Day 3 started off a little slower than Day 2 as we had 2 patches to download (a total of 340mb), plus Fallanx and myself were quite tired from all the early mornings and late nights (I have a decent excuse, not sure about Fafa though ).

As per the last few days, Fallanx was busy with Fafa TV most of the day, today also saw Aspira start live streaming and Katiepops going back to his roots!

Don't forget to check out our live streams from ArcheAge CBT3:

Fallanx - Live from 7am BST (8am CEST) daily for the whole CBT
Aspira - Live from 12pm BST (1pm CEST) daily for the whole CBT

And their J.TV pages have all the footage thus far saved for your reviewing pleasure!



As today was Katiechops first chance to play, we'll start off with a little bit from him:

"Ok so I had my first chance to test out ArcheAge today and after watching the live streams from Fallanx and Aspira I thought I had seen it all, I was wrong!

As they both had spent a lot of time on Nuian characters I decided to buck the trend (I’m a Scot remember we always buck the trend) and roll an Elf. So 'Le Chops' goes tree hugging mode and rolls a skinny arsed Elf, and they are the perfect example of true elf, slender, fair and well Elf-like, I picked the default 'Priest' skill set (Will, Romance and Love) and went forth."



"The starter zone starts off nice a simple and has you traversing a heavily wooded canyon, the initial quests are relatively simple kill or speak to quests with a few gather and dare I say it climbing quests added to the mix. Nothing grindy and they kept you moving towards the Elf town.

I picked up a horse at level 5 and had some good fun testing it out, the animations are nice and mounted combat was a decent surprise with frontal melee attacks and back kicks which knock down the target, add the fact there is collision detection in to this mix and this could be a whole lot of fun later on."



"As I didn’t have much time today to play I decided to do some exploring and just generally enjoy the scenery. The first Elf town, it was like an ancient fort overgrown and decayed like a forgotten temple in the Vietnam jungle, perched on the side of a cliff overlooking a giant "mother tree" in the centre of a round valley, I must say it was a very impressive setting for some questing.

I got to level 7 in about 1.5 hours with no down time, no big issues, boredom, or grind. It was a nice and enjoyable first outing in ArcheAge with a nice elven feel to it!"



So I’ve been putting this off for far too long and should really tell you a little bit about the Ferres.
Since I’ve been following ArcheAge I’ve been interested in playing this race, it has a very unique and distinctive feel to it.

So I’ve managed to rack up some hours behind the Ferres and started off on Day 1 with what I initially thought was a good class combination (Illusion, Will and Romance), turns out I wasn’t too happy with the way it played. My own fault entirely as I should have picked one of the default class combinations for my initial foray into ArcheAge. Come day 2 I decided to reroll and try again, don’t get me wrong I had fun on day 1 it just didn’t feel right.



Day 2 started off with the usual patching of the client, I decided to roll a ranger based class, in most MMO’s I play healers or ranger magic based DPS classes, so a scout based class is a relatively new experience for me to play. So the patching of day 2 and day 3 saw some huge changes to the Ferres starter zones, new quests were added and some niggly bugs were fixed. So I did the levelling experience again, as I’d done it the day before I flew through the first 7 levels in roughly an hour – the added quests helped with the flow of these first few levels.

At level 7 I started to explore a little bit and found a quest hub I hadn’t seen on the previous day, to my surprise I came across the following NPC:



Lo and behold, it was the class change NPC, if only I had known I wouldn’t have rerolled and would have just changed my class to the default Ranger (Illusion, Wild and Vocation). In fact I’d picked up Romance instead of Vocation when I created the Ranger and chose this time to switch. I noticed you start off the new tree at level 1 again, but it levels up pretty quickly with you – also you don’t unlearn the skills from the previous tree, they just aren’t usable when the tree is not equipped!

Anyway, enough of my ramblings about how I fail at picking a class and sticking with it

On to the juicy bits, Day 1 and 2 levelling were much the same, although I did now notice that mobs were dropping faster and I had some new sexy abilities to boot. One allows me to CC my target inside a giant bubble of water that floats up into the air, another allows me to spring in to the air and shoot down at my target. I must say that I’m not in any way shape or form a Fanboi type, but I think I’m falling in love with this game.



It’s a combination of everything, The quests/story aren’t linear, you’re not forced down a rail as you would be in any Theme Park MMO and it’s been a very long time since I’ve played a Sandbox MMO that actually had class in its own right before the masses had chance to build and create their own content. For example a forest magically appeared near a quest hub on Day 3 that I’d been to on Day 1 of the CBT, it was player planted and came as quite a shock – I did fell some of the tree’s

The story and setting for the Ferres is a perfect combination added to that the small things like the idle animations, I actually feel immersed as a ‘feral cat-lady ranger’ and honestly don’t think I could be impartial playing any other race for the moment as I’d miss not being able to run on all fours, hissing and spitting at other players as I zoomed past!



Thats all for the moment from Day 3, don't forget to check back later for more from ArcheAge CBT3 Day 4