First Impressions

[Shahared]

Ok, So I just got an invite (thanks GM_rider!) and the download went swimmingly, and I started playing. The new player experience is always daunting for any game, but I loved the fact that they kind of 'force' you to go through all the stuff you need to do in order to learn the basics. Heres a rundown of my first impressions and the little things that bugged me:
1: I was looking for a way to use the shortcut macros, and I know it says how in one of the ending quests, but if your like me....and I know there are a quite a few people who are...you tried to get through all those beginning quests as fast as possible so you could get to the real action. I know the fastest way for me to learn is to play so thats what I did. I was trying to figure it out and pressed f1 bc i saw the little 1 above the first skill i got and that brought up a little help screen which was great bc thats how i found out about f12 being the shortcut bar. Now all of this is good, bc i was able to easily figure it all out and whatnot.
2.It bugged the hell out of me that when i used a special on a monster i didn't actually start attacking it, I just used the special and stood there taking a pounding like a dummy till I clicked again to turn the arrow to red for attack. It would be nice if using an attack special on a monster automatically started your attack status on that monster. I doubt theres much that could be done about it, but I thought I'd mention it in my first impressions.
3.I loved the fact that mobs show up on your minimap! Yay! I miss this feature in a lot of MMO's. It's been in so many good games that you never really notice how much you love it till it's not there.
4.Idk if there is a feature to hide other characters or more importantly their text balloons. I found it kinda of hard to see some of the NPCs in the town square because of all the people and text balloons on the screen. Nothing much you could do about that, but its also part of my first impressions.
And finaly a few of the startup quests tell you to talk to people like the pet shop owner and they will tell you about their function in the game...but then you go there and they just tell you 'take this to so and so' or something like that, and you can complete the quest without ever talking to them about what they do. I think if your going to send someone to the pet shop owner he should tell you about pets 'then' send you to complete your quest. Idk how much of the game is 'set in stone' so to speak as far as how all the quests and mechanics work, but I hope some of my first impressions help with making this game better for open beta. And I will continue to post more as I see them in this thread.

[Khallas]

I haven't even played the game yet, and my first impression is that this game is nearly parallel to Ragnarok Online. If you've played it you'd know what I'm talking about. This game is virtually the exact same with Ragnarok. Both visually and in gameplay as far as I can tell. The only real difference I can see is the smelting system. :-\

[zakari]

The gameplay is NOT like RO. Only the graphic is similar, but superior to RO

[Shahared]

Ok second impressions! Scratch number 2..I like it now :p Just because sometimes i want to do nothing but my special so i can reduce my mp more then my health, bc mp heals faster then my health at the moment...but maybe later it will bug the crap out of me. So just a few more things to report on..
Ok, the NPC's need a good re-haul of their whole scripts...spelling aside(because i don't really think spelling is that important), the grammar (which I do think is important) is horrible and makes it hard to understand what an NPC is even trying to say...so quests are confusing and so is figuring out how to do certain things...I don't have example at the moment because its just a general observation, but I'm working on a list of the ones that need the most work as I come across them.
In my opinion it needs to be made more apparent who the class changing NPC is. All the other NPC's have names to denote what they do, a job title so to speak. The class changing NPC has a normal name....with no title or anything, just a normal name like the other NPCs that just give you general conversation in other parts of the town. And since it is not required that you meet the class changing npc during the first 10 'newbie' quests, most would assume that this is just another boring NPC that just adds flavour text or some quests. I was talking to everybody just to try and find the right person and thats the only way I found her, but it was a little annoying.
There is no in game NPC to describe the chat system that I noticed, so a better description of the commands should be either listed somewhere or put into some sort of menu. I had no clue that you had to type @ before what you type to talk in a party. Idk where that information is inside the game, but I had to whisper someone to find out so it wasn't apparent to me my first run through the game. I did manage to make it through my class change no problem and managed to fire off a few quests while doing so, so all in all that part of playing the game went very well.
And thats all for my second set of observations of my playing the game for the first time. And to answer some questions in the thread, I have never played ragnarock online...per se.....I haven't played a graphical RPG by that name but I did play the text based MUD that they most invariably ripped off to make it....like every other graphical MMO is really just a rip off of an even better text based MUD. So my opinion is I don't care...this is the game I'm playing and I have an unbiased opinion of it.