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Just plain horrible, in every regard

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 38 / 40
Date: September 19, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I was in the beta...well...I never actually played in the beta because I could never get the game to work. Then I was dumb enough to buy the game...lol. After about a week of hair pulling, countless crashes to desktop, a few re installs, I actually got into the game and played..for about 10 minutes at a time or until I zoned and crashed to desktop. But these problems are covered in other reviews, let's get to the real problems.

1. BORING: Once you get past all the bugs, (if you can), you find out what the game is really all about. Well...not much. One of the main selling points for this game, is that camping would be eliminated by the "random missions generators". The key word here is RANDOM. Everything about this game is random and generic, and that's it's biggest downfall. There is no sense of purpose, no sense of direction, and no sense of accomplishment.
The missions all start to look the same after about the 10th one, and you'll be on hundreds of them if you ever want any cash. This also ties in to the lack of boss mobs, and lack of dungeons.
You fight mostly outdoors, or in the "missions". Which are randomly generated "dungeons". The implementation of which is absolutely horrible. Mobs are spawned with no ryhme or reason, some dungeons have ZERO mobs in them, some have 5 that will all rush you at zone it.

2. SERIOUS coding and engine problems: Not even going to go into all of these as they alone would take up the 1000 word limit on reviews, needless to say it's overwhelming.

3. Crashing, crashing, and more crashing: Self explainatory.

4. Character creation: Suppose to eliminate cookie cutter characters, but it doesn't. Sure, you can train anything you want, but because of the skill system, and the way the points you get to spend must be distributed to make your character viable, you end up with really only one path you can take per given proffesion.

5. Monster AI: The single WORST programming of AI I have ever seen in any video game...and that's saying a lot.

6. Exploits, cheats, hacks: By the time I left, which was under one month into release, there were already players that were level 150+. Being that this is a PvP game, that's not good. Exploits were RAMPANT and numerous. Exploiters went scott free.

7. Balance of proffesions: Non existant. The game is so unbalanced it's not even funny. There are 2 viable classes to play if you want to live PvP, forget it if you play any of the others.

Just a note about me. I'm an avid gamer, and have 3 characters over 50 in EQ, and 4 over 50 in AC. So I obviously have the patience for online gaming...lol.

This game fails in every single aspect of gameplay. It's boring, repetitive, buggy, unbalanced, and just plain no fun. Avoid at all costs, you have been warned.

Not worth the time or money

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 15 / 45
Date: May 17, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I have loved some of the other MMORPGs that have come out including all three of the big ones, but i have alot of problems with this one, mostly because of mechanics. Camera angles are BAD. Player movement is BAD. and the whole game is too dark. Playing this was like playing EQ for the first time, but at least EQ got better, this never does.

"Anarchy" it is. "Online"? Not quite yet.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 14 / 17
Date: July 01, 2001
Author: Amazon User

As a long-time EverQuest player who habitually criticized the stability of it, I can say that Anarchy Online makes EQ look like one of the Seven Wonders of the software and network engineering world. After an arduous and multi-hour installation and patch process (2 of the 4 patches are over 10MB each), Anarchy Online is so plagued with instability, connectivity lossage, and garden-variety bugs that it is virtually unplayable. Connecting into the game takes on the average around 10-15 attempts, and once in, the average time you can actually "play" in the super-laggy zones is about 3 minutes, at which time you are dumped back to the login screens to start all over again. Zoning within the game is a 50-50 (and worsening) proposition; I was just recently stuck in a small shop with 15 other people for 20 minutes, unable to zone out. If you are lucky enough to zone, it's likely you'll be dumped back to the login screen. Even within the game, silly bugs such as mobs hitting through walls, graphics glitches, rogue pets, missing inventory items, and getting trapped behind objects still crop up in great abundance.

To be fair, the gameplay is inventive and creative, and attempts to solve the agonizing long hours of camping for items EQ players know so well. Quests, or "missions" are created for you (or your team) on the fly, and you go to a quest zone made especially for you, and you know the reward in advance so you can work for specific items you need. However, to add insult to injury, these quests are real-time based instead of game-time based, so with 80% of your "play" time centered around trying to actually play, it's nearly impossible to ever finish a quest in the allotted time. Out of 6 attempted 1-hour quests I only had time to finish one; I have since attempted two 10-hour quests and have not been able to make any headway on them either simply due to to connectivity problems (i.e. the quests themselves are not unreasonably hard, and you can even pick the difficulty yourself relative to your level).

I really hope Funcom gets it together and fixes the problems, but it seems that most current players chatting on the boards feel betrayed and are quite angry with Funcom for releasing what is at best a beta-quality product for 50-some-odd-dollars plus paying 6 months of online time in advance ("lock in now for the lowest rate!"). Even if AO solves its substantial technical problems, I would never again purchase a product from Funcom.

Not worth your money!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 13 / 18
Date: June 26, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Review - Anarchy Online

I am currently a member of the Beta community for Anarchy Online. For weeks now many of the community members have spent hours upon hours trying to solve countless unaddressed problems that FunCom are ignoring. To sum it up. Anarchy Online is an advanced and very graphical RPG, if you can get it to work. I personally believe that no self respecting programmer out there that would launch a game in a state like this. If you want to buy it, wait a few months.

Major disappointment

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 12 / 14
Date: July 03, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I played beta. I bought a copy and muddled through a horrific first-day-of-release installation. I was able to create and play my character through a variety of expected first-week glitches. But now we're in week 2, and the game is all but unplayable - I cannot zone, I cannot go on the newbie missions, and I cannot leave the backyard where I was "born." I have gotten no responses to my petitions and bug reports, and I cannot get onto the AO website to pass on these thoughts. Let me suggest this: hold off on buying this game until you see all the gaming community - the *players* - come out with positive reviews saying this has all changed. Pity.. I was really looking forward to this game.

VERY Painful Experience

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 12 / 14
Date: August 21, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Just to reiterate everyone else's experience: spontaneous crashes, lots of lag, big time bugs, poor graphics, and quite frankly - boring gameplay.

To top it all off - after the last crash I've had to REINSTALL Windows since it would not boot.

DO NOT BUY THIS GAME!

Tough to review a game that can't be played

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 11 / 12
Date: July 19, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Folks, I bought this product on the first day and struggled, hard, for hours on end to log in even once to the servers. I failed. You may deride me as an incompetent computer user if you like but in my opinion this game should not have been launched. I cancelled my account and so far have not been charged for that. I will eat the price of the game itself. Lesson? When it comes to MMORPGs do not be the first to buy. Wait at least two weeks, preferably a month to find out if the game will be playable. Its worth the wait the two weeks will not put you that far behind the first day buyers who do manage to log on (if that is a concern, it isn't for me).

AV

Buyer Beware

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 11 / 13
Date: August 14, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Please be advised! Many of these games are shipping with CD keys that are invalid. To add insult to injury, Funcoms customer service is close to non-existant and it could take several weeks and access to a fax machine to resolve your problem. The official message boards are flooded with complaints and there hasn't been a single post from Funcom to give any help or advice or even the slightest whiff of anything resembling an appology for what is an absolutely stupid and totally avoidable mistake

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.

Pitiful, even for MMORPG launches

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 11 / 13
Date: July 16, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I played beta, and it was buggy as betas are supposed to be. Unfortunately, it was far more playable than this piece of crap that found it's way onto store shelves. After one week of playing i've already canceled my subscription... it's awful.

The lag is terrible, but if it were just the lag I might be ok. The bugs (and exploits) are far far too numerous to list, but let me give you an example. Saturday night my character got stuck in some sort of server glitch that had me playing - online - but bugged so that I couldn't interact with people/see people/do missions/bank/zone. The only solution to remedy this, as support has said, is to have your character committ suicide. Any game where you have to, regularly, committ character suicide to escape bugs is most certainly not ready for release.

FunCom claims the game is "110% done and in order". I can only hope they fired the PR guy that made that claim. Maybe, maybe in a few months it will be playable but it's not yet. And by playable, I don't mean "the lag is rough and there's a few bugs" I mean "you cannot have fun playing this game".

FunCom should have waited longer on this release. I'm out [price] for a game that isn't even finished.

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