Anyone else playing this? Had a RL friend talk me into getting into this. Maybe it's because I haven't touched MMOs in years, but I'm enjoying a lot of aspects about it. Pretty much, it's a massive sandbox based around gathering/crafting and PvE mixed with a healthy dose of PvP. It all takes place on a single server so unless a zone is over capacity and the game has to create new instances, you'll always see everyone that's in a zone. The economy is also fully open and player driven.
You don't have levels per-se like most RPGs. Rather, you gain "fame" for anything you do. This fame builds up towards unlocking ranks for the various things you can do. Example, you want to craft bows. So you craft up some bows, each one providing fame. Once you reach a certain tier, you unlock the ability to craft higher tier bows while unlocking additional tiers so you can craft them better, as well as a new point on your grid to earn progress towards the next best bow. After getting a ways into it, you'll be able to specialize in crafting a specific type of bow, again, earning benefits to make yourself better at it. It scratches all the right itches for specializing in something and being able to corner a market.
Same principle as above applies to pretty much anything. Want to wear a leather chest, cloth head, and plate feet? Kill stuff while wearing those things to earn fame to then earn the ability to equip the higher tier equipment.
To give an idea of how fame is used on the destiny board, here's a pic that's similar, but not the exact board that is in game now. It's apparently been in beta for nearly 2 years so there's a lot of iterations that they've gone through.
Spoiler: show
Fighting wise, it's sort of simplistic while being fun and decently engaging depending on what you're playing. Some of the builds seem less fun, like an archer I was playing. I didn't have any abilities that really mattered beyond a once per 30 sec zerg ability with buffed arrows so I was just sitting back pewpewing with little input. Swapped to daggers though and suddenly it's much more involved and fun. You could compare it to many of the old top down view RPGs like Ultima, Runescape, maybe even Neverwinter or Buldur's gate, but with less abilities and input. With the game being designed to work on PC and mobile devices, the inputs are fairly simplistic. You've got your ability buttons, other typical UI functions, and that's about it. For targeting, you click/tap. For movement, you click/tap. For picking stuff up, you click/tap.
Speaking of builds, for all intents and purposes, there are no classes. When starting, you're kinda set on the path of a warrior, hunter, or mage, but that's about it. Put in enough work (really, not much at all) and you can run around in wizard robes with a giant axe, or charge into battle with a claymore in leather. The only thing to keep in mind is that abilities come from your equipment. This makes some swaps really important. Suddenly, instead of a DPS axe guy just being decked out in full plate cause why not, he could toss on some cloth shoes and have access to blink to close gaps quickly. An assassin could put on a cloth helmet to get access to a root spell to keep an enemy close while they finish em. Stuff like that really opens up the builds.
PvE and PvP are interesting. With it being fully open world, you can be in a dungeon with an alliance of 10 people and have some other alliance roll in and fight you. I haven't done much PvP, but in the higher stakes zones (red and black zones on the map), it's open PvP with full looting. The other zones (blue and yellow), looting isn't turned on. Apparently there's some massive push for guild's to control zones though I don't know what all benefits that provides. You're also able to build crafting centers in towns and captured zones that others can use for a price.
May be important to mention, but it is a paid game. That said, it's $30 with options to pay in $60 or $100 for additional bonuses. Something to keep in mind is a subscription isn't required. Once you pay your initial $30, you own the game and can play whenever. They function off of a "premium" system though. Essentially premium supplies a lot of bonuses. Technically speaking, you can play without these bonuses, but realistically speaking, you'd be mad to do so. Bonuses include +50% fame, +50% silver, focus points (allows you to up HQ chance and material refunds when crafting), learning points (allows you to instant learn something on the destiny board once it's 30% complete). -50% AH fees, the ability to buy a private island, etc. You can buy premium status with ingame currency, and at least at the moment, it's fairly easy to do so. You also start with 1 free month of premium (I think? my friend bought me a $30 pre-release pack that came with it and at this moment, that's still available and the cheapest option to join the game) and 80% of the currency needed to buy another month.
Overall I'm really enjoying it. There's a lot more to the game than I could put here really. I'm not super hardcore into it like some people are I'm sure, but I'm having fun just being a crafter/gatherer guy that can go into dungeons occasionally and still contribute. If it's something anyone might be interested in, feel free to check out the site.