As the name of this post implies I got some hands-on time with the rather beta-feeling retail version of the game last night, where I leveled a Chaos Marauder to level five. It's amazing how long it takes to level up when you're actually reading the quests and figuring out how to solve them by yourself, instead of resorting to a helpful website which is what I do while playing World of Warcraft.
My first experience of the game was mostly fun but there are some really obvious and annoying bugs that Mythic Entertainment should have definitely noticed and fixed before pushing this game out the door.
The most annoying glitch is the fact that sometimes my Marauder's mutated arm is still using the look of the normal arm. I have all the abilities that being in mutated mode gives me, but the arm itself isn't mutated. Switching mutations, going back to normal form and then switching to a mutation again, and logging out and logging back in all do not fix the issue. Fore me, the only way to reset this bug was to completely exit out of the game and re-launch it. But even then it would happen again eventually. It probably happened five or six times in the four hours I played. Did Mythic not notice this?
Another annoying bug is that my characters hair and tattoo color will change from black and red respectively, to blonde and blue. I'm pretty sure his eye color and face changed too. It seems like something occurs that makes my character switch back to what he looked like in the character select screen before I started modifying his appearance. Again, exiting the game seems to reset this bug. Not a big deal, just distracting.
Finally, I've looted three or four different one-handed axes for my character and they all had the same skin. Not only is that annoying, but it is just downright half-assed game design. Oh, and I put a trophy on my belt and have tried moving it to the various different locations available on the belt, but it just doesn't want to show up. The trophy shows up as an item in a gear slot, but the actual appearance of my in-game avatar doesn't change at all. Frustrating. A quick search on the internet this morning revealed the fact that other players have been experiencing these same issues, so they are not just isolated events unique to my experience.
This is the first time I've played an MMO right out of the gates and I assume these types of things are to be expected, but something core game play mechanic related like the Marauder arm thing is purely unacceptable. The server I played on was also slightly laggy at times, but there were also a lot of players running around and it was very crowded. I lowered some of the graphics settings and that didn't seem to help, so it's not my system struggling to keep up. Hopefully future patches will address these issues.
All in all it was a fun first four hours and I'm looking forward to getting more time in this weekend. If you are easily frustrated with unfinished games and bugs, I'd suggest waiting a couple months while Mythic smoothes out the wrinkles. I can live with them. Before I sigh off I have one last gripe. I'm all about helping out and reporting bugs and glitches, rather then just complaining in a blog, but the in-game bug report tool is a total joke. I wasn't able to give an accurate description of the problems I was experiencing because the form only lets you type so many words. Maybe I should submit future errors like the average user: "my marauderz arm iznt werking lol".