Its very good now, Its going to be mind blowing givien time to mature.
Ive played WoW, LOTRO and now ive been seduced by this beast of a game.
The combat is very imerrsive, you have alot more control when compared to the likes of WoW. With this game you can dodge attacks by double tapping in a diredtion, Block attacks simply by holding X although you will slowly use stamina doing so.
Hot keys 1,2 and 3 make you slash your weapon left, overhead and right respectively. Alot of your main moves are triggered with a simple touch of a hotkey or click in the action bar. Some of your more special moves are started in the same way but then then appears a short combination of key presses on screen which must be pressed on order (using the 1,2,3 keys)
If you happen to mess up the combintaion its not all bad as each key press still slices into your foe causing damage. Oh and of course if you finsh with a critical hit you will serve up a fatality move on your opponent like chopping a limb of head off all with plenty of blood splatter to wash it down with.
For defence everyone has a 3 shield system, this is 3 shields (no really...?) that you can move to your front left and right using CTRL plus the 1,2,3 keys. Personally i just leave them evenly spread but you can move all 3 shields to one side that will greatly reduce any attacks from that side.
Getting started in the game is even easier than the already simple systems of Wow and LOTRO. As in the early levels you cannot craft, gather resorces, or do any proffesions which i think is a good move as you dont have to worry about if your progressing in these skills enough why you try to find your feet in the game. You learn to gather at lvl 20, and you learn crafts at lvl 40. I havent got any higher so dont know what is still to come (The lvl cap is 80 at the moment)
The graphics are cool, way better than those other 2 games i keep mentioning but this will push your system.
Im lucky enough to have a powerful system. I run with all gfx options maxed (of which there are plenty to choose from to tweak performance) at a resoution of 1440x900 with FSAA off and i get a steady 40-50 fps with peaks of 100+ but it can very occasionally dip to around 15-20 fps but not for long and only when things get really busy onscreen.
Im running it on a Pentium Q6600 processor @3Ghz with a Geforce 8800GTX and 2GB ram under vista (I would have a vista score of 5.9 but my harddrive brings it down to 5.2).
Yes there are bugs in the game at the moment, im suffering from a memory leak that causes the minimap to corrupt after almost 2 hours play followed a minute or 2 later by a crash to desktop.
Im not too worried though as almost everyday there have been patches, although they are now planning to slow to 2 larger patches a week. I know this because of the excellent automatic updater that starts before every game. Its very informative about fixes, and other changes and what the developers are planning for the future.
More importantly is incredibley fast at downloading the neccessary files; the first patch of 700MB only took 15 mins to download on my 8Mb internet connection
The sound is good too although the voiceovers for NPC's stops at lvl 20 which is a little annoying only because up until then the voice acting is rather good and its a shame that it stops but im sure this will be addressed eventually.
For me the only faults i can find in this game are its bugs but these are getting fixed as quick as i stumble upon them.
Is this game better than WOW? For me...now....yes... and soon its going to blow it out the water.
Ignoring the bugs for now im going to scor th tis a 9