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A bright, shining, broken promise.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: October 09, 2001
Author: Amazon User

If you're thinking of buying this game and reading this, you'll want to know the following things:

1. Be very comfortable and familiar with your computer system. Ideally, you'll have built it yourself. If you're not comfortable editing registry settings, doing full backups, rebooting frequently, installing all sorts of drivers, and doing dozens--if not hundreds--of system-level tweaks, you may want to avoid this game. This game is seriously in late-beta condition. At best.

2. Be able to operate independently, as there is next-to-no in-game or out-of-game support. If you have a problem, you are on your own; do not expect customer service from Funcom.

3. Be extremely patient. You may have to install, re-install, patch, and re-patch up to two dozen times before you ever enter the game. And every following patch, you'll run the risk again.

4. Be tolerant of the company's mistakes. You'll find every patch a thrill as the time you've invested in your character wasted with a couple of keystrokes. Class balance and game balance vary wildly from patch to patch, and, with the rare exception, never for the better.

Buy this game, install it, and play it, and you'll be wasting not only your money, but your time.

This game is 80% done

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: October 05, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Anarchy Online is about 80% complete. The problem is, the 20% that's missing is the fun part.
The graphics, skill system, sound... they're all awesome. But the monsters all act the same, and the game is terribly unreliable. The game was released with serious bugs and it hasn't improved measurably.
What's more, the requirements on the box are hogwash. I ran it on an Athlon 1.4 with 512MB of RAM and a Geforce2 MX video card and it still had performance issues in busy areas.
All of this would be bearable if there were some reason to keep playing. The only thing to do in the game now is level, and that's no basis for a MMORPG. You level, and then what? Level some more? Why? It's frustrating.
It's obvious that the game was released too soon. It's too bad. They've got 80% of it done.

Been there, did that, never got a T-shirt

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: September 25, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Hmmmmm, where to start?

I signed up right after release (better known as the Beta-5 phase to those who played it) and stuck with it for a couple months. Got my character up to 60, so I played it quite a bit; joined a new guild, had my friends who always played....

And just got so sick of entering missions, not knowing what had been completely "nerfed" in the last patch. One day I go into a mission, green monsters are easy; next day I do the same level mission and get my a** kicked. So playability, while varied and in a sci-fi atmosphere (hella-cool, why hasn't it been done before?) is completely variable from one day to the next.

Three weeks later I visit the main message board, and it's the same as when I left... a recent patch has pissed off 3/4 of the game's population...

Final analysis: Wait for the spin-off, hopefully done by a company who has their act together a little more.

Sandar
AkA Bloodsnatch LVL 60 ADV (now deceased :(

Very good game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: September 28, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I have played the game since beta2, and it has done nothing but get better. This game is very much different than any other MMRPG out there, and I highly recommend you pick the game up.

Safe to go in the water!!!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: January 19, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I agree with the newer reviews, this game has finally lived up to what it promised to be 2 years ago. Funcom finally got 99.99% of the bugs worked out, as well as added TONS of high-level player content. What did I find different when I took them up on a 7-day Free Trial after an almost 2-year absence? Responsive Customer Service, Balanced Classes, Quests, Static Dungeons galore, working guilds, ARK Guided Tours of the Planet, acceptable lag in only the most insanely overpopulated zones, trade skills galore, people actually role-playing, .... this list could go on for a while. If you hated canceling your first subscription because of the potential you saw in this game, now would be a good time to give them another try - they've really got their stuff together this time!

While AO has some nice eye-candy, it is nothing more than poorly coded beta-software. Customer Support is non-existant, yet they charge more than any current MMORPG out there.

Anarchy Online = Poor Excuse for an MMORPG

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: October 04, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Let sum it all up by saying this - Spend your money elsewhere.

Initially, AO may seem like a good game. You may even play for the first couple days and think this is the greatest game to ever grace your monitor, but the more you learn...the more you notice how Funcom operates. Its obvious they have no clue what they are doing, every patch to this day has attempted to fix major flaws within the game system, and rather than solve the problem...they introduce more problems. Three months after release they realize, Oh...this particular class does 20X the amount of damage it was supposed to do, so we had to adjust the damage. Ya right, 20x damage seems like an obvious mistake which should be picked up in BETA, not well after people have been paying for it. This is just one example of MANY. You may here other players saying "This game is great, dont listen to the whiners"...well, they are the minority here. The truth is, there are only a small handfull of players that have been here since the beginning that still have faith in FU-Com. The rest of us have either moved on to other games, continued to play until something better comes out....or spend their energys spreading their negative opinions on messageboards. Oh, theres always that 1% thats in denial (ie...AO has potential! It will get better!) - ya right..

Buy a dart board, or a book....subscribe to Gardening Weekly, just whatever you do....DONT BUY THIS GAME! Funcom doesnt deserve your support.

Nice graphics, bad programming, bad customer support

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: October 04, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Just say no. There are tons of lag, messed up skills, virtually no tradeskills, only a few weapons worth using, every patch screws up at least 1 profession, sometimes more, monsters can hit you from where-ever they are(another client lag problem). The only way to advance in later levels is to group, but you can spend 2+ hours looking to join a group only to have the playfield server crash, or people on the team get disconnected(LinkDead).

There were so many upset customers complaining that instead of addressing their concerns, they changed the AO Forums to be moderated. Now the only posts you will see are either saying how nice the game is, or has so many gross mispellings that you question the intelligence of the poster.

Funcom doesn't appear to care too much about their customers. Alot of people had invested hundreds of hours into their characters, only to have them made inept by changing the affect of a major skill in a patch.

How do you think you would like it if they took your character that can barely kill monsters that give very little xp(when you need 500,000 to level) and made it so you didn't do 1/10th the damage that you did before? How about if they made the monsters more powerful and had them help each other(even all the way across a mission)? Well, that's exactly what they did in ONE patch. Have they reversed this situation? No, they just stated "We wanted to make the game harder".

They have professions that are basically useless. The professions with pets are left with impotent helpers who will get stuck on any little part of the landscape, not to mention the monster will completely ignore them and attack you if you are anywhere near.

Most of the high level characters(80+) have cheated their way to get those levels. There are tons of exploits that they use to get there, but they rarely get banned. Every patch that "fixes" and exploit seems to generate at least 1 more.

They do say they have a story they are starting, yet it's only 7 months out of the year. You can participate in events where 60+ high level characters will attack some huge monster that will kill everyone but the person who gets the last hit(and is the only person to get the loot and XP). You'd have more fun watching reruns of X-Files or Roswell.

This game does have some positive points though: it looks nice, has awesome music and has alot of skills to explore. Too bad only 15 or so of the skills are useful, actually necessary, so it's not like you have an option.

Bottom line: Don't even waste your time trying it.

Don't even think about buying this "Game"

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: October 04, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I played it in beta and never bothered buying it cause I saw then how this was turning out. The only right thing funcom did was allow us into beta to see how horrid AO is. Heed the words of the other people here- the game just plain stinks.

Anarchy OFFline by NotFuncom

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: September 28, 2001
Author: Amazon User

If you value your time and money STAY AWAY from this "game". This game is still in beta development (some would say alpha). The amount of bugs in the program is currently over 1,000 and seems to continue to grow with every failed patch that the developers franticly apply. The developers DO NOT listen to their community and the amount of anger felt toward them can be seen on any of the few remaining fan sites on the net. It short, this game only gets one star because it is not possible to give anything else lower. What a waste of time [...]. AVOID! AVOID! AVOID!

Avoid this title

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: October 04, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Avoid at all costs. Still bugs being ignored from Beta.

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