GAMEPLAY: The Game itself is stellar for it's directional attacks and blocking combat. Skill trees are lightly customizable. Gameplay and non linear, and sandbox play is phenomenal. You can choose to go domesticate horses and sell on a market, hunt for bears to tame for pets, cull PVPers from major cities, Farm materials for a guild or group of friends, or become a criminal in the streets. Community in game is a little rough due to the abuse from servers, but will get better once launch stabilizes. Character creation is impactful to gameplay which is different and welcomed--height and weight matters for stats. Quest content is very low, but always involves travel between main hubs involving travel to influence PVP experiences. Taming and domestication mechanic is very welcomed in an MMO and is very engaging for market/personal use. Item crafting is well built to start, but needs more use-ability due to stat restrictions on higher end items. I.e. The Bow materials cap out at the second tier material, and the top few materials to use are unequippable, and cannot be drawn. Gathering mechanic is a little clunky. To press 'r' to engage on some items is hard to target the hitbox, and you fail due to character undulation. The gathering quantity feels good. The weight capacity is low for carrying on person, but encourages you to get a pet or horse to help carry which is very engaging and fun. The weight gain and loss is engaging and welcomed for survival style genre in an MMO. You can gain or lose weight regularly by choices in food quality. Don't forget to have your tanks and strength bearing characters eat their Salted and Peppered Pork meat and Cream with Butter soup! Cooking customization is great! Gearing and combat equipment related specifics are rough because of restrictions on the 'pool of stat points' you utilize to choose your skills and talents outside of the talent trees. Stat/profession points really need a rework, or add more in to be able to do more effective selections for your character development. I.e. If you want to be a mage with a pet, you forego a significant amount of movement, combat protections, etc, and don't get them back from any skill trees. You can't build a character to do a Dagger / Bow build and have a pet, so you're forced into only ranged or only melee. The playstyle is great, but requires many players in a guild or group to be able to help for even the smallest group combat or task to make up for this shortcoming. One Game Breaking issue is that you can only create one character per account currently, so if servers go down and your character is in the server... you Have to wait to get into the server to delete it to play in the permaverse called 'haven', which is basically a farming simulator and tutorial island... but you can't get there without waiting in the infinite queue for literally 30-38 hours in most cases as of today. They're cleaning that up today supposedly.

DEVELOPERS/COMMUNITY: Lightly put, Launch is rough. I've played through ARK, WoW, ESO, No Mans Sky, Elite Dangerous, and many other sandbox style playthroughs and launches. It's not as bad as the community makes it out to be, because we all want to play and can't, but it still hurts because they weren't ready for more than 10,000 players. Server capacity is currently low and restricted. Devs are engaged and working on solutions in multiplying capacity for servers, but it moves slowly because of it's large-scale-up need. Discord and forum engagement is high from the devs/GMs/Community managers. Communication is also high.