A game far from completion: a poor and buggy graphics engine, a complete lack of linguistic editing. A disaster.
But now that I have actually bought the game, it pains me to try to give this game a fair chance. At it's current status, this game makes me die a little inside every time I play. Let's go over the issues, shall we?
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1) Documentation
A game as with such odd problems should never be so lacking in documentation. If there were simply some readable documentation for the game that actually addressed the issues people are facing, maybe it would be a little less depressing. I will come back to this point over and over as I bring up other issues.
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2) Graphics
I am running the following system:
> AMD Athlon 3500+
> Asus A8V Deluxe Mobo
> 1 GB of decent Corsair RAM (in dual channel mode)
> nVIDIA Geforce 6800 GT
After tweaking as much as I could (I spent around 2 hours doing this) the best FPS I could get was 15! The oddest part is that the game runs worse with lower detail settings! To top things off, the mystical numbered engines which you can choose from on startup are undocumented, and only trial and error can help you decide which to use.
The textures along the expansive terrain look like a flight simulator that ran on my old Macintosh with a 200 MHz processor. This is, of course, until I am 10m away from a patch of ground and it magically sprouts grass and "better" textures. This is by no means a smooth transition. Barefoot water skiing from water onto gravel would be a smoother transition than this texture swap.
The lighting is just as gross. On the only setting with which I could actually play, it made the torches stuck in the ground not shine light on the ground around them until you were within that 10m radius. Then, in spazo-matic fashion, it would insta-magically drop a little circle of light on the ground. This graphics engine is in great need of some smooth transitions.
To top it all off, the engine is still choc-full-o-bugs, and huge sky colored sheets seemingly dangling from the sky tend to appear. They are so stable a glitch that you can run around them and look at it from different angles (of course making it grow and distort).
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3) Interface
The interface is far from graceful, and about a mile short of functional. Every button and menu seems sluggish and unresponsive. This section is so abysmal that I feel I should split it up further:
The HUD elements are just gross. Although you can move them around, they don't make much sense, and especially without a manual written above the expertise of a furby, these elements are a great mystery to most. One of the most commonly asked questions in the starting areas is "Where is my XP bar?" This is a case where the flaky tooltips would be MUCH appreciated. To make matters worse, there is no way that I've found to lock the HUD elements in place, and so in trying to move my camera around I end up moving my compass off screen.
Speaking of tooltips, they are not only missing in many places, but useless a lot of the time because they are nonsensical. It is as if the developers put all the tooltips in an online translator (and a bad one at that) and just published the game with whatever came out. The worst examples are in the inventory window where you spend your ability points. When you hover your mouse over “Dexterity”the tooltip reads “Improve success touch.” When over the “Quickness” attribute it reads “Quickness fight.” Now I know the fanbois will come to the defense of the game saying, “but all of those are explained in the forums!” My retort is that no game should rely on user driven forums for basic things which should be in a manual. It is just inexcusably irresponsible to release a game this incomplete and without documentation. A player new to an RPG would be totally stumped. I'm well seasoned and I still found it difficult to figure out.
The camera settings are a nightmare. It follows a pretty standard third person view in which you can't really look behind yourself without turning your body. That in itself is okay, but I find myself fighting with the camera a lot while trying to move and turn at the same time. If I hold down my forward movement key and right click to turn or change pitch, it takes a huge amount of struggling to get the camera to move. When it does move, it moves all at once and way too far. It is like they expect us to have get a wrist workout trying to turn. Oddly enough, if I hold right and left mouse buttons to move forward, the camera angle changes beautifully! This game continues to confound me in tricky new ways. Perhaps there is some formula of settings and controls which will make the game function well, but it is a closely guarded secret of the developers who want this 15,000 square meter landscape to themselves when everyone quits the game in a month.
What could be worse than fighting with camera settings? Why, fighting with selecting a target, of course! This game's “super easy” click to move enabled interface means that instead of clicking on that monster to select it, you actually ended up clicking between its legs to select the patch of ground below it. Now, this isn't a big deal if it is the only monster near you as you can easily use tab to select the closest, but when you're running from something which you managed to aggro and you can't turn to look behind you while you run, you sure as hell can't select it if you missed the first time.
That should be enough ranting about the interface, as I'm sure you're still wondering about the combat and general gameplay.
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4) Gameplay/Combat
Now this is a section that is somewhat unfair to judge having played to such a low level, but the combat system just seems strange. Early on there's lots of clunky missing of projectiles and a dreadfully boring low level grind. I will, however, refrain from bashing the rest of the combat system which I have not explored.
But what about that aggro system? All I know is that MOBs auto-magically come racing across scores of meters to beat me up. Now I know I should be careful in dangerous areas, but come on. These suckers come at me like orc-sweat guided missiles.
Although I am not well versed in the “finer” points of the combat system, many of my friends are, and they are constantly frustrated with the fact that some skill trees seem to be utterly ineffective. I really don't want to spend hours suffering through the above mentioned issues just to find out that my class is not only gimped, but just plain dumb.
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I could go on, but I must now stress that the intent of this review is not to stress how bad this game is, but instead how premature it is in light of how much potential is has. This game showed so much potential, but it just got developed too slowly. It feels outdated and yet still rushed. Although there are improvements every day, they are minor and the game still feels like an alpha release.
Here is the bottom line: this game will go one of two ways in the next month.
(1) Many of these issues get cleared up. Graphics optimization allows good performance on many systems, and the real documentation comes out and is complete and helpful. DnL lives.
(2) Few issues will be resolved in spite of promises from the developers, and the even the game's most loyal community will disintegrate as they finally come to terms with the fact that this game is not and never will be worth the money. DnL dies.
If you are interested in the game, do not buy it just yet. Give it some time. You'll soon know which of those two ways it has gone.