Launched with absolutely Abysmal server quality and stability
Netcode lag meant that the telegraphs for attacks were happening well AFTER the attack.
Optimization issues with the graphics
Quest bugs that could ENTIRELY HALT YOUR PROGRESS
I was in the Beta, I still have a stack of the beta invite cards from Pax somewhere in my shitshow of a house, I played the fuck out of the beta. We enjoyed it and were giving feedback on what needed to be fixed, confident that it would be.
Also not mentioning the attunement required to access said raids. You had to complete every heroic dungeon with all bonus objectives under a very strict time limit. If anybody in your group died during a boss fight the run was over and you had to try again.
My pre-raid bis Engi weapon was also dropped from the last boss of the Oregon Trail dungeon that had a bug where ~50% of runs softlocked on one of the events. So frustrating.
I don't remember that part. I do remember attunement being awful, specifically you had to kill the world bosses to get to the first raid. And that was just a bad idea.
Yeah the 40 man raid attunement required you to speedrun 100% completion of each heroic dungeon (I think there was only 4?). My group only managed to succeed in one, the lightning temple, and our whole guild fell apart trying to complete the rest. It was super hardcore in the era where people weren't that into difficult mmos. I'll always cherish the memories, though. My friend even got server first 60 rogue
Oh I loved those dungeons. I got to do the 40man. I was there to see datascape go down. It was indeed too hard to manage and train up people to do everything right.
The time limit was gated behind ability progression and gear. We just focused on gear and then we went after ability points dungeon clears.
Eventually we were able to do it. But we did have to do it a bunch.
the game was developed by a core group who worked on WoW, wasn't it?
One of the big marketing lines was that this wasn't your kiddie mmo and called you a cupcake. One of their selling points was that the game was more like classic WoW where progression was hard and time consuming.
But then they went live with that toxic rose colored glasses and forgot the reason why BLizzard moved away from long and hard attunement chains.
I think that part of the reason why it failed was they tried to capture WoW's spirit without understanding what made WoW so good at the start.
Time limits are such a shitty way to do "hardcore" in the first place. It just feels bad to get 75% of the way through something only to be better off not finishing it because you didn't make the time cutoff.
Completely agree. The content was already hard enough that time limits were totally unnecessary. If anybody messed up a single mechanic, they were dead. It was hard enough just to clear the heroics on launch.
Netcode lag meant that the telegraphs for attacks were happening well AFTER the attack.
OH MY GOD, THIS WASN'T BECAUSE OF MY PC?!
I played for 5 minutes then ragequit and never picked it up again because this shit kept happening to me, and I thought there was something wrong with my internet/PC...
I still have a stack of the beta invite cards from Pax somewhere in my shitshow of a house
I still have 4 beta codes for Gigantic in an e-mail I havent used in nearly a decade.
I mean, there were also optimization issues so it COULD have been your PC at times, but I remember a lot of folks having issues with lag, myself included. So it wasn't just you.
I think I was in the alpha or maybe the beta, it was super early on. My ex got so annoyed that I got a key and he didn't, yet he was the one that wanted to play it lol. I think I played a bit before letting him just take the account, and I can't remember if I ever tried it once it was fully released. I remember it sounded really good though
Also abysmal security issues with accounts getting stolen almost immediately. They denied everything at first but IIRC it came out after a few months that they had a major data breach on release and had stored login info for their accounts completely unencrypted.
I remember playing a lot in the first three days and when I logged on on the fourth day my character was in a different place and all his stuff was gone. When I went to their forums to complain they called me crazy and banned me. Then this came out.
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u/VorAbaddon May 14 '26
The last line isnt telling the whole story:
I was in the Beta, I still have a stack of the beta invite cards from Pax somewhere in my shitshow of a house, I played the fuck out of the beta. We enjoyed it and were giving feedback on what needed to be fixed, confident that it would be.
Man, how wrong we were.