Why should I buy this game?

[paulrgod]

Hi unregistered, i managed to grab myself a copy of the game today not really knowing what to expect....i have lingered in this open forum all week asking questions and such.....i decided to take a leap.......

This game is incredible........takes a few minutes to get used to but when it all falls into place everything just clicks.

The graphics are incredible when you see it moving....this world feels alive, i have played all day and never seen the same sky twice, through day into night with the weather effects and such....incredible. The jungles with wildlife climbing the trees, birds and such scattering as you approach......fireflys in the night.

My favorite thing so far is the way the mobs are aware of you, you will be sat down and they will come along and sniff at you......you can also see them fighting each other, this really feels like a dog eat dog world.

Im on the uk server which didnt seem that populated but the game has only become available in stores today here in the uk....but everyone is very friendly and i have had a lot of help today in partys and such.

Im in love with the world here and can see me been around for a while.

Hope this helps you in your decision

[ayne31]

There ARE downsides of course but:

1. No archetypes to choose from. You can start out as a mage and evolve into a fighter within 2 weeks - but no training points will ever be wasted.

2. No character classes/races to be nerfed. All are truly equal, it just depends what you make of it.

3. Crafting actually is in the true sense of the word. EVERY piece of material influences about 8 qualities of your crafted armor, weapon or jewelery - not to mention that you can even make different colours depending on the stuff you use

4. harvesting is a game in itself - at least for me. To find the right spot, refine the right quality and get out as much as you can without depleting the spot (YES it relly happens) is funny and challenging at the same time.

5. Few items - wether you craft, forage or loot them - are wasted. You can earn money and fame in doing missions/tasks that need your abilities as a hunter, harvester or crafter (only thing REALLY missing are quests that give some unique items or at least special materials)

6. What is 6th?....well just habve a look at the screenshots.....

[andymon]

Hmmm, I got the game today and first impressions were not that favourable. The graphics didn't look all that and I hated having to use the cursor keys to move around.


However, after I had a play around with the in-game configuration options things got a lot better. just cranking the resolution up from the default (1024x768 I think, could be wrong) to my desktop res (1250x1024) resulted in an amazing increase of detail (and thankfully a reduction in size of those billion and one windows we have to have up on the screen...). If your card and rig can handle it, crank up the textures to 128mb to see some lovely character detail up close. Don't know if it's my graphics card (gf4ti4600) but the character shadows were glitching, either just what looked like a bar code under my char or literally half the shadows were all I could see. Anyway hopefully that will be sorted out soon, turning shadows off will probably give a reasonable performance hike anyway (as it does in every other similar game).
As for the control of your char, I still don't like using the cursor keys (bit clunky and Resident Evil-ish, IMO) but the two mouse button system works a treat, you just need to get used to it, which takes about 5 minutes.

Dialogue ? Well I dread to think how big the final install would be if it did have voices, otherwise it's just the same as games like AC2, ect. Although the various text boxes can be a little lost with all the other boxes you have open. One thing I would like to see, though is player music. One of my favourite bits of AC2 was a bunch of us doing a music concert, y'know just chilling by the lake sort of thing. Very difficult to implement, I should imagine.

[charlesm]

Two days later...

Notice guys that I'm no longer Unregistered. I bought my copy the other day got home and started playing and now that I've had to leave home and go to work where I can't play I am finally able to post a reply as to why I should buy the game...

Ok, you gotta understand that this is coming from a WoW Fanboy. I don't troll the other games fansites and post negative reviews for their betas, but well... WoW has been the game that's kept me up late drooling for over a year now and It'll probably continue to do so until it comes out. The reason I mention this is that it's pretty darn hard to give other MOGs a chance when you're heart is so set on something else and I want you guys to understand where I'm coming from when I say... The Saga of Ryzom is nice. Very very nice.

I get into the game and almost immediately I had the opportunity to meet some of the incredibly pleasant community out there (Javance and the Stormhaven guild I'm staring at you). It took awhile for the game to really really get just uber fun, but from the beginning it was much better than I expected.

The graphics, which I REALLY hated in the screenshots, were much better than I expected and I am actually somewhat pleased with them, even though they're not really my style. They remind me a little of what I falsely "remembered" the Eq graphics looking like after I played WoW stress beta but before I returned to Eq for a day and saw how crappy they actually looked. I'd say Eq, but done right... and with this unique bio-techish (is that a word???) feel.

The game feels great, it does have that fun feeling that WoW captured so well. At least with the right choice of skills it does. I'm not going to lie and say that Halcyon is the be all end all template, of course, but whatever he does there is no downtime involved (other than the downtime I force on him to goof around with my fellow players). That's a big plus... I can easily imagine a situation where a character could end up, through poor skill selection, with alot of downtime, but with minimal advanced planning I was able to avoid that scenario and can't imagine it being that difficult. Especially considering how horrible I am at selecting proper skill sets... if I can do it anyone can lol.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I have gone from a skeptic to a loving fan of this game. While I don't expect that the same fanboism that's kept me dreaming of riding a charger decked out in plate armor is going to suddenly die out in the next few months, if I can't find a way to justify paying for two games in 3 months, I'll not be leaving Ryzom without shedding a few tears.

(Of course if I do end up staying, I gotta figure out some way to get Apocalypse started here without causing any problems for the SUPER family I have found in Stormhaven.)