So I caved yesterday and pre-ordered the game (official release is today, so I still got the pre-order goodies). I played the beta for a few months and really enjoyed it. The setting, the classless/level-less character progression, the fact that I actually have to THINK to complete a fair amount of quests, etc.

Anyone else play the beta and have any thoughts on the game? I needed a new game since I'm getting pretty bored of Diablo on Hell mode.

I never did try it. Had the invitation but just didn't. How does it stack up to other MMOs?

I never did try it. Had the invitation but just didn't. How does it stack up to other MMOs?

Very hard to explain Dat. I'll try to keep it simple.

There are 3 factions to pick from (Illuminati, Templars, and Dragon). AFAIK they pretty much all play mostly the same but have different "decks" (kind of like classes almost, and unlocking all the required abilities for a "deck" rewards you with an outfit).

Leveling is pretty simple. You get Ability Points and Skill Points as you get XP. Skill points are spent on a number of things, all related to your weapons and equipment and determine how high of a QL (Quality Level) item you can equip and also give passive bonuses. Ability points are spent on, well, abilities. You can buy ANY ability you want provided you have the AP for it, essentially allowing you to dictate at any time how you want your character to play (tank/dps/heals/hybrid) and can be switched on the fly. Each weapon type has it's own place in the ability wheel. That being said you pretty much never need an alt character. You can play through the game and get every single ability in the game to make one super character if you wanted. Also you'll always gain AP and SP at the same rate (no scaling XP requirements) so if you ever didn't like what you're using or what you bought it's not hard to just keep questing without having to re-roll another character. There is no re-speccing.

Abilities are limited though in that you can only ever have 7 "active" and 7 "passive" skills equipped at any time. This is nice because you only ever have 7 clickable abilities in your HUD at any given time and allows for a lot of customization.

Weapons basically dictate what skills you can use. There are lots of weapons to pick from though. Pistols, Shotguns, Assault Rifles, Elemental Magic, Blood Magic, Chaos Magic, Fists, Hammers and Blades. The idea is you pick TWO types of weapons to use and select skills from those weapons to us.

Currently I'm using Blood Magic and Elemental Magic, mostly with a focus on large scale burst DPS and DOT effects for single targets. Other times I switch to Blood/Fist and focus on a healing build as needed.

So that's characters really. The game world is all modern. I love the setting honestly. The quests always seem very interesting and Funcom has done a fantastic job with quests to avoid the typical "Kill X monsters" or "Collect X things" crap. There are lots of sabotage missions (stealthy stuff) and my favorite are Investigation missions which really force you to think and usually do a lot of research and googling to figure things out. Fantastic stuff, really.

Not sure what else to say. Very cool MMO, very interesting, feels fresh, and I love having a character that doesn't feel limited to a specific "role" at any time.

That does sound fairly complicated, but I love the fact you can be anything on one character. I can see that making the end game far more enjoyable, since you can respec instead of starting all over. The setting is what drew me to it in the first place, but as with all mmos, I highly doubt I'll ever play it.

Unsubbed this past week. Can't justify the monthly cost since I've beaten just about everything and the content is released too slowly.

Typical.... Maybe I should just get GW2.