After roughly seven years the game is still kicking
Since then I've played almost every major MMO release, and in that time I've seen aspects of AO show up in all of them, the biggest being CoH mission system which is clearly inspired by AOs system.
Around two weeks ago I was sick of playing the "same old MMOs" so I shut down my account to EQ2 and decided to check out the "free games" on mmorpg.com AO happened to be on the list of "free" games to play, so I decided for old times sake to give it a run. After downloading the game (from this very sit lol) I jumped into the game. For any new players I would warn you that your first week will be like "what is that?", "how do I do this?", "where can I hunt?", type questions, and if your social enough in the newbie OOC of your faction you'll quickly make friends that will explain things for you.
Now the graphics are the games weakest point, they're deffently from 2001, but the good news is once FunCom is done with Conan (looking forward to that) they're going to upgrade AOs graphics, so I can't harp on them to much because if you see the screenshots for the new engine it looks great.
The community is quiet... it seems after seven years of playing alot of them have greated little niches that they stick to, infact this is where the game suffers the most. Since the community is generaly "closed" it can be an uphill battle to try and find guilds to join, alot of them have been runing for 5+ years and as such are very strict about new members. Once you do get into a community of players though the game realy perks up and becomes much better, you have a solid group of friends to hang out with and they may even toss you a few million creds to get you on your feet.
The gameplay was groundbreaking back in 2001 and to be honest its still very good to this day. Right now missions are generaly run off terminals and are randomly generated for you, but the devs have been adding in a ton of quests, infact the newbie island feels just like any other modern MMOs newbie zone, with quests that are tailored to introduce you to the concepts of the game. The problem is though finding where you want to hunt, where to get wepons and when to buy them. The game has a "Quality Level" system that is built into iteams but it can be hard to judge when your ready to use it outside of checking the skill requirements. I think WoW and EQ2 have it better with a flat level requirement.
The world is overly large and traveling through zones can take a long time... I personaly made the mistake of trying to run accrossed the zone called "The Longest Road"... yah it was long, took me about 15 minutes to get from Borilas (the nutural city) the my mission location. On the bright side though the game has a fair ammount of vehicles, which act as other games mounts, allowing you to travel very quickly though this is generaly used in the higher levels.
The major downfall of the game in my opinion is the User Interface, its old... like 2001 old, and it realy dose show its age. Its hard to get used to, the inventory window is very basic and their is now way to get a full readout on your character other than shift+clicking yourself. What is worse is that hotbar dosn't have any numbers on it, so you have to keep track of what number you just put your new skill into... or you'll be counting the boxes to figure it out, which isn't a horrible issue but being lazy its nice to just look up or down and thing "5... push 5!" rather than thinking "1, 2, ok yah its 5... crud he just got a crical hit on me while I did that!"
AO is deffently a strong MMO, and if you do give it a try and decide to stick with it long term don't stay as a froob (freebie player) the reason why is Shadowlands allows you to gain XP on a massive level... the mobs up their give 2x-10x the ammount of XP that normal mobs on Rubi-Ka give (with the downer of droping no credits), also by paying and getting access to all the expantions you get the perk system which allows you realy beef up your character and for higher level characters lets you go form the max lev of 200 to 220.
All in all AO is an MMO that has weathered many storms and stood through it all, they've lasted this far and FunCom has stated that they want to see it go much futher into the future... this being achieved through a graphics update and continued expantion. If your tired of playing your average mainstream MMO I'd recomend giving it a try, heck its 100% free unless you opt to upgrade your account, and thats a price everyone likes.