Troll Wizard said:
Very very buggy, I can run Fear, Half-Life 2, DDO, and Battlefield 2142, but have many problems with MEO. I can't run it for more than ~10 minutes before my graphic cards has to reset and eventually if locks up my PC. There seems to be some kind of memory issue in the code,even at the lowest graphics settings. There are other bugs as well, but the graphics problems is the worst.
For the short time I can run it is pretty, even at the low setting. Though I really can't stand the stupid, kill 3 of this animal (non-agressive) or bring back 10 of these items quests. Not very heroic IMO, probably why I couldn't stand WoW, Vanguard Online, or EQ2. It's funny seeing 10 different players standing around each killing their own tiger cub or auroch, yeah that's immersion. The quests in DDO seemed more like adventure missions, but people don't seem to like instant type adventure.
I was in the closed beta for a long time, and gave up on it, mostly for the reasons you state in that last paragraph.
When your major selling point for a game is the setting one of the most important things you have to do is make sure your players remain immersed in that setting as much as possible, and Turbine isn't even close to doing so. Mostly because they were lazy about instancing things.
- As a human you're given a quest to kill a named boar. That boar stands outside in a specific spot. When you kill it, it respawns immediately in the same spot, probably before you're done looting its previous body. You then proceed to run by that boar you "killed" constantly until you move to the next town.
- Later you're asked to kill a spider in the basement of a house. You zone through a door but for some reason this still isn't instanced. You walk fairly safely through the basement since it's full of other players fighting all the minion spiders, and you get in a queue to kill the boss spider.
- You're asked to hunt down a young man who's gone bandit. Much like the boar when you eventually find him and kill him he's suddenly completely healthy and standing next to you.
- You're asked to kill a Bandit Supervisor. You find where he spawns by looking for the group of people standing around, then either group or get in a queue to kill him when he spawns.
All of the above could have been made much more immersive and infinitely more fun with instances. And there are many more examples. This was just pure lazy on the part of Turbine, and very disappointing.
- One of the major quest givers in the first human town starts you on an arc to discover a traitor in the town. The problem? When you discover the traitor the NPC shouts it to everyone in the room, thus spoiling it for everyone, and making very clear that you are in a game, not in a world.
This was all presented in feedback to Turbine, and with no expectations that anything would change. All in all, that serious lack of immersion, coupled with the lack of some kind of sidekick feature that would let me play with my friends no matter our respective levels (how can the ability for people to play with their friends NOT be a top five goal of ANY MMOG? Amazing. WoW and LotRO, I'm looking at you) means that I'm not only not going to preorder, I'm not even tempted to play. I'm a huge LotR fan, but this doesn't tempt me at all.
I think the game will do fine, I have higher expectations than most MMOG players I think. I would guess it will follow a normal lifecycle, where there's an initial burst of popularity, and then things ramp down over the mid run and revive only when expansions are released.
