Due to server stability issues, PlayPark has decided to limit daily access (was 24 hours for the first few days which I didn’t play) for the beta test from 16:00-24:00 Bangkok local time). Because I spent 45 minutes in the character creator and then kind of went looking around the ship hub of Inventus a bit rather than just going straight through the tutorial quest, I managed to “grind” my way to all of level 2… 😛
I rolled a female Assassin (Hunan race) and as noted, I spent more time playing the character creator (edited out) than the actual game itself due to the newly instituted downtime (part of the load is likely coming from us “filthy foreign MMO players”). I wouldn’t say the customization is as extensive as Black Desert Online or ArcheAge, but it’s decent enough (and like those, you can save the appearance as a preset).
At least for the starter quests (or the ones I managed to get to), I will say the much feared “piss poor Bluehole style of optimization” has been mostly absent (a good thing). I did see (and catch on video) their use of texture loading priority so I do expect to see the same grayed out NPC’s and player characters that one experiences in TERA (though maybe not as bad) when you hit the limits of your graphics card. Their artists also utilized a lot of motion blur (which can probably be disabled) like when quickly panning the camera. A:IR does use a newer build of Unreal Engine 3 (compared to TERA) with some “enhancements” made by Bluehole/Krafton to deal with optimization. I don’t expect this to be perfect for the larger scale aerial combat and RvR battles (I’m presuming auto-optimization will be a thing like it is in TERA). I will say the graphics do look pretty good (including some polished up and unused assets from TERA).
The combat unsurprisingly feels good and impactful (Bluehole artists and animators have always done a decent job in this area with TERA, Devilian, and at least from my limited playtime with A:IR). With that said, there’s some misinformation going around regarding whether or not it is action combat like TERA or tabbed targeting. The game DOES NOT use the Tab key to actually select or cycle through targets (ala ArcheAge). Target selection is via LoS (line of sight). Class skill type also determines whether it is a soft-lock targeting (sort of like the skills for some classes in Black Desert Online or TERA) or a telegraph.
Beyond this, I can’t really give more initial impressions due to the lack of playtime from the limited server availability. The previous (from the Korean CBT) prologue where you start off as a child has been removed (I personally thought it was an interesting concept but the new tutorial quests in this Thai-SEA beta clearly gets players directly into the game). Hopefully I’ll be able to get in more game time when the servers are up (like being able to do the aerial combat tutorial which is where I ended).
