Just what the title says.
You can see by my rating that AoC has done the impossible. Now, I haven't rated WoW, but at this point it would be biased. However, if I were to do so back in its prime, it would probably beat an 8.5. But I'm also not reviewing AoC in ITS prime. This is just days after launch and I am completely engulfed by the game. The atmosphere is fantastic, the sound is speaker blowing, and the graphics.. Oh my, the graphics. They make my eyes orgasm. But you will need a very heavy rig to get the full effect, which I can almost say I have covered. I'm running a 2.7ghz Core 2 Duo with an 8600GTS 256mb and 3gigs of RAM. And I only get 30 FPS max on the multiplayer setting. Half of WoW.
I assume that they are going to address the framerate issues at some point, if possible.
I'm not going to tell you which class to play, because each has its own appeal. Right now I'm enjoying my Priest of Mitra and my Assassin. However, I do feel that the game severely tipped toward melee after all the effort they put into the combat system, which IS overhyped. I love combos that melee gets, and I've yet to experience Spellweaving, as they disabled it for PoMs due to an unreleased bug/glitch.
In all honesty, the game just feels fresh, and fun to play. Killing is fun, fatalities are absolutely just plain cool.
Now to my few complaints.
Free for all player versus player. This is a disaster right now. If you do not have the patience to deal with getting spawn camped by players 5+ levels higher than you, do your best to grind out your levels during the night time (single player) portion of the game. As melee, you have much more of a chance to put up a fight as you can keep moving and attacking. However on my priest, I'm pretty much dead with very little defensive ability, and no powerful heal quite yet.
The UI is another terrible downside, although this will certainly see an overhaul, and I would be very pleased if they completely ripped of WoW's interface. The minimap at this point is not very friendly to someone logging on for the first time. I didn't bother to read the manual because, well, who does? There is A LOT of clutter on your map that you can only sort out what each thing represents as you mouse over. Eventually you'll get used to it, but it is still annoying to see a million little marks on your map.
Overall, a few days after launch, AoC is at its worst. But if this is really its worst, then I'm never going to log on WoW again. I love WoW, I love my friends I made there. I love the enemies I made there. I love my epics, and I love, most of all, the forums. However, AoC, right now, is better then where WoW is, right now. I can only hope that when AoC reaches its peak, it will be as amazing as when WoW was at its peak.
8.5