Planeshift Enters Open Testing

josePhoenix writes "You may have heard about Planeshift in this article, but now they have finished their period of closed testing and everyone can play/test features! This version of the open source (except the art license) mmorpg includes combat, a much bigger world than the previous version, and many other features that bring it closer to the level of commercial games. The project leader, Luca 'Talad' Pancallo has posted some interesting statistics on the making of Planeshift Crystal Blue on their main page, including that they have 'a virtual team made of about 40 people distributed in 25 countries.' Read the good news and other info about the project, and download the client from this page."

Comments

Game Impression

[ZP-Blight]

This is a beta, so take with a pinch of salt as things may improve.

Stability:
I was able to crash it within 30 seconds by simply opening the config dialog (the in-game one) and pressing the "X" at the top-right section of the dialog in order to close it.

I managed to crash it a few more times in the next 10 minutes just by playing around with the various interfaces.

The User Interface:
The difference between a good game and a great game is by how intuative the user interface is. The user interface here is awful. Everything from the character creation to actual gameplay is unintuative. I know it's far from complete, but we're talking basic stuff here. There's no way to easily understand what part of the user interface is active or not (i.e. mouse highlighting). This is very apparent on the character creation screen.

Game Engine:
The graphics are pretty good all considering. The polygon count on the characters is good, but the landscape is pretty low. Character movement is smooth, but doesn't seem connected to the actual surface they are walking on (when the character walks, it appears as if they are gliding over the surface while their legs are shuffling).

There are frequent mini-freezes as you turn around and walking down long staircases could make you dizzy as the screen jumps so much.

Camera pans are ok, but you can pan right through objects which appears odd.

Conclusion:
I'd give it several more months to mature, especially in the user interface department.