I made account almost 6 months ago but only now I had chance to play it. Sadly I didn't like the experience and I dropped it...
1. GUI is terrible. I have quite old 1280x1024 monitor and I don’t have space to open all of those windows. It’s not that bad, but still managing EQ takes a lot of time compared to ordinary GUI from Tibia.
2. Map in starting city is sometimes confusing as hell.
3. There are way too many lags, but I can forgive it, since its beta and buying more powerful server would be rather odd.
4. Detection of NPCs(including monsters) in the battle window is way to “big”. I’m seeing shitload of monsters all around me and I cannot determine in which direction I should go to find them. This detection also makes fights harder than it should be. My battle window is spammed with tons of frogs/sheeps/human NPCs which are far away from me and I have to scroll down to mark enemy who is buried somewhere between 100 of frogs. If you really want to keep that “long range” detection then look at World of Therran. They increased “visibility” of sqms.
5. Server has its own Rookgard and that beginning is a
painful chore... You are forced into way to looong tutorial which will “help” You to gain 50.000 of coins, required to travel by ship from starting location into “Mainland”. I lost patient at the third task. Fuc*ing lumberjacking... You get task to gain two skills of lumberjacking, but… After reaching lumberjack NPC and learning about lumberjacking, there is only O-N-E tree on the whole goddamn Island which You can cut down… Rest of them either require lumberjacking skill 13+ or those are dead trees which are not giving any progress after cutting them... I REALLY don’t understand why there is only ONE Summergrown Tree or whatever it’s s called, but there is shitload of tree which requires lumberjacking skill 30+ to cut them down. There is also that STUPID random number generator responsible for breaking down my axes… I fucking made that axe 10 mins ago and after 3 uses it brakes…? Are you being serious…? The first task wast to advance in smithing. You had to make one axe. I did it. And during third task you got 3 axes more… I had 4 axes… All of them broke before I reached 12 skill in lumberjacking. That was the moment when I pushed CTRL+L.
The point of tutorial is to TEACH new players basic mechanisms of the game, not to force you into repeating that action over and over and punishing You with the most breakable axes in history of video games…
Also it seems that You cannot just grind and collect money from monsters, because NPC – owner of ship, has some kind of “deal” with NPC involved in giving you tutorial tasks, so the Captain will not let You until You are done with tasks... Nice.
I was excited about RPG, low-exp server but I didn’t expect that I would have to sacrifice 1 hour to get two levels of lumberjacking while playing MAGE…
Don’t get me wrong, most of the stuff on that server is awesome… But this doesn’t justify that serious user-unfriendly tutorial.
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Small update
So I gave it second Chance today. I got 5 brand new lumberjack axes and discovered that I can also cut bush-like plants which apparently are consider to be tree. After losing 4 out of 5 brand new axes on those freaking bushes I managed to get 12 level of lumberjacking ad I could advance with my “TUTORIAL”. Sadly server yet again took initiative and immediately threw it out of the window without second thought while screaming “sayonara suckeeeeerrrr”…
6. PROTIP: This is the best example of failing at pretending to create ROLE PLAY server… If you really want to punish people (who are playing Tibia-related game), because they killed few random sheeps(btw. sometime they are in some corner of the map when no one would make connection between them and some famer dozens of sqms away) and pigs then you should either:
6.1 Explain it VERY clearly that ALL of your actions have consequences and somehow inform people that there is build-in system involved in counting how much those bastards died from players hand or…
6.2. Create proper script involving NPCs arresting You or…
6.3. Create something else which will alert player after killing one of them.
There is NOTHING RPG-friendly about being able to kill those animals, not getting any reaction from NPCs who are standing right in fornt of player and observing his/her killing spree and later finding out that you killed ~20 of them and must pay 150coing for each, cuz fucking CITY Guard (involved in final tasks – the only way of getting out of the tutorial) acts like whiny girl and will not talk to “criminal scum such as You” or something… To be honest in real RPG this guard should arrest me or something, don’t you Think…?
7. Only reasonable exp-area is very much mage-unfriendly for mages who are not way above “suggested” level. You have to (or at least should) keep distance between yourself and creatures, but you just simply CAN’T. Spawns are spammed with monsters and respawn time is way to short. After killing few earthcrawlers in one part of the caves, I “advanced” into next parts, but when I was backing up to those previous parts, because I was keeping distance, I was immediately attacked by respawned creatures, so I have to back up entirely from those caves to restore my mana and HP.
8. Also I have to go back and talk more about that detection distance. It was very useful in exp-are mentioned in point 7… Thanks… I appreciate getting battle window full of swamp frogs. I’m not sure if this is your fault but window is showing monsters in descending order of appear, which means that first monsters on my screens and the closest ones are way at the bottom of battle window between all of those spammed swamp frogs.
Btw. and this is still about tutorial because after ~13 levels and MANY hours of gameplay I’m still on that stupid Bawfuria Island… I’m sorry to say it but designer failed miserably with the idea of making tutorial longer and more boring than Rookgrad from old Tibia. I just withdraw my 6k from bank gave it to some poor guy who still plays there, slaughtered few additional sheeps and pigs
, took few screenshots and logout for good.
I’m hoping that Bawfuria will be reduced into more reasonable size in “full version”. Low-RPGs with a lot of reading are mostly for fairly mature audience, but those people don’t have three weeks to finish tutorial. And This server will never gain any attention from 999x-fans as well.
PS. There is almost 11pm at my clock and when I’m sleep I tend to be harsh. Sorry. Love idea. Love dialogues and story. Love graphic. Hate gameplay. Games = Gameplay > everything else.