GA Beta

[gkaare]

Beta started today at 10:00 am. Here's the rest of the schedule.

BetaAvailability.jpg

[blahblahimazblahblah]

so how is GA? Still dunno if i wanna get it...i just dont want ti to be like warhammer...

[gull]

So far it's been pretty fun but we haven't put together an agency and played together. It's more of a fps where you gradually gain skills/stats.

[gkaare]

This beta has been exactly the same as the PAX demo. I'm kind of hoping to be very pleasantly surprised on release. So far we can only see 5 PvP and 5 PvE scenarios. It seems to match people up from all different levels, too.

So far I don't see a difference from people that are level 5 and 15. The people that are 15 have more weapons available and more skill points. In PvP, you can't see what level your opponents are. It's hard to tell if you're getting killed because you're bad or because you're out-leveled. One time I was healing Patrick as a medic and he just disappeared off my screen. I looked over at his computer and saw that he was dead. I didn't even see what killed him but something one-shotted him while I was channeling my healing beam on him. I'm hoping that was the level difference there.

Everything you do is done by a queue. There is no world map or world PvP for that matter. You can't use any special abilities in town which means waiting for a queue is pretty fucking boring. Thankfully the queues have been extremely quick thus far so there hasn't been much standing around. Because there is no world, essentially there is "nowhere to go" and the game doesn't feel very immersive.

The game doesn't have the best graphics which is not a negative aspect by any means (think WoW). The look feels extremely polished and gameplay is incredibly smooth and responsive.

So far I don't think I'm going to regret buying the game at all. But I'm afraid that the end game might get boring very quickly unless this beta is just a small taste of what release is. I'm itching to play right now and I can easily see myself playing this game for at least a couple months even if this really is all the game is. Even if I only get a month of gameplay out of this, that is worth my $45.

[eli]

I got to play Saturday and Sunday for a few hours, and I have to say I'm enjoying the game so far. Whie just about everything above is accurate, not having world PvP and having all PvE content instanced (and accessed via the queuing system) has been good for me. I often struggle to find groups in more traditional MMOs, I've had no such difficulty in GA. I've not tried the PvP yet, just been doing PvE to level-up. There's still a lot I've not "figured out" about how the game works (I think it was my 3rd or 4th instance until i figured out I could shoot through my own Force field).

I'm kind of hoping right now that the crafting system will "open up" a bit, so far I've got over 100 crafting components but there's nothing I can build.

The combat is fun and fast paced, I also wonder if the rate of level-up has been accelerated at all for the "beta", a slow painful level grind is the last thing I want.