Guh ... Well, let's just say day 1 wasn't all that fantastic.
Once I finally got the game installed it took soooo long to patch because the game kept crashing. Never could figure out why. Even after I disabled my firewall and rebooted the game I guess kept loosing connection to the patch server and crashing.
After finally getting everything patched, I finally started up to create my character. Unfortuanly the character creation screen wouldn't stop running in Windowed mode and was extremely laggy. I checked the forums and that apparently happens to a lot of people. Only response I say from the mods was to change your resolution to 1024x768x32+ on your desktop. My desktop resolution is 1280x1024x32 and still ran like that. Again, never could figure out what it ran in windowed mode like that. Was extremely annoying though. Is it supposed to be like that? I can't stand doing things in Windowed mode.. heh
Finally created a character that I was happy with and tried to play. Now it started locking up at the loading screen ... ugh, back to the forums and after doing a lot of searching and trouble shooting I finally found some older NVIDIA drivers that let me login.
So, after 3-4 hours of problems I finally got in the game. (Still getting Windowed mode on character creation/select even with older drivers) I fumble around in newbie town for awhile adjusting my HUD and checking out settings and stuff. I finally find the welcomer that I had a task to see and wonder would doing the various tasks. Until I came to battling a grino (sp?). That thing took me to school in like 2 hits. lol
So after getting laided out by the gringo thing I decided to try some gathering and combat. I was able to kill the first noob monster with no problem, but after that it just went down hill. I started getting destroyed by any of the lowbie monsters that I tried to fight and started lossing my patience.
I was pulling with the acid spell and could get 2 or 3 casts in before they got to melee range. I'd then try to finish them off with my starter dagger. Unfortunatly the little rat things were ripping me appart before I could finish them off. After getting torn down a couple times I finally just logged out and called it a day.
I plan on looking over the manual I downloaded tonight and reading up on things before I try again. Ryzom is just way different than any game I've played and I just wasn't grasping it all that well. Maybe after I read through the manual I'll understand things better. There wasn't really a tutorial or anything, so I was pretty much flying blind. I'll probably just delete that character and start over from scratch after I read through the manual. Maybe starting with a clean slate and a little more knowledge will make for a better experience. hehe
Anyways, is anyone has any advice for a beginner I'd welcome it. I wasn't really sure what packages to start with so I just did the default fighter / mage / gatherer thing.
Couple questions I have though:
1) After you pick your starter packages you can save up points and buy into another skill set right? Is it possible to be 250 in all 4 (5?) branches? Like be a fighter / mage / gatherer / crafter 250 in all 4?
2) Once you train up in something is it possible to untrain it? Just wondering if I'm going to end up having to make another character later on because I trained up underwater basket weaving on my first character instead of that instakill skill I should have gotten.
Thanks,
Adam