Customer Reviews

Anarchy Online

5 star:		(46)
4 star:		(27)
3 star:		(19)
2 star:		(26)
1 star:		(165)

 

 

I was in the beta...well...I never actually played in the beta because I could never get the game to work. Then I was dumb enough to buy the game...lol. After about a week of hair pulling, countless crashes to desktop, a few re installs, I actually got into the game and played..for about 10 minutes at a time or until I zoned and crashed to desktop. But these problems are covered in other reviews, let's get to the real problems.

1. BORING: Once you get past all the bugs, (if you can), you find out what the game is really all about. Well...not much. One of the main selling points for this game, is that camping would be eliminated by the "random missions generators". The key word here is RANDOM. Everything about this game is random and generic, and that's it's biggest downfall. There is no sense of purpose, no sense of direction, and no sense of accomplishment.
The missions all start to look the same after about the 10th one, and you'll be on hundreds of them if you ever want any cash. This also ties in to the lack of boss mobs, and lack of dungeons.
You fight mostly outdoors, or in the "missions". Which are randomly generated "dungeons". The implementation of which is absolutely horrible. Mobs are spawned with no ryhme or reason, some dungeons have ZERO mobs in them, some have 5 that will all rush you at zone it.

2. SERIOUS coding and engine problems: Not even going to go into all of these as they alone would take up the 1000 word limit on reviews, needless to say it's overwhelming.

3. Crashing, crashing, and more crashing: Self explainatory.

4. Character creation: Suppose to eliminate cookie cutter characters, but it doesn't. Sure, you can train anything you want, but because of the skill system, and the way the points you get to spend must be distributed to make your character viable, you end up with really only one path you can take per given proffesion.

5. Monster AI: The single WORST programming of AI I have ever seen in any video game...and that's saying a lot.

6. Exploits, cheats, hacks: By the time I left, which was under one month into release, there were already players that were level 150+. Being that this is a PvP game, that's not good. Exploits were RAMPANT and numerous. Exploiters went scott free.

7. Balance of proffesions: Non existant. The game is so unbalanced it's not even funny. There are 2 viable classes to play if you want to live PvP, forget it if you play any of the others.

Just a note about me. I'm an avid gamer, and have 3 characters over 50 in EQ, and 4 over 50 in AC. So I obviously have the patience for online gaming...lol.

This game fails in every single aspect of gameplay. It's boring, repetitive, buggy, unbalanced, and just plain no fun. Avoid at all costs, you have been warned.

If you're thinking of buying this game and reading this, you'll want to know the following things:

1. Be very comfortable and familiar with your computer system. Ideally, you'll have built it yourself. If you're not comfortable editing registry settings, doing full backups, rebooting frequently, installing all sorts of drivers, and doing dozens--if not hundreds--of system-level tweaks, you may want to avoid this game. This game is seriously in late-beta condition. At best.

2. Be able to operate independently, as there is next-to-no in-game or out-of-game support. If you have a problem, you are on your own; do not expect customer service from Funcom.

3. Be extremely patient. You may have to install, re-install, patch, and re-patch up to two dozen times before you ever enter the game. And every following patch, you'll run the risk again.

4. Be tolerant of the company's mistakes. You'll find every patch a thrill as the time you've invested in your character wasted with a couple of keystrokes. Class balance and game balance vary wildly from patch to patch, and, with the rare exception, never for the better.

Buy this game, install it, and play it, and you'll be wasting not only your money, but your time.

Please be advised! Many of these games are shipping with CD keys that are invalid. To add insult to injury, Funcoms customer service is close to non-existant and it could take several weeks and access to a fax machine to resolve your problem. The official message boards are flooded with complaints and there hasn't been a single post from Funcom to give any help or advice or even the slightest whiff of anything resembling an appology for what is an absolutely stupid and totally avoidable mistake

Folks, I bought this product on the first day and struggled, hard, for hours on end to log in even once to the servers. I failed. You may deride me as an incompetent computer user if you like but in my opinion this game should not have been launched. I cancelled my account and so far have not been charged for that. I will eat the price of the game itself. Lesson? When it comes to MMORPGs do not be the first to buy. Wait at least two weeks, preferably a month to find out if the game will be playable. Its worth the wait the two weeks will not put you that far behind the first day buyers who do manage to log on (if that is a concern, it isn't for me).

AV

I played beta, and it was buggy as betas are supposed to be. Unfortunately, it was far more playable than this piece of crap that found it's way onto store shelves. After one week of playing i've already canceled my subscription... it's awful.

The lag is terrible, but if it were just the lag I might be ok. The bugs (and exploits) are far far too numerous to list, but let me give you an example. Saturday night my character got stuck in some sort of server glitch that had me playing - online - but bugged so that I couldn't interact with people/see people/do missions/bank/zone. The only solution to remedy this, as support has said, is to have your character committ suicide. Any game where you have to, regularly, committ character suicide to escape bugs is most certainly not ready for release.

FunCom claims the game is "110% done and in order". I can only hope they fired the PR guy that made that claim. Maybe, maybe in a few months it will be playable but it's not yet. And by playable, I don't mean "the lag is rough and there's a few bugs" I mean "you cannot have fun playing this game".

FunCom should have waited longer on this release. I'm out [price] for a game that isn't even finished.

Game issues have been ignored by FunCom for over two weeks now since their last major patch. Populations counts have fallen to ridiculously low levels, and I am about to jump ship and head for Dark Age of Camelot as a result of my exasperation, frustration, and disgust with FunComs colossal failure of the gaming community.

I strongly recommend NOT paying your own money for this game.

FunCom is -almost- a poster child of what an online gaming company shoud NOT do. They got a couple of things right. And they even pretended to fix some of the problems of this game. But they only pretended. After one set of problems was "fixed", me and my friends would discover that there was absolutely no change at all. FunCom claimed to have fixed the memory leak bug no less than four times before they finally got it right on that one bug alone. I will be cancelling my AO account, deleting this rubbish from my hard drive, and apologizing to all my friends I suckered into getting this game along with me.

It is unfair consider this a a game eligible for reviewing when for all practical purposes it is still in a very buggy beta mood. Abandon all hope ye who ignore me...

Most of you couldn't wait for this game. I am amazed that while I was testing the BETA software for this game I had fewer problems than I did when I started running the purchased game. I guess that they didn't learn from Verant's mistakes.

I was online for an hour the other night and only played for about 15 minutes. I was stuck in lag spikes the size of Mt. Everest. I kept fought the same critter for 25 minutes, I timed it.

Take care in buying this game until you hear positive stuff from these reviews. You will suffer more frustration than enjoyment at this point. The servers lag is unacceptable, the support is non-existent and the gameplay is for the extremely patient.

Good luck...

Just to reiterate everyone else's experience: spontaneous crashes, lots of lag, big time bugs, poor graphics, and quite frankly - boring gameplay.

To top it all off - after the last crash I've had to REINSTALL Windows since it would not boot.

DO NOT BUY THIS GAME!

I played beta. I bought a copy and muddled through a horrific first-day-of-release installation. I was able to create and play my character through a variety of expected first-week glitches. But now we're in week 2, and the game is all but unplayable - I cannot zone, I cannot go on the newbie missions, and I cannot leave the backyard where I was "born." I have gotten no responses to my petitions and bug reports, and I cannot get onto the AO website to pass on these thoughts. Let me suggest this: hold off on buying this game until you see all the gaming community - the *players* - come out with positive reviews saying this has all changed. Pity.. I was really looking forward to this game.

I really wanted to love this game, and I gave it a lot of chances. But with absolutely ZERO customer support (none of my issues have ever been answered), a terrible track record for patches (12 of 12 have been failures), a total lack of the promised storyline, and play that manages to be both unimaginative and repetitive... this just isn't a good game.
It's a beautiful game, with great music... and no 'meat'.