Dynasty Warriors Online: Very, Very, Very First Impression

Okay, loaded up the Closed Beta build, logged in the for the first time…and I am greeted immediately by hokey pronouncements, scintillating sparks as weapons shatter against shields (and other weapons), violations of battlefield physics, and that awesomely anachronistic power ballad

I am home.

Well, sort of.  For something called a “beta” it still seems far more like a game in alpha.  A lot of the interface looks both very clunky and unfinished.  The console games went out of their way to include atmospheric finishes to menu art to help sell the idea that you were stepping into a fantastic setting, but they haven’t got to that point yet, it seems.

The graphics are also require significant optimization.  Despite very few lighting affects or in-depth texture-mapping, the game chugged to halt whenever I hit an enemy soldier (whether there was one, one hundred, or one thousand), diving from a smooth 60+ FPS to less than 5 immediately.  Lowering the graphics settings to the bottom had absolutely no affect.  The admittedly aging desktop seems to have no difficulty rendering any number of soldiers and movements and attacks, as long as I don’t actually hit anything.

I’m going to come back to this, with pictures, once I secure a gamepad of some kind.  One way or the other, DWO seems basically unplayable with a keyboard.