My AoC PVP Weekend Experience!

Okay, so I've been playing for a while.  Heres a short synopsis of my experience so far.

Character creation.  Looks good.  Models look good.  You can make yourself fat, thin, muscular.. a mixture of all three with a triangle slider.  Lots of face options, I don't think all of them are in at this time though, the client is a little limited.  A plethora of options on the facial features, bone structure, scars, tatoos.  You can change skin tone, eye color, hair color, etc.  If you've played Oblivion, it's about as complex as that.  The UI is attractive, good sound.  Pretty solid.

I wish there were more options,(Hah) Specifically skin tones but it may only be a client thing, it might be a different story in the full version.  Plus, you have to stay true to the story.

Tortage Island.  You get to go up to almost level 6.  Basically, you play up until you reach the city.  Water effects look great, excellent graphics, even on medium.  I am running a 8600GT currently, I run at 40FPS.  It's very linear, you can do a little exploring, but not much, as it is exclusively single player.  I like the UI, it's pretty nice, smooth animations, there is slight lag sometimes while fighting.. but that may be a client problem.  Directional attacks are actually pretty easy once you get a control scheme and get the hang of not getting auto-attacks.  Several times I found myself saying "Attack you dumbass" because I'd forget that I actually have to manually swing in order to do damage.  All in all, not bad.  Blood and guts everywhere.

The speech animations could be better, some of the animations with the voice acting is poor.. in my opinion.  Like, Saddur the Galley Slave Master has a high pitched voice.. odd, considering he looks as if he's about 6'8", 300lbs.

PvP.  Not bad.  Again, not many people know their characters or the controls very well.  There just simply isn't enough time in three days to become a master.  There is quite a bit of lag when the stuff hits the fan, blood, spell effects, combo effects, etc.  Though,  If I had a new GPU, that may be different.  I have 8Gigs of RAM, so I didn't have much of a problem.  The Annihilation seemed lame because of how people started to play the maps.  Go to res totems, destroy them, then kill each other.  You'd think that your team would be interested in protecting it, but that isn't the case.  Combat is hectic, Capture the skull, or whatever.. I didn't test because I hate that game.  Leave that to Unreal Tournament or something.

Mechanics.  Casters have it easy, click spell, it goes off..  Rangers are the same.  They have a few melee combos though.  Fighters have it rough.  You have to first, hotkey a combo, then hit a number of hotkeys in order to pull it off.  Pulling it off isn't hard in itself, but having to hotkey upwards to 15 or so keys.. that's rough to do without having to move across the keyboard and still hit the right ones at the right time.  I'm using a G11 logitech, and it's still pretty difficult to find enough hotkeys for the combo, then enough hotkeys for the directional attacks.  I even added some to my mouse.  I've got it down to about 6 combos with the directional attacks in addition.  Adding more would make things a little uncomfortable.  However, you have free reign to put hotkeys just about anywhere, so If you find something nice for your playstyle... congratulations.

Rangers are overpowered and Priests are underpowered.  Though, the former is being fixed during the downtime right now.  I've only come acrossed one glitch, it is in the lobby.  If you jump off the ledge to the bottom of the snake head, next the a pillar... move around a little bit (because you're stuck), you'll fall through the world and die.  But who knows if that lobby is even part of the final version.  I'm running a C2D 2.7ghz, 8G RAM, Asus Striker Extreme, RaptorX HDD, X-Fi SB Xtreme Gamer, EVGA 8600GT.. I run medium settings with a few things turned up at 40FPS solo, 20-30FPS PvP.  Low shadows, no AA.  Only 1280x1024 res.  I'm guessing you'll need a high end 8800 to hit high on decent framerates.. I know for a fact, one 9800 Gx2 will run it on max.  But, on medium, most of the textures are pretty darn good looking. 

The only really annoying thing that I can acrossed..  was this.  The foilage rotates depending on where you are looking.  It is always facing you.  So, if you turn slowly in circles, you can see it turning in circles as well.  I guess they have to skimp somewhere, 2d foilage in order to make the rest of the world look really nice.

I give it a 9 out of 10 for its purpose.  We are testing and they are fixing rather quickly.  It's going to be a good one.