This is just some feedback about what my first experience playing the game was like.
Login process was fairly smooth, I did have to wait in a queue but it didnt take too long to actually get into the game, maybe 5 minutes.
Character creation was fairly smooth and easy to understand.
Problems began when I actually got into the game, one of the first things I noticed was that compared to other mmorpg’s and i’ve played very many of them, setting up your keybindings in this game is fairly difficult, the settings and the way the menu is laid out is not self explanatory at all, its difficult to see the difference between the “keyboard” and “mouse” options for keybindings, also the final result of the keybindings is difficult to achieve what you want…
Example of this for me - I wanted to be able to cast skills by clicking them with my mouse in the hotbars - So far it seems impossible to do this with any skills besides buffs, I do not know if this is something to do with the targeting system, but even so, since there is a tab targeting implementation ti should be possible to do it, and as far as i can tell it isnt - that’s a big dissapointment and may require me to fully change my desired control scheme to something totally different, probably not using the mouse much at all.
Second thing I noticed was that when running in a certain direction the character’s head has a tendency to flip around back and forth very very quickly, and it really looks comical / like an error and detracts from the feeling of watching the character move around - I think this may actually be related to the keyboard I’m using, but I’m sure that if it’s happening with my keyboard, I’m not the only person who is experiencing it, it just looks very silly, like your characters head is spinning when running at a certain angle. and or when running forward your characters face may be facing backwards - looks very odd / not right.
After this I noticed that the hotkey “lock” and unlock mechanism works in an odd manner compared to most other mmorpgs, as even when they are in the locked position, clicking something in a hotbar with the mouse will frequently still cause you to accidently unbind things regardless of the hotbar being locked.
the next major detractor for me was when I realized you needed to have megaphones to use standard shout, so i’ll say the chat interface seems limited at best, and having a continuous stream of gold bot spam scroll across the top of the screen is very undesirable - prefer that scrolling text was simply removed to be honest… But at least the block interface works without too much hassle, would be a lot nicer if you could block them by simply clicking the name and selecting it, but at least it functions.
But! Those are pretty much all the negative that I experienced with my first session playing the game (spent about 3 hours logged in)
And those aside! What I can say is that - this is overall still the experience I was hoping for out of this game when I first saw it back in, I think 2014, have been watching the english release develop since and I am happy having spent 10 bucks to gain early access, the first playthrough was still very enjoyable…
Big positives I will say - once you get a somewhat functioning control scheme worked out, the pve is very nicely paced and rewarding, your aoe’s skills feel extremely rewarding to use (I was playing ranger) and the pacing of the first few levels is nice, quick but not rushed, you can take it at the pace you like and that’s a great thing in a game like this.
The questing is decently rewarding and the systems implemented for teleporting around are pretty good for this kindof game, overall thumbs up there for questing and travel.
There clearly are still a couple of translation issues to be worked out in some of the text, help menu test and quest text etc. but overall very good.
the class progression and skill progression so far that i’ve experience had been fun and rewarding, and im enjoying playing it.
It’s kindof a shame that some of those more obvious issues havent been situated at this point, but here is to hoping that with the coming year or more of release patching the game will get to a higher level of polish for this release, it’s a great, superb, starting point - the fine details just need work - overall congratulations to dev team on a job well done.