Ok, because I still believe this is a great game I will try to help you guys but telling how I experienced my first few days (this is like my 6th here or something). I will just write down I how I experienced it and leave it up to you if that's how it's intenteded or not.
On a side note, English isn't my first language and I'll be typing fast so forgive my spelling/grammar mistakes please.
*Warning: long post ahead*
MD's description of some MMORPG-ranking list intrigues me and makes me join. After joining I am immidiatly intrigued even more. The game started of great: lots of story, great atmosphere, etc. But then then confusion started, and never ended. It all began during the shade story. After each screen you could select principles to upgrade and I thought I could thereby affect the story. So when I ended up inside the cube and everything was dark I selected 'imagination' so I could perhaps imagine sight/objects/etc. But AFAIK now the principles and the story have nothing to do with each other.
Some time later I end the cube story (and got negative rewards for playing with the girl... which appears so random) and suddenly end up in the middle of a festival. Now I CAN make choices in the story but it doesn't really make any sense... [i]at all[/i]. A clown hits me, I hit back and then go to a tree. Uhm... ok... how random can it be? I know that there's nothing random to this game but I have absolutely NO idea what the story is about or even if there is any story at all or if it just a random scenes with random questions with random outcomes which leads to even more random events.
Then of course, there's the free roaming play, which is great. But also quite confusing at times. The Berserker quest was a great puzzle and not that hard to beat; at least it made some sense. But today something totally random happened again: I visited the GoE and saw that a portal was open. I had no idea why or where it would lead to but I clicked on it because it was something new, and I got the feeling that I should click on everything what is new.
Anyway, I ended up in some random house. I clicked on a drawer which gave me some text about chasing demons and a kidnapped princess and whatnot. I had NO IDEA what the story was about or why I was reading it in a drawer, but played along anyway and it appeared to be some puzzle to reach hell in the fastest way possible. After some tries I quit and clicked on another drawer... apparently that was part of the story which occurred before the part I had just read. Same thing happened with the bed.
All in all, I had never been so confused. I was teleported to a random house with some half-finished story which I accidently started reading in the wrong order while having no idea if I should even be reading it in the first place. I really wanted to get back to what I was doing before (working on some player quests, they only thing which DO make sense) so I exited the house. After about 200 AP spend on a very confusing trip through forests, empty houses, past wells, through empty villages and churches I finally found my way out of there.
So, 1.5 day later I am back at the GoE (which doesn't have a portal anymore, thank God) and still have no idea wtf just happened... In the mean while I am still reading one paragraph of story each day, getting random positive of negative awards for it and always choosing the 24 hour wait for +90% skill bonus. The story doesn't make sense (as far as I can tell there isn't even a story, there are just random scenes), the world makes little sense (unless you go through a portal, then everything is [b]m[/b]ucked up), the only thing which is clear, well-done and has kept me going are the player quests.
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This is my experience of the game...