I played the shit out of the beta this weekend. Here are a few of my rambling thoughts.
I don't know how long I played, but I'd guess in the 20 hour plus range.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... =614121108
Yes, the beta was pretty limited, 2 of the 3 base of operation wings were closed in the beta, as was everything outside of 4 skills, 1 story mission, 2 or 3 side missions and one quarter of the Dark Zone.
Performance
The world did look pretty awesome. I don't know that I saw many similar looking buildings or props. The weather effects were pretty too, from day/night cycles, to light fog, to an almost blinding white out.
I think I ran with the default settings, mostly high. I didn't run any FPS monitor but I honestly didn't notice any dips or tears or any graphical issues.
A few times when joining another player that required a server transfer I was greeted with a fun message about the service not being available and getting kicked back to the title screen. That was probably the biggest irritant. Transitions to and from the DZ are masked by a short walking through a door, or hopping over a wall animation but it really is seamless. Even a few times I was transferred to a new DZ server, you get a message about being transferred in X seconds, and you can virtually not tell that you were moved servers, it was that smooth. I was fucking impressed.
The Cheating
From day 1 there was reports of super simple cheating possible. Honestly I saw it once. I was extracting loot from the DZ and someone on my team was taking damage from nowhere and it wasn't telling him who was killing him either. He went down I think 3 times before we got the loot extracted and ran and was fine after that. That's all I experienced.
I heard it was simple to modify HP, Ammo and similar values to anything you wanted but never saw that happen in my experience. I heard of people not intentionally cheating too, where a desync would happen between the client, the server and other players and you would appear as invisible but would be running around with other people and still able to attack them. Magus and I experienced that on the last night, he saw me stuck on a repel line but I was next to him shooting. But we asked other players around us and they said they saw 2 people standing there so. /shrug
For the PVE
A lot of the city felt empty, not too many civilians wondering, not many random encounters. I hope they expand upon this for the release. It would have been nice to see more of the PVE side quests to get a better feel for the types we would experience, but the couple they had were different. One had us repairing an antenna array by climbing a building, killing some guys, hitting a button, killing some more guys and hitting another button. Pretty standard. Another had us trying to locate (Batman Arkham style) a person for someone. Finding these Echos around the area which show what happened previously there. Kinda neat. Ended up wondering around between 4 of them, killing one group of guys, and finding the person, a bit different feeling and I liked it. It wasn't a standard thing you'd have seen a hundred times already.
There were a few encounters, where a group was holding off against enemies and you were to murder the shit out of them. Pretty quick and standard. Gave ya something to do, and that's about it.
For the PVP (Dark Zone)
I have to give it up to TechDJ and Magus, when I grouped with them in the DZ, or even with a few of the nicer groups of people I joined up with when randomly matchmaking, I had a blast.
I think once I had the two available yellow tier weapons the one DZ vendor offered I stopped worrying about being killed and the game opened up a bit more at that point. It didn't really matter if I had gone rogue and died, I was having fun at that point. But at the same time I was still hitting all the DZ vendors to see if they had a slightly better weapon holster or glove or weapon mod just to get the little bit more DPS or HP.
I didn't really care to wonder around solo in the DZ, not really for fear of getting mugged, which that maybe happened once or twice randomly, I don't really remember at this point. It was just pretty boring soloing the NPCs or running past other players not caring what they are doing.
While it was annoying to get ganked trying to extract some loot and almost having it on the chopper after waiting the minute and a half after signaling for extraction because anyone for no real reason could jump you and kill you, granted they would then be marked as a rogue agent and show up on everyone's map for a short time. It's actually tense moments like that where you have an upgrade on your back that your trying to get out of the DZ that makes it worth while. Because while you died and lost what you were carrying because the person that murdered you grabbed it, you can try to track them down and take you gear back. And that is the exciting part. You win some and you lose some.
So I think the DZ really shines when you are with even one other person and you can work together to take out the NPCs or even Rogue agents that were murdering innocents.
So while I haven't pre-ordered yet, I think I will be soon. And probably even the gold version to get the additional DLC. I hope some other ATG members join in, it'll be fun.