Okay.

An example of an mmo doing something new, while I am not a fan of the series, is the elder scrolls mmo where the first person view is something that I have never seen before and peaks my interest.

jdm, I will admit I am an mmo vet and may be burned out on the genre in general. What do you enjoy about the game that makes it stand out to you? It seems very much like a frankenstein to me that is stitched up of other elements of popular mmos.

I got into the beta two tests ago and hit a wall at level 10 on two characters. The straw that broke my back this time was a quest where a guy in a bar had me hand out cookies to kids standing outside the bar. 

Pros:

1. graphics looks nice for an mmo

2. animations are neat

3. sounds/music are enjoyable

What does that leave you with? A game where its nice to walk around and enjoy the ambience.

Cons:

1. generic quests - kill/collect/fetch/talk. You get a quest to go kill 6 of a monster, hand it in, another guy gives u a quest to collect 4 of an item from that same monster. It feels very much like world of warcraft before any expansions.

2. generic spells/skills - mages get a fire spell for damage, ice spell to slow, lightning spell for a dot, and a sleep. thats it.

3. boring world - the zones are covered in packs of monsters standing there waiting to be killed.

4. theres no spark to peak your interest. literally nothing new in this game that hasn't been done before. 

5. the worst map in any mmo ever. its just bad enough to make me angry. the generic quests would be one thing with a friendly map but when you have to wade through the poo storm of a map to find where to go its enough to frustrate anyone.

6. dynamic quests aren't rewarding. every reward is xp and money from grinding mobs for 5 minutes to fill up a bar. 

7. boring combat. stand there and burn down a mob with little to no threat of failure.

What does this leave you with? A game with a good atmosphere but none of it matters because the foundation is poor. Essentially slapping a bow on a pig. I have this game sitting on my desktop with the beta open for 3 or 4 more days and I have no desire to play it already. I know its for beta and meant to help them out but there is no fixing this game in the short time until release. There is no forum thread set up to list problems for the frequent spelling errors and mis-labeled npcs. 

When the testing for jobs is released I will give it another go as a good chunk is missing from this game - as well as housing; However right now I would not, and am not, going to play this game even if it was free let alone an initial purchase with a monthly sub of 15 dollars. This game simply doesn't bring anything new to the table. Been there done that.

that video card is about as powerful as a calculator. simply put - u cant run the game with it. it has only 96 cores.. this game drops my gpu down to 45 fps in some areas and it is literally 14 times more powerful than your gpu

harvest moon:forage for arbitrary building materials. i cant take it anymore. only made it to fall of the 1st year before i shelved this game out of boredom. back to a wonderful life on dolphin.

p.s. screw you small branches.

Well maybe it isn't for you then. I on the other hand played the kitten out of this game. Beat new game+7 (the hardest the game gets), did a speed run in 57 minutes, beat the game on a level one, beat the game without a shield, oh and in regards to you thinking its impossible to play through with only a few lives.. I also beat the game with only dying once to the mandatory death to Seathe (people have actually done entire runs without a death by skipping the first encounter with Seathe). This game has an incredibly deep story if you give it a chance.. for example: saving Siff from the abyss before encountering him in the woods gives a new and rather touching alternate cut scene when you fight him. And another one I liked is depending on how you interpret the hints of the story and seeing that the primordial serpents are on the side of the gods.. you are actually doing the "good" ending by not linking the fire and preserving the world for humanity where as linking the fire like you were told to ends humanity.