Review of Ryzom after two weeks of play: The Good and the Bad...feel free to discuss

[pr0ger]

The exploration is really wonderful, man!

This is really a interesting way to play :
- weather is incredibly good. moving coulds, storm, clear or foggy sunsets, dark night or starmap night (can we find north with it ? ), and seasons of course, "distant fog" and trees who pop-up slowly from the fog and get more and more detailed... repeat it for every places, "region" of the world... design/graphics are really, really great. Simply : I never seen a weather system so great. Actually I wonder if i start a botanist, who enumerate every kind of plants, how far and complex it will be.
- mobs observation. This is kinda scripted, but... this is exciting. I sometimes go far from our main cities, places where mobs are "yellow/orange"-squared. You learn quickly which are aggro or not, and then you watch carefully what are their walkpath, how often and how fast they move... You learn how far they can see you, so you move, "sneak" carefully, (and sometimes you get stuck! lol)
You can start a zoologist career, it will be very useful for your guild/teammates (okay lots of people do that, mainly because of drops or XP ...)
- tribes and outpost finding. Kinda trivial, but when you meet unknown tribes, it's fun to follow them then findout their outpost is hidden. Karavan spawn point too.
- Funny scenery. sometimes there is some "shrines" or just random stones, but very uncommon. Note them on a map and you can start a "tour-operator" or safari-like teamplay. This is very good for RP, and map-designer should increase the number of them. Missions should use them too. It's funny to say "let's meet together where the trees make a skull" etc...

When you are good enough to see really big mobs, and going to another races places (without prime root portals) this IS a way to play and have fun time.


But be prepared to get a huge death penalty !

[sputniik]

I agree with all the 'good' and the following 'bad'.

-Sound: Dead boring. I've heard more interesting sounds at the library!!!

-Selling interface is too cumbersome...takes to long. There should be a drag and drop window or something that allows you to drag all the items you want to sell and then confirm you want to sell those items. As things stand now, you have to sell each item individually and then reconfirm you want to sell each time.

-Quests: The quests are cookie cutter and only consist of killing 'X' amount of a particular animal or gathering X amount of raw materials. There are no epic quests, there are no variations in quests for any of the different races and no quests which have any storyline to them. Ugh...one of the worst aspects of Ryzom

-No player vaults/storage and no NPC consignment vendors.

-Ranged Weapon combat is broken in my opinion. Ammo is ridiculously expensive. Furthermore, ranged combat seems to be no wear near as effective as magic or melee combat on mainland area... Sometimes, ranged combat seems to have been an ad hoc after thought that has not been fully implemented yet.

-In game description needs to be more detailed and give better descriptions of what stanzas, skills, attributes, materials, and items do.

-No sense yet of what the over arching story line is in this game....maybe it has yet to be introduced or encountered.

They aren't huge game-breaking problems though, imo.. but yeah, I hope this game reaches its potential sometime soon.

[xixan]

Something else to add to the GOOD. Mob A.I., what I am specifically referring to is the fact that aggro mobs will attack herbivores. I was elated to see these mobs acting more lifelike in the wild...i.e. interaction between mobs without Player interaction. I once sat and watched a wolf like carnivore attacking and getting the crap beat out of it by a herbivore...that is until the carnivore's pack joined the fight.

[shrike]

- weather is incredibly good. moving coulds, storm, clear or foggy sunsets, dark night or starmap night (can we find north with it ? ), and seasons of course, "distant fog" and trees who pop-up slowly from the fog and get more and more detailed... repeat it for every places, "region" of the world... design/graphics are really, really great. Simply : I never seen a weather system so great. Actually I wonder if i start a botanist, who enumerate every kind of plants, how far and complex it will be.

I agree with this one, with one exeption. Winter.

In Witherings (Zorai) we have a white jungle. You don't have a winter with snow in a tropical area, you have either no seasons at all or a dry (summer) and rainy (winter) and two intermediate seasons. But - for god sake - no snow.

Secondly, for all areas, it is raining during winter just like in the other seasons. The lifetime of a snowcover when it's raining can be measured in hours.

Both these things are big immersion-breakers for me.

Something else to add to the GOOD. Mob A.I., what I am specifically referring to is the fact that aggro mobs will attack herbivores. I was elated to see these mobs acting more lifelike in the wild...i.e. interaction between mobs without Player interaction. I once sat and watched a wolf like carnivore attacking and getting the crap beat out of it by a herbivore...that is until the carnivore's pack joined the fight.

Something negative to add on this one - herbivores never help each other when getting attacked by predators, but they *do* help each other when they are attacked by players.
Also, predators sometimes chase you from a very long distance should you run by them while they are fighting another mob . After they finished that mob they'll sometimes come after you, no matter if you are already at the other end of the map.

[jdiegel]

After they finished that mob they'll sometimes come after you, no matter if you are already at the other end of the map.

I still don't believe that anything in this game will give up chasing you. I've crossed the map into another zone the other day, went a good ways into that zone, then sat there for a minute or so, then had the thing chasing me come running up and attack.

What will really be funny is the day some guy manages to drag a couple 300+ lvl mobs into a high population area, and those mobs kill all the guards, then proceed to camp players for a couple of hours.

[smirch]

The biggest problem I have with the game right now is that I'm out of town on business and can't play the friggin' thing. I'm reduced to lurking around the forums between boring ass lectures.

Let's see...the rubberbanding wouldn't be missed. And the mob balancing on the mainland could be tweaked a bit, but I'm pretty jazzed about everything else.

[pr0ger]

Ah, right about raining during winter... but those stuff are just "fine-tune", compared to the hardwork of making a whole weather system.

will really be funny is the day some guy manages to drag a couple 300+ lvl mobs into a high population area, and those mobs kill all the guards, then proceed to camp players for a couple of hours.

Mmmh, did you ever do that in some other mmorpg ? no ? I did was really fun to watch (worse was GMs doing that to kill "afk" players !!!)

[aelvana]

If you want to solo, regen 3 is not enough. Granted, there isn't a guide for it and it's not in the book, but if you max out your regens above all else, and still need to rest, sit between mobs and all your meters will regen in a minute or two *max*. This will hold true at high levels as long as you keep up with maxing your regen.

As a nuker, with *fully* maxed out HP and sap regen, I can alternate using life and sap, for double the regen, and spam spells indefinitely. Soloing fight at 45 in light armor, I can kill a lot of 3k mobs with no need to rest since they can't overcome my regen. Stam regen is high enough that by putting a small amount into HP it never goes down. If I do lose life, it's 60 seconds to regain half my life meter. Since at 45 fight I still rarely need to rest at all, I pop my self heal (the other downtime reducer), and downtime is reduced to 0.

The skills to solo are definitely purchasable under the skill system

[jmaynus]

So far I do like Ryzom, it's a pretty fun game. But they do need to add in more sounds, so weird playing it and having very little sounds. It almost makes the game seem so empty without a lot of sounds. They don't even need to do music (would be nice to hear music from time to time), but mainly have more background sounds.

Add in more tasks and of course the quest system. Also they need to make it stop raining so much, everytime I log in it's raining. But most of all they need to fix the lag, (could the raining all the time be causing the lag?). But over all I have been enjoying the game.

[shundley]

So far I do like Ryzom, it's a pretty fun game. But they do need to add in more sounds, so weird playing it and having very little sounds. It almost makes the game seem so empty without a lot of sounds. They don't even need to do music (would be nice to hear music from time to time), but mainly have more background sounds.

The game IS empty! But you're right... it wouldn't seem as barren without the echo. It's quite startling, also, when you're wandering about in virtual silence and some great creature suddenly screams at you. That has literally made me jump a bit when it happens.