I've had a couple of sessions in the Ryzom beta recently. Ryzom was a game that sounded like it had a lot of interesting features in it, however the beta experience has been less than pleasurable.
First off, the game won't play through transparent proxies - and I have a transparent proxy at home, which meant that in order to play I needed to patch myself and sit exposed to the outside world. Not nice, however it did remind me how awesome my proxy is when I did a bit of web browsing without it, and was appauled at the speed (thanks again Portunus! :)). So anyway, after installing the client, plugging myself outside of my proxy, and patching, I began the process of creating my character.
Character creation had most of the options that one would expect these days, down to individually modifying facial details, height, build, etc, as well as some race choices, but it just seemed primative compared to something like Starwars Galaxies or City of Heroes. There's just something about the way the avatars look which seems wrong, slightly malformed, slightly uninspiring and dull. The same can be said for the graphics in the world, and the character animations - very drab, and they almost have a feeling of being outdated by 4-5 years.
There were major graphical glitches due to my ATI card - various bits of text would randomly become rendered across the sky, and I think it was also effecting the responsiveness of the cursor, making the game quite unplayable at times. I did test it on another machine with another video card, and it was quite a bit better, but the controls still had quite a sluggish feel to them.
The game itself looks fairly uninspiring. It has all the familiar features of an RPG, however there's just nothing there which is very inspiring. The ability to customise your spells (ie, higher range but higher mana cost, or make another one with lower range and less mana, etc etc) is a great idea, but in game it just ended annoying me due to the user interface being a bit unintuative. The other thing that sounded great about Ryzom was the "shard" concept - not the name, but the concept. Basically it meant that everyone was going to be playing in the same world, but the load would be balanced across many servers. I really hope that more MMORPGs of the future start taking this approach, as there really is something quite appealing about everyone playing in different parts of one large virtual universe, compared to the approach of today where the load is split up in to multiple servers, each of which contains a unique instance of the same world. The problem of course is lag, which Ryzom doesn't seem to have fixed either judging by the terrible lag I experienced when I was playing (to the point where they had recently disabled certain merchants and other services as they were inoperable due to lag).
All in all, it was a bit disapppointing. If I could put the 2 main bugs aside (not working through transparent proxies, and the terrible graphical glitches) I would still be walking away feeling very uninspired. Ryzom needs to look more visually appealing to compete with some of the games being released at the moment, and it also needs to pull its playability up a few notches too. It had some nice ideas, but it seems like they've been let down a bit by the execution.
On a completely random note, the icon to run Ryzom looks totally like a weed leaf:
