Yeah I have been playing it. So far i'm thoroughly impressed. I also had a chance to play planetside this weekend and the 2 games are not even comparable. Planetside blows imo.
So far I am really loving it. It's something completely new and is quite a lot of fun.
It is little cartoony and reminds of a borderlands/halo mix, except with people running around everywhere. It also has a slight GW2 MMO feel but in an FPS.
There is no leveling in this game except for the different Tier system (only 1 and 2 at the moment), but you do gain experience from doing certain things such as gathering, killing shit, or PVP. There ar, Tier 1 is basically the training wheels while tier 2 gets more competitive.
You spend experience on new weapons/gear that gives you different abilities. You craft gear which is completely customizable based on the quality of the ore that you have gathered. The cool thing is you cannot simply gather all the best ore and equip the best weapons. your toon run's off CPU power so you have to balance the gear accordingly. If you build to high quality of stuff you wont be able to use it all at the same time, so you need craft different quality items with various qualities of building materials. (I can go more in depth if requested)
The ore is found throughout the world and you have to scan/survey the ground to see the quality and quantity that at your location. You then do what is called "Thumping". Basically you call in a futuristic mining machine from space that slams into the ground and begins mining. While mining the thumper is making a whole lot of noise in the process. "Hence the term thumping". The noise attracts all kinds of attention from nearby wildlife or bad guys which come to kill you. You can thump alone with a small thumper but it only returns a small amount of ore. You can use a larger thumper in groups which make more noise but give you more materials. The larger thumpers require about 3 or more people to use in my experience. There is a 3rd thumper that is even larger but I have not been a part of one of those yet.
There are also dynamic events like Gw2 that you can group up and fight for your land back. Overall I have been pretty entertained all weekend. If you get bored of one thing, just go do something else.
The pvp can be queued from anywhere on the map and will put you into a few different gamemodes. So far I have only tried team deathmatch. It follows what you would expect in something like BF3, with one exception.... Your toon has rocket boots on so instead of jumping you fire up rocket jets and float up in the air. This turn's your normal 2-d FPS shooter into a 3D FPS. Someone might be shooting you form above or below you! This made it really fun for me, adding another dimension basically. It keeps track of all your pvp stats, you can even rewatch matches which is pretty cool.
Too summarize I was really impressed with the beta, especially since it is a beta. Looking forward to the actual game release. I ended up purchasing the $20 founder package to get unlimited beta access and some freebies. So far i have already enjoyed $20 worth.
Good to know, thanks for the rundown! I used to follow gameplay vids of this but apparently they went back and made some fairly big changes between a year or so ago and now. After a quick websensed google search I didn't see an obvious release date...anyone know if there is one yet?
I watched an interview this weekend with one of the developers and he stated that the there really is not a set launch date. they have over 500,000 beta users registered so they said that when they feel it's pointless to not allow the masses to play they will just "Switch it on".
After playing planetside 2, Blackops 2, and MOH recently, this game is more polished than all of them, and is going to continue to get better.
You can still jump on the beta for 20 bucks, (which gives you like 50 bucks worth of in game stuff and immediate beta access.)
What would you compare it to as a shooter? When is it releasing. I think I'm going to pay the $20 and jump on it as well. Maybe I can play this with you more TheThing as I barely get to play GW2 anymore.
Does it feel good as a shooter? Like I never really got into Team Fortress 2 as a shooter. Its not like that is it? I do enjoy BF3 and Borderlands Franchise as shooters.
I really like the PVP, It's 3D pvp which is quite fun. It's not like wow pvp, but more like playing a quick round of a shooter. Teamdeatch match, etc. The weapons feel pretty good. The game reminds me of a borderlands/halo mixture, except different. I really haven't played a game like this one that I can compare it too. They have done good on originality.
I use to wish another game would come along like WoW that would draw all my friends to play it and drop wow or other mmo's so we all could just play one. But I have realized it's not the games because they have got better it's just us growing up and not being to waste time on games like we use too.
But back to the topic this game looks great. Are there servers or how is that being managed? Hope to game with you all on this one.
I love the variety I'm seeing in MMOs. Still loving GW2 for my fantasy fix, Firefall for third person shooter fun. I will probably skip Planetside 2 because I'm not much on FPS anymore but it looks great for people who like the genre. After so many years of WoW clones this is good to see.