...lol. After about a week of hair pulling, countless crashes to desktop, a few re installs, I actually got into the game and played..for about 10 minutes at a time or until I zoned and crashed to desktop. But these problems are covered in other reviews, let's get to the real problems.

1. BORING: Once you get past all the bugs, (if you can), you find out what the game is really all about. Well...not much. One of the main selling points for this game, is that camping would be eliminated by the "random missions generators". The key word here is RANDOM. Everything about this game is random and generic, and that's it's biggest downfall. There is no sense of purpose, no sense of direction, and no sense of accomplishment.
The missions all start to look the same after about the 10th one, and you'll be on hundreds of them if you ever want any cash. This also ties in to the lack of boss mobs, and lack of dungeons.
You fight mostly outdoors, or in the "missions". Which are randomly generated "dungeons". The implementation of which is absolutely horrible. Mobs are spawned with no ryhme or reason, some dungeons have ZERO mobs in them, some have 5 that will all rush you at zone it.

2. SERIOUS coding and engine problems: Not even going to go into all of these as they alone would take up the 1000 word limit on reviews, needless to say it's overwhelming.

3. Crashing, crashing, and more crashing: Self explainatory.

4. Character creation: Suppose to eliminate cookie cutter characters, but it doesn't. Sure, you can train anything you want, but because of the skill system, and the way the points you get to spend must be distributed to make your character viable, you end up with really only one path you can take per given proffesion.

5. Monster AI: The single WORST programming of AI I have ever seen in any video game...and that's saying a lot.

6. Exploits, cheats, hacks: By the time I left, which was under one month into release, there were already players that were level 150+. Being that this is a PvP game, that's not good. Exploits were RAMPANT and numerous. Exploiters went scott free.

7. Balance of proffesions: Non existant. The game is so unbalanced it's not even funny. There are 2 viable classes to play if you want to live PvP, forget it if you play any of the others.

Just a note about me. I'm an avid gamer, and have 3 characters over 50 in EQ, and 4 over 50 in AC. So I obviously have the patience for online gaming...lol.

This game fails in every single aspect of gameplay. It's boring, repetitive, buggy, unbalanced, and just plain no fun. Avoid at all costs, you have been warned.

"Anarchy" it is. "Online"? Not quite yet.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 14 / 17
Date: July 01, 2001
Author: Amazon User

As a long-time EverQuest player who habitually criticized the stability of it, I can say that Anarchy Online makes EQ look like one of the Seven Wonders of the software and network engineering world. After an arduous and multi-hour installation and patch process (2 of the 4 patches are over 10MB each), Anarchy Online is so plagued with instability, connectivity lossage, and garden-variety bugs that it is virtually unplayable. Connecting into the game takes on the average around 10-15 attempts, and once in, the average time you can actually "play" in the super-laggy zones is about 3 minutes, at which time you are dumped back to the login screens to start all over again. Zoning within the game is a 50-50 (and worsening) proposition; I was just recently stuck in a small shop with 15 other people for 20 minutes, unable to zone out. If you are lucky enough to zone, it's likely you'll be dumped back to the login screen. Even within the game, silly bugs such as mobs hitting through walls, graphics glitches, rogue pets, missing inventory items, and getting trapped behind objects still crop up in great abundance.

To be fair, the gameplay is inventive and creative, and attempts to solve the agonizing long hours of camping for items EQ players know so well. Quests, or "missions" are created for you (or your team) on the fly, and you go to a quest zone made especially for you, and you know the reward in advance so you can work for specific items you need. However, to add insult to injury, these quests are real-time based instead of game-time based, so with 80% of your "play" time centered around trying to actually play, it's nearly impossible to ever finish a quest in the allotted time. Out of 6 attempted 1-hour quests I only had time to finish one; I have since attempted two 10-hour quests and have not been able to make any headway on them either simply due to to connectivity problems (i.e. the quests themselves are not unreasonably hard, and you can even pick the difficulty yourself relative to your level).

I really hope Funcom gets it together and fixes the problems, but it seems that most current players chatting on the boards feel betrayed and are quite angry with Funcom for releasing what is at best a beta-quality product for 50-some-odd-dollars plus paying 6 months of online time in advance ("lock in now for the lowest rate!"). Even if AO solves its substantial technical problems, I would never again purchase a product from Funcom.

Tough to review a game that can't be played

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 11 / 12
Date: July 19, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Folks, I bought this product on the first day and struggled, hard, for hours on end to log in even once to the servers. I failed. You may deride me as an incompetent computer user if you like but in my opinion this game should not have been launched. I cancelled my account and so far have not been charged for that. I will eat the price of the game itself. Lesson? When it comes to MMORPGs do not be the first to buy. Wait at least two weeks, preferably a month to find out if the game will be playable. Its worth the wait the two weeks will not put you that far behind the first day buyers who do manage to log on (if that is a concern, it isn't for me).

AV

Major disappointment

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 12 / 14
Date: July 03, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I played beta. I bought a copy and muddled through a horrific first-day-of-release installation. I was able to create and play my character through a variety of expected first-week glitches. But now we're in week 2, and the game is all but unplayable - I cannot zone, I cannot go on the newbie missions, and I cannot leave the backyard where I was "born." I have gotten no responses to my petitions and bug reports, and I cannot get onto the AO website to pass on these thoughts. Let me suggest this: hold off on buying this game until you see all the gaming community - the *players* - come out with positive reviews saying this has all changed. Pity.. I was really looking forward to this game.

VERY Painful Experience

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 12 / 14
Date: August 21, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Just to reiterate everyone else's experience: spontaneous crashes, lots of lag, big time bugs, poor graphics, and quite frankly - boring gameplay.

To top it all off - after the last crash I've had to REINSTALL Windows since it would not boot.

DO NOT BUY THIS GAME!

Buyer Beware

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 11 / 13
Date: August 14, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Please be advised! Many of these games are shipping with CD keys that are invalid. To add insult to injury, Funcoms customer service is close to non-existant and it could take several weeks and access to a fax machine to resolve your problem. The official message boards are flooded with complaints and there hasn't been a single post from Funcom to give any help or advice or even the slightest whiff of anything resembling an appology for what is an absolutely stupid and totally avoidable mistake

Pitiful, even for MMORPG launches

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 11 / 13
Date: July 16, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I played beta, and it was buggy as betas are supposed to be. Unfortunately, it was far more playable than this piece of crap that found it's way onto store shelves. After one week of playing i've already canceled my subscription... it's awful.

The lag is terrible, but if it were just the lag I might be ok. The bugs (and exploits) are far far too numerous to list, but let me give you an example. Saturday night my character got stuck in some sort of server glitch that had me playing - online - but bugged so that I couldn't interact with people/see people/do missions/bank/zone. The only solution to remedy this, as support has said, is to have your character committ suicide. Any game where you have to, regularly, committ character suicide to escape bugs is most certainly not ready for release.

FunCom claims the game is "110% done and in order". I can only hope they fired the PR guy that made that claim. Maybe, maybe in a few months it will be playable but it's not yet. And by playable, I don't mean "the lag is rough and there's a few bugs" I mean "you cannot have fun playing this game".

FunCom should have waited longer on this release. I'm out [price] for a game that isn't even finished.

New program: Bugs: Poor Privacy Policy: Credit Card required

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 9 / 10
Date: July 03, 2001
Author: Amazon User

This product doesn't seem to be put out by a U.S. company and, as such, doesn't seem to follow simple, established e-business protocol. In addition, the game seems to have bugs that crop up even before you can play the game.

Cases in point:

*-* You must enter in your full address and credit card data, just to try the game out. *-* Your credit card is automatically billed each month, forever. There are no instructions on how to stop or quit. *-* Web site doesn't by default redirect you to a secure page to enter in your credit card data, so a large number of users (including you?) might have their credit card numbers sent half-way around the world to Oslo without encryption. *-* Funcom has no posted privacy policy. Who knows what data they're selling of yours. They're not even a member of BBBOnline or TRUSTe *-* Game servers may be overloaded and you might not be able to play when you want to play... but you still have to pay

My advice is to wait a few months until this company gets it's act together, otherwise you may find yourself getting more than you might think from this service.

Thumbs down.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 9 / 10
Date: September 27, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I really wanted to love this game, and I gave it a lot of chances. But with absolutely ZERO customer support (none of my issues have ever been answered), a terrible track record for patches (12 of 12 have been failures), a total lack of the promised storyline, and play that manages to be both unimaginative and repetitive... this just isn't a good game.
It's a beautiful game, with great music... and no 'meat'.

What to Believe?

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 11 / 14
Date: July 26, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Somewhere between the total condemnation of this game (by many) and the unabashed praise (a little harder to find, for sure) lies the truth...AO is a flawed product with many admirable aspects.

I successfully ran the game (which in itself I guess is exceptional) on a rather low-end system (PII450, GeForce 2, 256RAM)without too many problems, even with the graphics maxed out. I downloaded the patches as .exe files prior to installing, so patching was relatively painless, and I had no trouble registering. I've had only one disconnect and almost no trouble zoning, but I've also played in non-peak hours and for no longer than a couple of hours at a time. I think that the many, many technical issues which plagued the release are being slowly resolved. I don't think FUNCOM was adequately prepared for the release (nor was the product adequately tested) but I do think they are making an honest effort to fix the problems.

What disappoints me most about AO is not the technical aspect, but the gameplay mechanics themselves. There is no in-game tutorial as such, and the manual leaves out more than it explains. Many of the controls cannot be remapped and personally didn't find them intuitive at all.

Graphically, the weather and environments are very nice (as were the skies in ASHERON'S CALL) but figure movement is not particularly smooth or realistic. The buildings are generic/futuristic, but the cities do seem convincingly large. It bothers me, however, that a story set so far in the distant future is so uncreatively tied to the present in terms of design and culture.

I have also been playing ANACRONOX and although it is based on the creaky Quake II engine, it is a much more convincingly realized world--lots of little details that really demonstrate some imagination. Not so sure about AO.

So, if AO survives the birthing process and is embraced by the gaming community, it might evolve into something special. The question is, do you wait and see, or brave the technical issues and be a part of the process that shapes the world?

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