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Anarchy Online is still alive and kicking, and they've announced Lost Eden, their newest expansion. Shacknews had the notice, noting its thirty-dollar price tag atop your paid subscription rate.

Some time ago Anarchy Online made headlines with their free online play offer, and it's actually still in effect. You can download their base client called "Anarchy Online Classic", start playing, and then get peppered with emailed offers to upgrade to the expansion packs at pretty reasonable prices.

I tried Anarchy Online back when they started their free playtime offer, and after a short while ran away from the game. What drove me away? Let me first be kind by saying good things, and then listing the problems.

The Good
I really wanted to play a good sci-fi MMO. I'd played Ultima Online back during its beta and the first couple of months (when I quit in disgust over their early instability problems), and had played Earth & Beyond, quitting before it ultimately folded because I couldn't get into big enough groups quickly enough to have an enjoyable game experience. I was playing Final Fantasy XI at the time AO came around with their offer, if memory serves. Funcom's game was doing some innovative things for its time, pioneering heavily instanced areas that could be as solo-friendly as you wanted via mission kiosks that let you set some sliders for difficulty and rewards and then choose from a small set of sample missions to do. Groups could share a mission by duplicating the mission key the kiosk gave you for a minor fee. These things seemed interesting to me, and for a little while it kept me busy.

There seemed to be a lot of game there. The online forums and collections of stats and how-to's talked about the different professions, pets, weapon types, nanos (magic-like abilities), vehicles, and more. I just had a hard time learning how to actually play it.

The Bad
The four things that killed it for me were the user interface, no help, the bugs, and their deceptive selling tactics.

1. The User Interface
The UI on this game was hideous and slug-slow even though the graphics ran moderately well on my rig at the time. I played Earth & Beyond back in 2003 and found its clean UI to be quite nice, but AO's UI was blocky, made vital information hard to find, and was not in the least bit customizable.

You might argue that the expansions cleaned up the UI, and I think I did read something about it getting better, but why they wouldn't fold those advances into a newer base client and then distribute THAT to sell the game is beyond me. I couldn't trust that the game was going to get better or that the UI would become servicable, so I walked away.

I mean really, if your UI is going to confuse a college-educated experienced gamer, software developer, and computer user, you have really done something wrong.

Coincidentally, this is something that made World of Warcraft's UI feel so good that it seemed like I could hear angels singing softly and sweetly to me as I played the game. That and the perfected morphine drip of rewards it spools out, but that's another story.

2. No help
The game had an absolutely terrible, slow, HTML-based help system that had no built-in tooltips for the UI, no help teaching me the basics of how to do a mission, read the maps, find where a quest needs me to go, and a crash-prone client. That's not exactly a shining example of something I'd like to pay for. I think they expected me to sit on a chat channel and plead for assistance on how to do the most basic things.

The game itself seemed very deep, with lots of skills and crafting options and places to go. But like the tree falling in the forest that nobody hears, if I never could learn how to do 90% of it, it is as if the game never had those features. Even when someone was patient enough to stop and try to teach me, my endless stream of questions on it wore their patience thin very quickly. These people had been playing for a long time. They'd learned the hard way from others just as I was being forced to do.

It was just plain barbaric.

3. The bugs
The game was terribly buggy, from a crash-prone client right down to the core gameplay. I'd take an instanced mission, fight my way through some tough areas to get to the goal, and spend dozens of minutes scouring the level for a hard-to-see gizmo that could be stuck somewhere in the level geometry. Forums told many tales of woe where quest goals would be lost, invisible, stuck somewhere else, or just not appear, keeping me from getting the reward the mission offered.

I even had a GM help me out a few times. The superpowered guy would zip around at super-high speed, pumped up on his nano enhancements, whipping around the dungeon and trying to find the thing I'm supposed to find. Even he would give up, declare it a dud mission, and send me on my way. Oh well, try another one, was the message. I was flabbergasted. How could they put out a game that just didn't work? People PAY for this?

3. Their Deceptive Selling Tactics
Every week without fail I would receive at least one offer from Funcom pleading with me to upgrade to an expansion. Sometimes the offers would be ok, and sometimes they would frankly be phenomenal values. Get just one or two expansions for 20 bucks total, or in some cases get all of them for 30. But in every email, without fail, they did their best to almost completely hide the fact that you had to subscribe to the game.

Now I KNEW that this was a for-pay game, I was a grownup, I'd played these things before, but the sales pitch hid it. It was just plain deceptive, and it told me that they were either trying to fool newbies to the MMO scene into buying the expansions and then sneak in the subscription, or that they didn't think their product could compete on its merits.

Have you tried it?
Have you played Anarchy Online? Have you played any of its expansions? Is it any better now?

From Aeropause.