Basically, the game is an online CRPG much like Ultima Online or Everquest (more like Everquest).  You run around in a 1st person perspective, kill things, get stuff, increase in power, buy things, sell other things, meet people, die, and all of the other things that make a role-playing experience truly epic.  Okay, maybe I just haven't played enough to know about the really cool stuff, but unlike the Everquest beta, I'm sure the cool stuff is out there.  At least people talk to me here.

In this preview, which is mostly being put up because people have been asking for it, I will be writing about my experiences in the game, some basic "how-to's" for prospective players, and basically whatever I think I can post without violating the considerably lightened NDA or give away too many spoilers.

General Impressions

A number of notable improvements came with beta 2.  First, the game is graphically more lush without being a slideshow.  Where some people were complaining that in beta 1 the character models were a bit chunky and blocky, there are a lot more polygons in the new models, giving them a rounder look.  Terrain details such as trees look excellent now, and the shadowing seems improved.  The ground is still sort of a blurry green, but this is for framerate's sake; you can actually turn on the full detail with a @render detail (on|off) command in the chat interface, which slows down your framerate a bit (though not appreciatively for those of us with high end systems 8P).

Lag was also improved.  While the lag thing was never that big an issue in the beta 1 build, there were certain periods of slowness, most notably in dungeons, where everything would stop moving for about 15 seconds while the server ran an update process.  (Luckily the monsters were frozen as well as the characters.)  Play is extremely smooth now.  (I play at an average ping of 180.)

A couple of glitches that popped up early in the beta led to a wipe shortly after it started.  The bug that caused the wipe was a treasure spawn bug which cause a bunch of newbie vassals to run around in full matched plate, etc.  I wish I knew where they were getting the stuff.  I never got any.

There were also some problems with movement prediction and rendering which seem to have been cleared up.  The worst of these was the "invisibility" problem, where either a character or monster would be invisible to someone else until the observer logged out and back in.  This was annoying, as there were a lot of times when I could not see anyone but saw spell effects, received items, and got @tell messages from them but could not see them.  Apparently some people had problems where they would be under attack and couldn't see the monster that was beating on them (I never experienced this one).  More benign and amusing was the sight of large mobs moonwalking at high speeds down the road as the servers and client tried to resolves their actual position, failing horribly.

Some other changes were instituted, most notably in the field of magic, and a couple in general combat.  See the appropriate sections for these details.