[Strokke]

If you need something to read here is a short writeup I posted on the official board. I'm sure much better will be coming as people finish catching up on their beauty sleep

I would guess that there are a lot of people that were considering going, but just weren't sure if they would have a good time. There are also people lurking these forums who are looking into the game and don't know very much about it. I know that I actually attended the event without knowing much I think an opinion from as close to a neutral party as possible could be valuable to some.

Yeah 80 bucks was expensive, but I lived in southern california and my guild leader was flying out and convinced me to attend with him. I have some MMORPG experience in the past, played AC 1 and DAOC for about a year each and spent a little time playing betas of WoW and SWG. My bread and butter has been WC3 for like the past 4 years however. So while I know my way around these types of games I am far from an expert or fanatic.

Impessions on the game itself: At first look I was disappointed. I was a little late to the demo event and was standing behind a bunch of people. No projector was set up at this time and I was too far away to see much from the LCD monitors each person was playing at. In fact the game looked downright slow. My background in gaming is all competitive. Competitive WC3 (on and off sponsored), PvP server for AC, RvR in DaoC, not to mention playing Hardcore diablo II Looking at the games at this point I actually pointed out to my friend "I think I could queue up a bunch of attacks and go take a poo everytime a battle started". I was disappointed because heard this was going to be challenging and I wished there was more quick decision making needed. I walked around and talked to somebody at Sigil about the slow pace. Between the conversation we had and what I would later learn by waching, I was no longer worried about it. A combination of hacked stats, the view I had, and no knowledge of the counters sympathies etc had "fooled" me.

We bailed and wandered around for an hour and then came back because there was nothing to do. We snagged a couple of seats behind one of the programmers and had a great view. The graphics, although choppy from the computers, had fluid attack animations that I liked. The guy playing had a melee character and swung his sword in a very realistic manner (was using whole body not just his arms). I came away marveling at the overall graphics of the game, and dreading the day when I would be forced to shell out some cash to upgrade for it. Watching the game in action definitely made a fan out of me.

Before I move on to the other events I want to share an anecdote from sitting behind the Sigil Employee (absolutely no idea who he was) and asking him questions. We talked about the lead in attacks for melee characters and he explained how they worked, then when I asked how long they lasted he replied something along the lines of "The animation lasts 6 seconds, but the lead-in is available for about 12. It might be a little too long though so I might change it." My friend and I definitely loved the response though it is not everyday for us that we can hear something like that from a programmer of a game we are into. The personableness from the creators of this game is NOT something I am used to and was definitely the highlight of the event for me. I am used to Blizzard where they shaft their serious players, flip the bird, then rake in the cash.

Impressions on the rest of the event: I seem to have gotten a bit long winded so I will keep this short. The liveforum with the two CEOs/Headprogrammers/whatever they were (One's name was Brad I believe?) was amazing. This was by far my favorite part (although winning a sound card was pretty cool). Just to emphasize how great I feel about the way they treat their community I need to bring up Blizzard again. Blizzard keeps everything secret, then releases patches that usually do not make any sense. In this liveforum every answer was logical and made a lot of sense. Even the ones they chose not to give details about didn't frustrate me (Not the typical sorry we cannot comment on this at the given time that every company answers every single question with). I knew that they were not talking about it because they had some secrets up their sleeves that other companies would steal because they were so good. Rather than spout the typical BS we are all accustomed to (We here are going to re-invent the wheel and create the greatest game ever!), I was greeted with two men who seemed more interested in making a great game than anything else.

I will end it there I guess I entered fanguard as a skeptic, and left a believer.