The first day of AA has been a blast! A few blips here and there with server issues and such but overall relatively smooth. I've had a great time getting started with this game.
Day 1 Overview
There was a mad dash to get your housing location, lots of questing, some dungeon running, a bit of "stealing" and a whole lotta PvP ensued! Be sure to check out my ArcheAge live
stream to get in on the action.
Housing Dash
So one of the first things a lot of people wanted to do was place stake their claim on the vacant land. Player housing is a huge part of the ArcheAge experience and having your piece of land is going to get this party started. You have to get to level 10 to get the quest for your scarecrow which is the first thing you can place that claims a piece of land. So you can imagine, everyone rushed to level 10, which only takes about 30 minutes if you know what you're doing, got their scarecrow and rushed to their coveted land spot.
I was lucky enough to get my farm and an actual house laid out on a nice spot overlooking the water!
Questing
As with any new MMO launch, there was a lot of questing to do. For the most part questing, even with the absurd amount of people online went fairly smooth. A few hiccups appeared at some key bottle neck quests in which there is a single item to update it yet a hundred or more people needing to get it. In some cases, lines were formed. In other cases there was just a riot of people gathered around the item all spamming their buttons hoping they'd win out on this spawn.
A tip: Skip quests like these and come back.
Dungeon Runs
The first dungeon is available at level 18 and can be run multiple times. You only need three players to do the dungeon and don't necessarily need a healer/tank if you can work well with your teammates. I was able to run the dungeon several time getting some key pieces of gear. Dungeon gear is highly coveted and not replaced with any haste.
"Stealing" and a Whole Lotta PvP!
This is the bread and butter of ArcheAge. I'm working on putting together a video of a major heist/PvP event we took part in late last night. One of our guild members was exploring the mountains and came across a dense forest of player planted trees that were about to be ready for harvesting.
We grouped up as many of us as we could and made our way out there. We intend on grabbing as many of these trees as possible. While out there, we ran into the people who planted this forest and they warned us not to take their trees.
Well, we're a bit stubborn and didn't listen to them. We flagged ourselves for faction PvP killing and took them out. Little did we know, they had a group of 25-30 players from the opposite faction hiding in the forest waiting to harvest the trees. They rushed us and we had ourselves a nice little skirmish.
While being vastly outnumbered, we were able to steal about half of the trees they had planted (which was A LOT) and got ourselves a lot of kills in the process. It was quite funny how afraid they were to come down and engage us while we just kept chopping away at their trees. They were afraid we would win and they would lose out on all of their trees. The odds were ever in their favor as they boasted numbers in a ratio of 3:1 compared to us, yet I feel we came out the victors with getting kills and bringing in a boatload of wood for our guild mates to use for crafting.
Come Join the Fun
It's not too late to join the head start for ArcheAge and if you're still not sure, the game goes live on Sept. 16th and is free to play. Be on the look out for video from the little skirmish we had and here's hoping to some more lively battles in the future!~
