So Cyrene just finished coming out and everyone made the mad dash to the new planet as soon as the servers went back online. And with many... Every other release of anything in EU it was confronted by a barrage of complaints from the very (constructively) critical player base. It's cool, opinions are what make this universe go round, or something along those lines. So here I am to give you all my opinion based on my first impression of Planet Cyrene.
When I first entered the planet, I noticed that it was actually running smoother than I expected. Especially with the huge group of players gathered at the starting point that would usually lag the hell out of my Mac. I didn't crash at all except for one instance that I'll get to later. One of the first things that I noticed was that we started with all the TP's on the map. Not something that most other planets do, but hey it makes exploring cheaper and faster. There are some strange particle effects over a lot of the camps which cause lag and don't really do much. They do look kinda cool tho. The TT weapons look pretty nice. They don't use much ammo, have high rates of fire, but decay fast. You can buy a flamethrower at the TT that I haven't used, but I saw someone else using it. I never would have expected a flamethrower... The TT armour doesn't have the greatest stats but looks great. I expect the uber armour and guns to look sweet as well. The terminals look pretty cool too.
I started looking for quests right away. For a planet based on story telling there aren't much but I read somewheres that this isn't the full release of Cyrene. One of the quests told me to go but an item from the TT, a something scorpion, which from what I could see doesn't exist... Maybe I'm just blind. But that's just one quest. The other ones I found were introductions to mining and hunting. I can't wait until they start releasing there feature quests/stories. They seem to be building up for something nice.
Once I was done talking to all the NPC's at the starting camp I started going down the TP list one by one to see what this planet has to offer. Most of the places look great. Well modelled landscapes and shorelines give each island it's own atmosphere. There's an island up northeast if I remember correctly that has a old style city in it. I forget what the TP name is but anyways. I did a bit of running around in it and was glad to see a place that resembled an actual city for once in EU! It even has a coliseum in it. I hope to see that turned to a pvp arena or something. I think they did a great job with that city and a good job overall. A bit more exploring brought me to picturesque waterfalls, dark gloomy caverns, a volcano, beautiful beaches, and much more landscape than I have the time or patience to write about. Good level design is an important part of a good game.
A few strange things that I noticed.
You can swim in the volcano's lava pit, and if you swim to the bottom you can actually walk around on the bottom of the pit. It may be cool to see strange volcano mobs that live in the lava, where you can only hunt them if you have armour that protects against burns to enter the lava.
One of the TP's has a group of huge yellow spheres floating over it. You can fly up to them and with a little handy work you can actually fly inside them. I'm not sure what there for, but there is some land with trees inside. It looks kinda like the floating islands off the movie avatar...
One of the TP's has the thickest spawn of mobs that I've ever seen. If you had the misfortune of going there you may have ran into some problems. At first I thought it would be a perfect place to death skill since all the mobs are around the revive terminal. But it is at this point that my game started crashing. I could'n even stay on long enough on safe mode to get away. I eventually spawned my Sleipinir and flew away. They might want to re design that TP.
One of the TP's. Forgotten Hill. Is out in the ocean and actually doesn't exist. You can't TP there from an other TP and if you swim there you wont find anything at all. Even if you swim to the bottom of the ocean. I guess they forgot forgotten hill :P
All the mobs are low level. They like everything else look pretty cool. it seems like you can kill most of them with an Opalo and some pixie armour. Even the really big mobs don't go over level 11. That's actually good for someone like me. Or maybe I didn't explore enough to find the tough mobs.
One of the bad things I noticed about the mobs it that they used some mob sounds from Planet Calypso. Common guys, get your own sounds. Some of the humanoid mobs actually use avatar emote sounds from what I seen.
The camps are filled with cool looking machines and vehicles. Hopefully we will have drivable models in the future.
In the end Planet Cyrene is a really nice looking place with not much to do on just yet. Hopefully there not to long with releasing all those quests and stories that the planet is supposed to be based on. I'm really hoping for big interactive quests ranter than the same old kill 100 of these things for a token crap that they have everywhere else.
Anyways that's my first impression of the place. It's not 100% bad, and I wouldn't label it as a failure. I'll give it a 60% grade. Not bad compared to most of my high school years XD But I would like you hear you opinions. Please post if I missed something, or if something I said was totally wrong.
Nicolas Radioactive d'Entremont