So I got invited to the Beta during the second wave and thought I would share my opinion on things. I am a level 27 Archer/Ranger so my opinions won’t cover anything beyond that thus far but I will likely add points as I go along. Anyway here we go.
From a presentation point of view Tree of Savior both sounds, and looks beautiful. The characters have tons of personality and you can customize them (even with just the hair options!) to look quite unique, the areas are well detailed and both the sounds and music are fantastic.
There seem to be a few graphical glitches like when your player moves behind an object that turns transparent, the object (a tree for example) starts flashing which looks odd and sometimes the screen flashes and I am certain it isn’t my graphics card. A big thing for me is that I, for the first time in an MMO for a very long time, I love the look of the main city which is a important as players will spend quite a lot of time here so A+ there.
The controls when using a keyboard however are IMO, horrible. It feels rather uncomfortable and extremely dated, I have never been a fan of arrow key movement though so I will accept I may be baised. However when I switched to gamepad I enjoyed the controls far more, everything feels rather snappy and rarely do I have any issues, and when I do they are due to player input and not the system.
Overall the combat mechanics are hit and miss, I absolutely love the hold skill and aim such as on multishot from the archer, it’s very fun and overall my abilities are very enjoyable to use. They feel powerful and look great, however I think the cooldowns are rather long and I hate this. I feel the developers did so because they don’t want auto attacks being ignored but I don’t think 12, 20 and 60 second cooldowns are the way to go about it. At the very least when abilities have 2 charges I think the cooldown should start once a charge is used rather than waiting for both to be used.
I feel the monsters are a little too easy to fight, they don’t do much damage and are rather stupid but the game is fun none the less. The boss battles happen far, far too often and rather take away the meaning of a “boss battle”, quite a few have re-used mechanics although some of the bosses are great! Also I have noticed a large amount of people complain about how linear the game is and I too feel there should be more optional paths to take early on, and that some of those could be more challenging and of course, rewarding.
Upgrade system is pretty fun, attacking the anvil is cool and the feedback of your upgrades success is a nice feeling, I feel the game should explain the upgrade mechanics though, I found out how to improve my gems by accident and nothing related to those systems appears to be explained very well.
The big topic, the XP gains. For me personally the grind is ok, kinda. I understand that leveling should take time and we do not want another “hit cap in 1 week” MMO but I also understand that having so much grind very early is not a good idea for the longevity of the game. People who I have seen complaining about both sides need to understand both these points. Ragnarok Online did not have you playing for hours and hours to gain 1 level at 25. There needs to be a balance, let the grind come later rather than so soon. We want this game to do well and so we need players and most players will not stick around killing mushrooms and boars at low levels.
tldr: Anyway overall I find the game very, very fun. I see myself playing it on release and there are plenty of classes I wish to try. There are some flaws like the grind showing up so early, and the boss battles thrown out sometimes 3 times on a map and the easy difficulty (so far) but the game is fun and looks and sounds very, very good. Can’t wait for main release or the future beta tests! Hopefully I get back in :).