AoC is a very polished and bright game. The launch was the best I’ve ever seen in an MMO with smooth gameplay and a fairly small number of major issues. No launch is ever likely to be perfect. That being said, the Early Access was disheartening to say the least. If you are in the Eastern Standard time zone as I am, you were supposed to get access to Hyboria Saturday afternoon at roughly noon. There were server issues and the launch was pushed back several hours. This didn’t effect me as much as it did others because I had the black screen on start issue with my ATI x800 video card.
After my problems with the video card were fixed, I luckily got to miss the initial login server connection problems experienced by so many trying to log in at once. I got in and was able to play a couple of hours Saturday night, but spent most of that time reading tutorials and solving minor graphics glitches. When I got home Sunday afternoon I was able to complete my fixes and start actually playing the game now that it was running smooth and looking pretty. I got about 4 or 5 hours of solid play time in.
Fast forward to Monday afternoon, my last day of Early Access before the rest of the world arrives. I was thirsting for more Hyboria and ready to jump on the minute I got home from work only to find all US servers were down. The servers were being prepared for main launch that was supposed to happen today and were supposed to come back on-line at approximately 9PM EST. That too got pushed back and didn’t come online until midnight last night. I, again like a fool, waited up to get some game time in because I was psyched. Come midnight, half falling asleep because I’m an old man now and go to bed around 10, I was able to start downloading the patches to the game client. About 12:15 I was able to get to the login screen! Yay, this will wake me up…failed to connect to login server. Oh man, say it isn’t so. I tried for almost half an hour before weeriness got the best of me.
So after paying for Early Access for a three day head start in the world of Hyboria, I ended up only able to play about 5 hours. Very disheartening and I feel like I’ve been let down by FunCom. If they knew they were going to have to take down the servers for a day of maintenance here and there, they should have started EA on the 16th instead, giving us what we paid for. I so far haven’t had any major issues with the game itself, but with the developers this is strike two.
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