I have been following this MMO for a while just not closely.
Is anyone engaged with it? How is it looking?
If anyone answers - is it as bad as it seems to say it is in terms of first-person shooter mechanics (player skill matters not character development or gear) and action combat (quick reflexes defeating thoughtfulness and preparation every time)?
Needless to say it is not a pitch that fills me with expectation but the game may be a lot better than it sounds.
I've played it for many many hours.
Couple of things that make it a non-starter for me:
Client input rate affects combat attack rate. Essentially what this means is, the faster you click, the faster you attack.
The camera perspective and zoom is fixed, and you can't really change it. You can't adjust it in any meaningful way. This is problematic for a few reasons, but the biggest ones? Trees.
It selects trees before other objects. It doesn't remove the trees from visibility/view, so when you're fighting something near trees, the canopy doesn't disappear (soon enough), so it clicks on the tree, and it breaks off during combat to go chop the tree down. It sounds insane, but it's true. So if you fight in forests? Prepare to be frustrated beyond words.
The.. interface bugs are too many to count. They don't even have appropriate screen ratio sizes (16:9, 16:10) so the sides of the screen are literally cut off, inside the full screen or window or whatever choice you make. Again, I know it sounds ridiculous, but this is how it was during the last alpha/beta/whatever test they had in April.
Also looting was insanely difficult. You had to manually click, pick up, drag, drop, every item of loot. I tried to use the shortcuts people talked about, none of them worked. Also, loot of the same kind stacks, but doesn't stack when you loot it. Meaning, you have to manually, every time, find the pile of "spider eyes" and put the loot manually in that pile. Otherwise, it's perfectly happy to use up 10 separate slots for 10 separate spider eyes, even though they all stack. Riiiiiiight. But then, wait for it! The stacks are super tiny. They could be up to 100 or whatever, but no, they're 10 or 20. Awesome. And at the same time, no way to increase inventory space. The perfect storm of tedious.. yay!
Combat is poor, and they're adding on gimmicks like housing and other non-combat loops. It's like combat is "good enough" even though it's objectively terrible, yet they're moving on to test other systems.
The player is limited in what they can use in combat from what they learn from creatures. Sounds cool, except.. You get such a small number of concurrent abilities, and the limitation is permanent. I think it's something like 5? 8? and that's it. You just press all the buttons as fast as you can, and hope you win. There's no strategy, tactics, nor is grouping required, that I saw.
I tried my best to engage other players to try and form groups, nope. No-one was interested. Most people in game don't even use /say. Tried discord, again, during the test, no-one was talking, because they were all too busy solo playing. If there is grouping dynamics or value, I didn't see it. I asked the developers directly, in-game, some very polite & direct questions about how the game worked (like doorways being blocked with invisible doors that weren't working right) and got zero response.
I mean, yes, they might have changed a lot of these things or addressed these bugs, and it's free to test, so why not go try it? I just found that their entire direction, goals, the whole reason for the game was not grouping-required and not challenging. It's just a resource gathering interface, and there's so many of those already. :|
There's also some inconsistency with respect to people "helping you". If they "help" on a fight, they get the loot and XP, 100%, you get nothing. It might actually be something absurd like "killing blow" for attribution, I'm not sure. It was.. unexpected and unpleasant, whichever it was they chose.
I also got the very strong impression (based on memory / GPU usage) that there has been exactly zero optimization, and the only reason they've restricted the viewport/camera the way they have, is to meet a minimum acceptable framerate of 30fps. If they adjust the camera in any way? Likely the framerate crashes to single digits, because it's rendering the entire world with almost no visibility constraints or limits. It's a bit sad, really. When compared to Legends of Aria, for example, it's quite poor in performance/optimization.
They've got a platform that could be really good. They could make grouping required. They could make it 3rd / 1st person view. Nope. They chose all the worst possible options. :)
EDIT: Sorry, couple of additions.. Read this[ https://forum.fracturedmmo.com/category/49/discussions-feedback ] (say, the first 3-4 pages) before you decide to download it and test. The opinions expressed there (especially since march) are very enlightening.
Also, you can't adjust the volume of the launcher (which is set at like 1000% normal) and... there aren't three races. None of the three-races / dynamic anything is actually in the game, at all, even a little bit. So, brace yourself for those little gems.
Their community is even more defensive/white-knight-ish than Pantheon is, and they're fully engulfed in the "It's Alpha, stop being critical" stage of community-groupthink. You've been warned.