First Impressions

[DarkViruz]

While this game is no where near done and the amount of delays without communication can be lightly regarded as inept communications between devs and the community...I must say however, I am addicted to this game...

It's laggy but hey what mmo start is problem free..(once you fly off 'newb island' everything is better)

Land area is massive, just absolutely massive. I spent an hour simply flying around getting to know random islands. Combat is well, I dont think im high enough to really know...it seems mundane (WoW style you press a button it does the shit rinse and repeat) but I've been having fun leveling. (lvl 14 currently). Riding your dragon around is some of the most fun i've ever had. You even ROLL/fall down cliffs if they are too steep. It's very basic...this game has the potential to be good however, they claim a release date of april 2006, i honestly dont see it happening.

[Monster]

Does everyone start out with a dragon?

[DarkViruz]

well kind of. the pioneers all get a dragon as a pet (weak fighter, mainly a flyer mount) however you have to put one skill point (which really isnothing) into the mount skill tree. If you're not a pioneer you can get a dodo with 2 skill points. travels fast can summon 3 of them but they dont fly. You can however use balloons and dragon ships (ginormous dragons) (dragons with a cart that carry's 80 people) to get off the island

[Monster]

So are pioneers pre-order people or what? Is that only for the beta, or do they get dragon mounts from the start during final as well? I assume other people can get dragon mounts too, but just have to buy them or something?

[DarkViruz]

pioneers are indeed preorder people.

We'll have dragon mounts in DnL when it comes out too, but, rumor is not until lvl 35 (as opposed tot he current lvl1) Others can get diferent mounts including a different dragon...pioneer dragon is a 'special' mount for the preorder people.

[DarkViruz]

since launch yesterady at 5:00 est the server has been up for a total of maybe 12 hours. I don't mind too much but the following picture expresses many peoples feelings..

[DarkViruz]

Server stabability is definetly improving i am able to play round about 5-7 hours at a time now, there rebooting still takes an hour but its vastly improved.

A lot of people on the screen still causes massive lag, but since the entire world is so huge (40,000 square km) it's easy to get away from it all. Snowboarding is fantastic, so is hang gliding and parachuting (can't wait to attack a castle with 200 paratroopers...of course it'd lag everyone out but how hot would it be to see 200 paratroopers coming down from the sky off of dragons and hanggliders). At this point no quest have been implemented/turned on but I've actually had a blast grinding off of mobs. I cannot recall a game where I had fun killing creatures.

Armor is also very very cool. You can loot bracer and shoulder pad but in the non plural form...see you can put the shoulder pad on your left side or right side
so you can have 2 different shoulder pads and bracers and legging bracers to give you a really unique look.. I thought that was a fantastic addition.

The game however, is based on potetnial. While they've thrown all these features in and tons more which they haven't activated yet as they want to sort the memory leak issues....Potential in terms that they have all these features and plan to or have implemented them but a lot of them need some hardcore polishing. They picked up 500, 000 dollers off the preorder...im assuming that will help develop the game but they have a lot of work to do for there April release...I cannot see them hitting april...I think Septemeber-end of next year is more realistic if they want to ahve all their features in and polished. And if this happens...this game is gonna be massive fun.

[Monster]

You can snowboard?? Damn, this really sounds like it's going to be cool...

[DarkViruz]

http://www.jabussucks.com/sog

First screenshots (4 or so are the same). I took these at random intervals..try to keep in mind i have had my setting at teh absolute minimum so most of these look outdate, but also keep in mind since this game has been in development for something like 3 years you cant expect the worlds greatest shots either.

That said you cans ee up to 30 miles away (land and such) so if you see an island in the distance you can actually fly to it. From the mainland to the far north took me roughly 50 minutes of flying on my dragon. All the way south seem like it would be roughly an hour long flight. And that's roughly only 1/8th of all thge land that will be available in DnL when it comes out.

I enver thought I would say this about a game but it's really neat just flying around and exploring the land (give you reason to since you need to build forts).

A little more about the fort system while the game currently has 18,881 people in it (or atleast registered). Only 540 forst are available to everyone. 40 forts are baronies (ie section of land) 5 forts are duchies (states/provinces) and 3 forts are kingdoms (countries). The rest are allr egular forts. So with such limited forts and with people hitting the required levels to build the forts (myself included) in the next few days are gonna become much more pvp intensive as people have to try and destroy/capture forts in order to own one. Advantages in clude the ability to teleport to that fort instantly...which means you dont have to fly 2 hours to get there.

You set the time you can be attacked at ie (18 hours from now when you set down a fort) then when 18 hours later arrives your fort is vulnerable to attack for 2 hours. I haven't yet experienced an attack but im told you get alerted and you can teleport there to defend that's when the fight starts. Supposedly you get npc's defending ti as well not to mention anyone and eeveryone that has enrolled in your fort.

I sadly bugged out my fort. I had built a regular fort early on then got access to building a barony fort so i went to destroy my old fort (cant own more then one at a time) but it bugged out my fort and didnt destroy it but cleared me out of ability to use it..now i crash anytime i open my fort window and i cannot place downa barony fort. this makes jabus a sad panda. On the plus side my old fort is still up and anyone who clicks info on it crashes which makes jabus a happy panda.

Hopefully they'll fix this up soon, i'll see if i can get some screenshots going (not sure i want to since im about 1 hour and 30 minutes away and i can no longer teleport there). But if im up there for some reason ill get some shots going. as of last night the server has only been up for 30 minutes, it has been up all day the day before so they borked something with the latest patch.

[Monster]

Why do you have 4 identical screenshots?

Damn, 50 minutes to fly somehwere? That's amazing. So is the land all barren if you just walk around, or are there features, dungeons, monsters, etc?

[DarkViruz]

currently their are mobs here and there (they haven't set spawns for them all so the further you go the less you see. It used to be abrren but forts are starting to crop up here and there. I'm sure more and more will get added as time goes by, for now its kinda cool just looking at the view even though it was probably randomly generated.