Hyped a LOT, but didn't live up to most of it.
The bottom line is that this game is horribly bug-ridden. MOST players can only play for anywhere from 30 mins to 2 hours before the game crashes due to a memory leak that was identified a LONG time ago in early beta...and somehow still made it to retail.
To add insult to injury, Flagship is currently adding subscriber-only content to the game, and their patch that was supposed to fix the memory leak did no such thing. Who knows when this show-stopper will be fixed.
Other bugs I've encountered: - The "invisible avatar." This usually happens when you port back to a station. You can see your characters weapons sort of floating along, but no player character.
- Game won't even launch. I get this mostly when I try to launch the game from the "my games" icon (in Windows Vista). The game crashes after the splash screen. If I navigate to the actual launcher.exe file in the install folder, the game more of ten than not launches fine, but has crashed on me several times.
- Graphical corruptions. I've encountered all manner of graphical corruptions, mostly dealing with my character, and usually something as benign as the model becoming discolored. This is usually alleviated by changing your equipment back and forth.
- Black launch screen. This is similar to the game crashing after the launch splash screen, but instead of the game crashing, it just sits at a black screen and nothing happens. This is also fixed mostly by not using the icon from the My Games folder.
- Level won't load. Invariably this happens as I am porting back to sell loot and return - and I end up losing legendary items because when I port back to the station, the load screen sits there and spins, and nothing happens, forcing me to use the task manager to shut down the game. Infuriating to say the least.
- Invisible skill usage. On several occasions, My avatar (marksman) has been shooting with no sounds or animation to show for it. I simply had to place my reticle over the enemy, and the enemies would die - despite the fact that by all appearances, I wasn't shooting.
- Locked shooting. This happened to me during a boss fight - my marksman wouldn't stop shooting, no matter what buttons I hit. I had to port back to a station in order to get it to quit.
These are just the ones I could think of off the top of my head.
So with all those bugs in mind...is Flagship patching the game to a workable status? Nope. They're adding in subscriber-only content, and have NOT addressed the current, shoddy state of the game. Talk about infuriating.
On the upside, the graphics are otherwise very polished, and all the classes I've played so far have been very fun to play. The voice acting is passable, and the levels look very, very nice.
This game has a lot going for it...it just needs to be fix to cash in on them.