My thoughts so far

It's difficult to really get into the game right now since it shuts down so soon after the game servers open up, and not really getting anything experience wise makes fighting kind of unsatisfying, but I realize this is just play testing so I know that isn't how it will be once the game is actually released so here are my thoughts with release 1o.

1) I remember one thread had brought up about the instances, and they don't bother me a lot, it does take away a little bit of the immersion since you can kind of avoid a lot of stuff while running in the 'table top game map' (my own term). I do like how UO was able to have people traveling across the lands the entire time and since sota is still not close to release the instancing to the table top map could become less later, but the instancing doesn't seem too annoying because you are still able to do a good deal and can still access the first person traveling in many areas.

2) I see some complaining about the use of the card decks, I think that will be more fun once the game is live, right now in the testing phase it is tough to really try out the decks and how different ones work...at least for me because I haven't gotten a huge amount of time playing. I tried archery and I couldn't use ranged fighting, the only shots I ever made were fire arrows or something. With swords I was able to actually fight, but it seemed with archery, unless you were casting arrows you never did any actual archery. All in all I like the decks, I still think it makes the fighting much more random and not just spamming one move or spell repeatedly. You have to actually pay attention and think as the cards are drawn.

3) Character creation, so far there isn't a whole lot to it, which for me...I'm fine with that, to me the games have gotten too complicated with the really fine points of a characters face and body. I enjoy mostly just being able to change the most noticeable things like color of hair, eyes, skin, hair style, body markings...things like that. Most of the time you wont notice after the actual character creation how big the chin is or how round or square the face is, how deeply inset the eyes are....that stuff may be noticeable when zoomed in on the character creation screen when that's all that there is, but when playing I don't think fine details add much. I'd rather have a lot of choices in the most noticeable details than lots of fine detail areas, but few choices for each.

That's all I really got to try out, I tried to go to the PaxLair event, but I couldn't find it. So far I'm still really happy with the product, it is so different than the regular mmos of today, it makes the character feel more personal with small additions in the game like the journal entries written as 'I learned this today from ___'. I finally got to try Archeage myself and I don't even pay any attention to the quests, I just click until the npcs shut up and hand me the reward. SoTA you need to pay at least a little bit of attention by searching for the key words and asking about them. This is why I, like many others, enjoy Richard Garriott games... to put it bluntly... they have a bit of intelligence to them. As I've said in another post, it may not have 'WOW COOL' factors like other games, but those things get very old relatively early into playing. This game has great potential to hold your attention for a long period of time, and keep you thinking which is very important for immersion. Graphics don't make immersion, substance does.