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The game is not playable

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 9
Date: July 02, 2001
Author: Amazon User

This game was not even close to being ready for release. Consider the following: 1) Servers are not up for more than 20 minutes at a stretch in prime time. 2) Lag in the cities is about as bad as it gets. If you don't have a cable modem, forget it. 3) Many bugs leave characters stuck in zones and unable to move, stuck in shops, stuck in missions. 4) Funcom does not provide phone support. The only way to get help is via e-mail or to /petition in game. I have yet to receive a reply to either method.

Save your money. There are other games coming out soon that are worth waiting for. (Shadowbane, Horizons, and Dark Age of Camelot are all in Beta.) Also, both Everquest and Asheron's Call do not experience any of the problems listed above. They are both stable and cost a LOT less.

Save your money on this one, it's simply not playable at present.

Was Good, Isn't Now

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 9
Date: September 27, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Well when this game launched it was shaky. Then the game got better and more stable. It was doing pretty good, up till recently. Someone in their administration is nuts.

Funcom decided after four months, to redesign the game mechanics. They completly nerfed the Agent class, making it useless to play. Then they started stating they would make drastic changes to the way armor and weapons are equiped. Players demanded they not do this, but they continued to make worse patches.

Recently they released patch 12.6 on a Friday (this is like the 5th time they've done this.) The patch literally made the game unplayable for anyone levels 30 or higher. People made low levels hoping Funcom would fix the game. They said they did, but it is still giving many of the same unplayable problems for mid-high levels.

They today, Funcom stated they will no longer allow users to comment on the problems on the boards. They are now censoring the messages on their boards.

Is the game good? Graphic wise yes. However the administration is so messed up they are making DRASTIC changes to the game without notice - devistating the time and money that players have put into the game. They don't test their patches before releasing, they release on patches on weekends making the game unplayable for days. They have already lost a lot of the player base. I supported Funcom all the way up till last week. Their behavior is inexcusable. The game is unplayable for many mid to high levels and now they censor comments on their site.

If you start playing they will no doubt nerf your class 2 months from now and change basic game mechanics, destroying the way you built up your characters. My advice... wait till Star Wars.

It's all just a shame

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 7 / 9
Date: November 06, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Here's the scoop. I've played Everquest and Asheron's Call both to varrying degrees of satisfaction. But I was genuinley excited for the release of Anarchy Online. I hoped it would raise the bar in a genre (MMRPG) that has such potential but has been reduced to a banal excercise in gaining levels.
I held off from buying the initial release (thank God I didn't pay the (***)original price) and inspite of cautionary reviews from the reputable gaming press (PC Gamer, Computer Gaming World) I decided to go for it.
Why not? It sounds great. No more camping problems, a sci-fi setting next generation graphics, the opportunity to partake in a four-year story arc. I so want to like this game
You'll notice that here are like 250+ reviews on this page most of them negative. Most of the earlier reviews deal with bugs and connectivity problems. I can say after I downloaded the patches, which DID take most of a Saturday afternoon, I have had no problem connecting or staying on. I have had severe problems with lag in crowded areas. (PIII:650, 128mg ram, 64 MG TNT2). Turning off most of the graphic whistles and bells imroved the situation somewhat better but made the game no better than it's much older predecesors graphics-wise (and it looks awesome at high res, but I can't actually move around).
As to the game play: Boring. The much-balleyhooed mission system (which does put an end to monster camping) is lame. Unimagiantive maps and objectives just guarantee that the predicable level-get more gear-level, march will be a long boring one. In fact, I couldn't even complete several of the fed ex style missions (take this item to this thing in this maze) becasasue of a bug that doesn't register that you've actaually accomplished the mission objective. So I spent hours just running around a cleared-out maze trying to get my reward.
The combat is buggy and it's often hard to tell where your enemy is. Also thanks to a bug you can shoot and shoot through walls.
The technological aspect of the sci-fi roleplaying is interesting but deadly complicated. And as far as in-game help from fellow players or official agents in avatar form there is none. I did find a helpful chap nicknamed Coorwin who was able to give me the basics of nano-tech implants but since then I've been on my own.
Perhaps an active and creative user base can ressurect this game. But as far as raising the bar on MMRPG's Anarchy Online is more of the same and a huge dissapointment. I have canceled my resistration before the 30-day trial was over. I truly beleive the MMRPG conceptwill change the way the world think about computer gaming and one day there will be the "killer app" that will do it. Anarchy Online isn't it.

No Fun(com).

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: July 08, 2001
Author: Amazon User

In short, this is a [price] beta . . .

Ten days since the game's launch and counting. Still unplayable. A powerful machine won't help you. (I'm reviewing this on a 1.1ghz machine, 64mb Radeon, 768mb ram, 768k DSL).

Some of the current problems:

+ Pings commonly between 3000ms and 10000ms.

+ Unable to move from one 'zone' to another

+ Characters, experience, credits, posessions often randomly lost

+ Documented commands that fail to work

+ A lot of GUI and typographical errors abound

+ Servers are completely down between 10% and 15% of the day.

+ Logging in is a long and arduous process

+ If you manage to log in, lag is too horrible to play (for example, press the 'sit' key and you may wait up to five minutes before your character sits.

+ Characters can shoot you through walls, meaning you can't see them or find them, but they can kill you.

+ If a character attacks you, your nano-bots (aka magic) will fail to work on them unless you then seperately attack them (a combination of a couple buttons pressed and mouse clicks - enough time to be killed before retaliating).

+ Often doors contain no textures, causing a giant "blurp" to occur and the screen to go haywire.

+ The manual is attrocious. Read the first four or five pages and burn the rest. You'll have to wait until someone else figures everything out and find out how to play on Anarchy Online fan-websites.

There are countless additional problems. This is just the surface and illustrates why it is a waste of time.

The core of the problem is that Funcom's networking is done through TCP which most multi-player game developers will cringe at (and for good reason). Additional problems are a failure to test and scale their server-farm and server software to handle a large number of concurrent players. Well known players in the game industry (including some from iD Software) have offered their comments and suggestions along these same lines on FunCom's own Anarchy Online forums. Also, according to some of the .plans for the iD folks, they are into this game (and if the creators of Doom and Quake are into it, you know at the core it must be good). It's just a shame that something that appears so fun is currently totally unusable. You can use it enough to see what you're missing and that's about it.

Some of the other problems you'd have encountered a few days ago were:

+ Sending your credit card number over an unsecure connection to register (even though the manual states it is a secure connection).

+ After registering, the email you recieved containing your password did not contain the password.

+ Patches would partially download and/or fail during application.

FunCom used a couple excuses. The first was that there are too many users in each 'zone/city' (700!). The second is that 35,000 was a shock to them and they didn't expect to have that many users. There are two problems here. The first is that since the entire point of an MMORPG is to have a lot of players interacting and playing together, you would want to be sure the software and servers scale well and can handle *huge* numbers of players in each 'zone'. Otherwise, what good is a multi-player game? It's like one-man baseball. The second problem is that they claim now that 35,000 users was a shock and unexpected, yet their own press releases previously touted that they expected the number of users to rival all other MMORPGS previously released. Further, they had 100,000 users request to participate in the beta. This means that they could have had all the test users they needed to be sure the servers could stand up with 35,000+ users and that their cop-out over the 35,000 current users is wholly inaccurate.

This product is currently still at beta-level. In short FunCom got 35,000 people to pay $50+ for an incomplete and far-from ready product. Perhaps this was an attempt to gain further emergency funding to pay for making the game usable, but it's still wholly unethical.

Finally, if you're still not convinced, then realize that only one week after the game was released, Funcom has already mastered a second copy to be released (with fixes and all) because the first was so disasterous. But take heed, even with these changes, it's still as unplayable as ever.

The game would be wonderful, exciting and fun if only it could actually be played. If you enjoy 10000ms pings and 10 frames-per-minute game play with, then this game is for you. Otherwise, wait a month or two and check back to see how things are going. At this point, I intend to return my game and get a refund if it isn't playable within the first thirty days.

Funcom=OmniTek?

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: July 17, 2001
Author: Amazon User

The world of Rubi Kai has enormous potential, unfortunately serious technical problems keep Funcom's effort from being a great game, and has reduced my gaming experience to frustrating reinstalls, constant disconnects, severe lag, and unplayable game features. To say the game was released prematurely is an understatement. Not to mention the ... minimum requirements on the box lable. Do not even consider purchasing this game is you are running less than a 450mhz processor and 256K RAM (not 64, or 128). Even with those stats you'll still have to set visual setting options in the game to zero (yes zero) and turn off all the lovely graphic details to get decent frame rates (this has even been reported in high end machines, so if you want decent frame rates you'll need 512RAM and at least a PIII 1 ghz). Even with that, Funcom has advised players to avoid cities(yes, avoid cities, I'm not kidding), because P4 users with 512 RAM and 64mb video cards still report frame rates in the 10-15 fps range with visual settings at a minimum. Won't even get into all the bugs, characters trapped in downed zones, shooting through walls, horrible (and I mean horrible lag) even with cable/dsl, patch crashes, install bugs, CD id bugs, login bugs, frequent disconnects, etc., etc. Funcom says their working on it, but that the game is 100% playable. I have to laugh. It's been seven days since I tried to patch from version 11.5-12.1 and now after wasting countless hours reinstalling and repatching I cannot even play. No word from Funcom "support" yet (although I was given an ID number for my support e-mail). My advice is to wait a month or two and check the boards to see if there's been any improvement. Otherwise, don't waste your money.

I have played UO, EQ and AC...AO is the worst game ever.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: September 18, 2001
Author: Amazon User

AO has manage to go backwards instead of forwards. Buggy...no support...nobody monitoring the boards. Just the other day they claim they accidently erased the Message boards..bull! There are so many negative comments on those boards, they had to erase them, altho if you go there now...its full again of negative comments. Don't buy or try this game. If you want to try a game that looks decent and has people who seem to care about the game...try DAoC (Dark Age of Camelot) [....]

STAY AWAY FROM ANARCHY-ONLINE!!!!

Possibly the worst online game ever released

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: September 25, 2001
Author: Amazon User

This game is the most buggy product I have ever had the misfortune to load on my computer. On top of that, the actual gameplay is very bland, the game lacks any real content and is missing most of the things that make a MMORPG interesting.

In an attempt to solve every gaming issue that existed in customers heads from all previous games, Funcom has produced a truely boring game in Anarchy Online.

I strongly recommend *not* buying this product. I would have rated it zero stars but that is not an option.

Empty Box

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: October 01, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Dear Fellow Consumers,
Please do not make the mistake I did and spend your hard earned dollars on this empty box. The title of my review sums the game up. There is NO content to the game, the issues of play balance and trade skills has still, since Beta4, yet to be addressed by the folks at FunNot. Fair warning givin, play DOAC or one of the other new game coming out, but dont send FunNot a dime of your money.
My Two Bits,
Sheytan Level 97 Agent, account cancelled

Instable

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: October 09, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Let's see the problems -

1. Gameplay was junk
2. Buggier than the swamp down the street from my house
3. SLOW
4. No storyline
5. Grouping not a huge part of the game
6. I was conned into buying a beta piece-of-junk!

AO = crAsh and lag-a-lOt

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 8
Date: June 29, 2001
Author: Amazon User

When the game works it is a great game. Problem is you rarely get to play long enough to experience it before you crashes. Of course to even try to play, you have to log in. Good luck with that. That is a challenge in it self. I tested in the Beta 4 phase (last phase before release) and in my opinion it should still be in beta. Don't spend money on this game any time soon. But if they ever manage to fix all those zillions of bugs, it is a game with great potential.

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