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Reviews: Anarchy Online
 Anarchy online, is it a game or is it a course with how one must learn how to be calm?
That's the question, and I still have no clue on the answer. Lets start up with the basics. Graphic wise, at first, the game is well very pleasing to the eye. So they gain a point with eye candy. Of course, eye candy does jack to the actual game play except say well that looks nice. The problem with the graphics in AO (anarchy online) is that to move anywhere at all, you will have most of the stuff turned off any ways. This is because of the way they decided to show you the graphics on your end. Instead of loading textures after one goes into another area of the map (or zone for short), they render every single polygon on your end at real time. This means, unless you have the best video card possible, you will be turning things either off, or dropping your resolution, or even turning down your view distance. It doesn't matter if you pass the same type of tree or building 100 times, each of those tress and buildings are being redone for you each time you pass. Instead of loading different type of armors and guns that you will see people in or even remember them after seeing them once in a zone, you will reload each and every single one every time the same person goes through your line of sight or 50 people go through your line of sight. So its actually better for people to stay away from other people, seeing that they must constantly deal with loading the same exact graphics every time a person walks by them. This is where you have to laugh, because the social aspect of the game dies because they forgot people like being around other people, but if they stay around other people, they get hammered by the graphics problem that AO hailed itself as being the best looking. A nice vicious catch-22. What about the game play the thing that is suppose to make the game great and keep people entertained for hours on end? Honestly, I can not see any real game play value to it. Each zone is basically the same as each other zone, except where buildings are placed and where trees are placed. I give it a point for being big and all, but they lose major points on uniqueness. That's one thing I guess EQ beat everybody in. Each zone in EQ is different from the other zones. It makes it feel different as well. AO takes a lot of its cues on EQ by the programmers who even stated they played EQ when they were not making AO. Somehow, they missed the mark of EQ by a few million yards. The first one is that, there are really no true 3d effects, in which it makes it feel 3d. I was expecting to climb stairs and run down endless hallways, and see the world of a place via the apartment and stuff. There is none of that. There are no stairs that I can find. Then again, there are no elevators either. There are ramps, but this game is all about (x, y) and no z. You either hunt in the open, or do missions. That's the entire game in a nutshell. You kill, gain experience, and level, and spend points into a skill system. I know what you're thinking... So does EQ. Yes, and no. In EQ, you do the same, but there are dungeons with a boss mob at the end, or near the end. There is none of that in AO. In EQ, you could find something rare if you hunted it constantly. In AO, even if I get all my stuff via mobs or treasure chests, I can buy the same stuff in towns. This is of course till you get to about level 125, where then its all in killing the same exact stuff you killed for the last 124 levels. But you're thinking, there is pvp as well. Yes, there is pvp in the game, but ill get to that a little later seeing there is a reason I'm not throwing it up in game play. Armor in AO is plain weird as well. Yes, there are many different types of armor, but you will be upgrading pretty much constantly because of how mobs hit. Instead of doing min/max damage and sometimes only getting a scratch, every mob does a min damage that can hurt a ton during the course of battle. This is because; your armor will never absorb most of the blow. It will absorb till a mob gets to the min, then it will stay there, vitally forever. An example I think is needed. A mob that is hitting you for 24 damage on a consistence basis, will always hit you for 24 damage until you break the next barrier where it will then hit you for 23 damage. There really is no min/max in AO, there really is a max till you break a threshold where it will lower the amount, but they will never get unlucky, and they will never get really lucky and hit for more or less. That makes game play in AO very boring just in itself. You can pretty much judge if you can survive an attack by the very first time it hits you. There is no suspense because you can tell quickly if you can win/lose via the first attack. This in itself makes game play boring. You also can do missions, which I admit is a cool concept, but really does nothing but provide you with a random generated dungeon with mobs inside instead of killing outside. Its cool, in that you can jump on, do a few missions real quick, make some exp, and then log off and not have to deal with finding a place to get exp outside, or play the looking for group. Its bad in that it sometimes kills social interaction, but then again as stated above, missions help with not having everybody running into your line of sight ;> Whoever designed the cities should be shot and dragged and then to make them try with 100 percent view distance make it from a zone line to another zone line without crashing on a modem connection and just the recommended specs to play this game at the servers prime time. I bet they crash to desktop at lest 5 times. The problem with the cities is very simple, everything that a person would use is roughly around the same area. Now add several hundreds of other players, and you can see the design flaws within a minute. Everybody is packed together, and add the fact of how they designed their graphics, it makes things very ugly. Let me give you an example again with omni-1 entertainment. The mission booths are near the banks which are near the insurance terminals. (places to go to save your character so that if you do die, you only lose to your last save position or after you gain a level) All of these are near the whoompa's (a teleport device that takes you to a different zone), which is near the grid (another teleport area which is a zone in itself). You then have all your stores near all these areas as well. Thus in theory, having everything near each other works great as time should be reduced, its just the opposite. Time increases because everybody else sorta wants to do the same thing, thus creating one huge lag feast. Even when you see a zone line, you might not make it. That's because, one of the simple things to code, the actual crossing to another area, is a chore. This is because, the servers didn't notice you actually wanted to cross the zone. Thus you wait a little, then get the message that your still stuck in the same zone that you were trying to leave. This of course, can have bad outcomes come out of this such as fleeing from people or mobs. Because during this waiting, your frozen there, you cant fight back, and whatever is after you basically gets free hits on you and you can even hear the free hits being hit on you. This usually means death in most cases. Thus, this can pretty much put a damper on whatever you were trying to flee from and have to deal with the death deal. If all that was not bad enough, you also get the treat of a vicious memory leak in the game itself. So even if you have to try to zone several times and make it, and even make the walk across the zone in a heavily congested area which the servers can't handle, and even make your purchases from vendors and such, you will still get booted from the game or the game will just thrash your hard drive after awhile anyway. It doesn't matter if you have 1024 Megs of ram or 128. The only difference that this will make is when the hard drive will thrash. The lower amount of Megs one has, will pretty much tell you when its gonna happen. Why is the hard drive thrashing? Mainly because AO has used up every single ounce of whatever ram you have and are now using the hard drive to swap files. That's because the ram never ever dumps anything when you're in the game. You have to do it manually by using a scrub program or by turning off the machine and restarting. And scrubbing doesn't always work any ways; thus you will be turning the machine off and on any ways. Of course, one can keep this from happening if they stay with group or solo and never zone and never see another person, but again, this is a game of social interaction, so they miss the mark again. Then you have the other part of the game, the player Vs player or pvp for short. Basically if you get sick and tired of killing mobs, you can try your hand in pvp. The main problem with pvp in AO is with all the exploits and funcom's (the developer of the game) inability or indifferent attitude towards exploits, this makes pvp pretty unfun and unfair. Add the fact that people can shoot you when you're zoning into a pvp area, and well that's just plain out stupid. The reason its stupid is once again, you don't fight back, and you don't know how much health or spell casting ability you have left till you load yourself fully into an area. Thus it makes it impossible to judge if you're dying or they are doing nothing. Yet, the pvpers will try hard with every reason in the real life world and the game world (yes, if you beat there real life world example, they move to game world examples till basically you say screw it,its not worth arguing any longer). That it's fair. ROFL, sorry guys, your wrong, but this article isn't about pvp so ill leave it at that. Add the exploits where people unleveled unfairly and have more points in certain skills than you because of yet even more exploits, and you have people who pretty much destroyed the second aspect of the game, which really destroyed the whole game in general because the first aspect of the game; the player Vs environment is boring. These things just annoy me, and for a company once again who tried to model EQ, I cannot understand how they missed the following things. 1) No name tags when you see another player. Yes, you can control+tab, but this is annoying. Because it kills social interaction, and makes it hard for friends to find each other in city or wilderness zones.All in all, this game is not worth the money. If you believe the story line will save this game, leave now. It won't, it can't. No story line can save an online game period. That's because unless you have people who basically play the game and get paid to play a role for 8-12 hours a day, not everybody will come into contact with them and have people playing different shifts around the clock, the story line can not save an empty shell of a game. That's because a story line must be on going 24/7 when some people are not around, and others are. Having a weekly event will do nothing, as people will have 6 days and maybe even more because they miss the last weekly event still wondering. So unless they are having people play 8-12 hour shifts around the clock, there is no way a story line can help. Save your money till they fix everything and see for yourself if the game has a story via web sites. If you're new to the online gaming world, AO is not a game to start yourself off on. Any ways have fun ;> ShadeStorm Score: 3 out of 10 Comments: Comments Really Go Here!
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