Anarchy Online went 'live' Wednesday, June 28th, and thousands of gamers flocked to a new world, only to be blocked by patches and thousands of other gamers jamming up the bandwidth eager to play.Anarchy Online went 'live' Wednesday, June 28th, and thousands of gamers flocked to a new world, only to be blocked by patches and thousands of other gamers jamming up the bandwidth eager to play.
Summary / Solution / Truth
I anticipate having a good time as "ever" in Anarchy Online, however, currently there are a lot of problems with the game.
Just like any other massively online multi player game AO is having it's growing pains. The very small patches (I'd guess 200,000 k worth of files total), which normally would take the cable modem I'm currently connected to a matter of minutes to download, took a whoping 4 or 5 hours to download on the first day. And then, much to my joy, there was an error in the way I let the program extract them and they became corrupt, so I got to do the entire process all over again, spending another 4 to 5 hours downloading them again.
Since Wednesday I have yet to have a ping that doesn't average 3,000, while in any other game my ping from where I am currently staying averages 50.
Despite these troubles, Anarchy Online shows a lot of promise for the future. It is a step in the right direction.
People do not compete for items, they buy them in shops (there are items you can get via "missions", but the common way is buy or trading with other players.)
"Missions" are randomly generated for you, thus there will never be any competition for any single creature spawn.
"Dungeons" are also randomly generated when you enter (there are supposedly static ones too.)
"Skills" can be bought by any character, of any race. You pick what you want to become good at. Although, your "Professionally determine which skills have what maximums.
At this point, probably under 15 hours of total play (and 25 or so during the final phase of beta), most of which I was unable to do much due to the heavy lag, Anarchy Online shows a lot of promise and is a lot of fun.
It's definitely a step in the right direction, and will probably divert my attention permanently from EverQuest for the simple reason I can play AO for 1 hour and always gain something, where at 60 th level in EverQuest this is impossible.
While I say goodbye to my past in EverQuest, and say hello to my future in Anarchy Online, I do so with a bittersweet happiness and knowledge that with each new game, we make a step forward in understanding what it is that makes a really good game. But most of all, we learn it's not so much how uber the game or our characters are, but that it's the social interation, and freedom of choice, that really draws us in and allows us to become a character in another world.