So I've been camping this game for around 2 years now and it's finally about to come out. They are allowing pre-order people to play in the open beta, so I went to BestBuy and got lucky enough to find a pre-order box. After 3 days of playing the beta and can say, with great pleasure, that this game kicks all kinds of arse!

I'm extremely happy that they are doing an open beta to augment the closed beta, because the first day of the open beta apparently just about everyone that pre-ordered tried to download the game and start playing right when the server opened. This caused their poor servers to crash and their site to go down (their site is on the same server as the beta!!). After buying bandwidth on Amazon.com's download server (which also almost went down also. Holyshit!) and hooking up their live server they got everything going, but very slowly. It took until 2am CST before they got this "working" but it took me until 12pm then next day to actually get the 900MB update actually downloaded. If this had happened on the first day that people wanted to actually start playing, it would have been disastrous. I know I was pissed, cuz I took a vacation day just to play it, and didn't even get to look at the character creator the first day. So I took a second vacation day. =D

Also in the beta they are finding hundreds of bugs that were left undiscovered. And best of all, they are fixing them daily and very quickly. I've never seen a company move this fast on so many bugs both large and small. I'm actually interested in how they can accomplish this. Every day they have an update that is twice as huge as a GU in EQ2. Every Day! It's amazing to say the least. And it really gives me faith in Cryptic as a company.

Right now they are offering a discounted 6 month and a lifetime subscription, but both go off the table on the day of release. (sneaky marketing tactics!!!) After 3 days in the beta, I think I'm gonna get the lifetime. This game is just so fun and it works very well with my schedule. It's pick up and play, (sorta like WoW) and it has a heavy lean on questing (like LotRO) but makes soloing fun and enjoyable (sorta like FallOut 3 (!?!)). Best of all you can make your character not only look like you want (Best. Character. Creator. EVAR!!), but fight like you want (classless system; customizable powers) and act like you want (awesome travel powers; new stances and moods being added daily). It's oddly liberating to play in a classless game like this. You'd think it'd suck, but it works quite well actually. They have a role system that allows characters that don't fall on a specific role like tank or healer to shorta shift into the role that the group/raid needs.

If anyone has and questions about the game, I can try to answer them as the NDA is lifted.

Also please note that this game won't keep me from playing (camping the broker in) EQ2... I still enjoy that very much too. =D

Oh my...
It's a complete ripoff of City of Heroes, including abilities and sounds.

And made by the same guys too. =) It's like a sequel only better!

I found with most beta's i've done that they've done major updates just about daily. Not really that new its just the fact that they've got the staff dedicated to getting the game rdy for launch rather then working on other projects. Once the game actually goes live for about 2 months is the real test to see what happens.

Never really liked City of Heroes too much, played it for a bit but never really got into it. A lot of really annoying ppl..

checked out the videos & screen shots on the site. looks really cool! I was impressed by the level of customization that seems possible! Hope it's as fun as it looks. If so, might have to try it out?

Hindrix

It's more customizable then even the videos and pictures lead you to believe.

If you grab a preorder from GameStop or BestBuy you can basically try out the open beta of the game for $5 until the 27th when they wipe the servers in preparation for launch. If you don't think its your cup of tea, you've only lost $5. There's only 2 more days of that though.

I can't wait to actually start playing the game for real!! A couple of my friends tried out the game on my account and loved it too! Maybe if we get enough people playing it we can make a Super Group (guild)! =D

I looked at the website a good bit and watched the videos. From what I can tell this is CoH with a few upgrades. They are damn near the same, yet years after CoH. I talked to a buddy that tried the beta, he said the PvP was still waaaay out of balance. PvP requires 3 specific overpowered for PvP powers or you just get insta ganked. Although he said the 3 PvP required powers do suck in PvE. The game is launching shortly and with a big section (pvp) being borked up I don't think they will get good reviews.

I believe you are talking about the "Stalker" class for the most part.
Stalkers get invis ability and always critical attack while invis.
But with PVE, Stalkers are slow attackers.