Earthrise – My first days

If you have been following my tweets this week (@Bryonis_MMOs) you would have seen my disappointment with the post office. I had to wait for my box with Earthrise in to travel about 25-30 miles in 6 working days... yeah I know that's fast work from the post office!

So when the game arrived I was pretty much ready to dive straight in. I popped in the DVD installed and then patched... which was 500mb. Not what I thought I should have since its only been a week since launch. That said I patched the game and logged in. On the plus side I didn't have the same problems others have been suffering in the first few days with CD keys not being accepted or passwords going wrong.

Off we go then!

I make myself a character, Bryonis, and head into the training area of the world. The first thing that struck me was how graphically intensive this game is. My poor 9800 GTX+ (512mb) could not content with the volume of requests from the game to perform. Now since they are asking for a 7800gt+ 256 bit minimum I thought I would be all right. During my play I dropped the graphics down a fair amount before getting up to 30-40fps. Which really just distracted me for my time in game.

Well as I do not have enough technical know how to say for sure it was not my computer, I will have to take a bit of a leap of faith in my machine and say I think its more than likely that the game itself could use some optimisation for those of us without dual graphics cards and the new processors/RAM etc.

My 30-40 fps and I went for a stroll around the training area, and I started shooting and hacking apart different training enemies to get a hang of combat in the game, and as another chap on www.MMORPG.com has mentioned it does become a bit of a pain having to press ALT to change from exploration and combat modes. I see why they have done this so that you can be caught unaware in PvP, however it could be streamlined to make the transition between the modes more seamless.

As I left the tutorial zone after besting several NPC's, I found myself doing some quests for the continoma who are one of the main factions. This immediately put most people into two camps if they decided to join the noir or the continoma as I did. That said, there was not any real PvP action at that level, apart from one chap hiding and ganking from with a group of Noir NPC's that are part of a quest.

I might add that the particular group of NPC noir troops was on a spawn timer of about 20 seconds. So as you picked one off, you didn't have long before his clone would jump you while you fought off one of the others. Frankly I don't appreciate unlimited numbers of enemies. It meant deaths that would not have happened had it been a fair situation.

Pop it back in the oven for half an hour and it will be done...

To be honest I have been disappointed by Earthrise. Its been released too early in my opinion and really needs more time. I would like to see the game in six months to a years time and hopefully it would have had some upgrades. I am just a bit sad that a game I really wanted to be great has disappointed me. Well for MMO's I shouldn't be surprised. More fool me!