Well the launch of Settlers of Ganareth has come and gone. But actual game time has been severely limited in my end.

When we pioneers where allowed into the game late last monday it all started with all of us having a bad ini file we needed to delete so the patcher would get a new one that wouldn’t crash the game client. The good thing about that is that we tickled into the game at a relatively low pace and allowed us to at least play for a while. And get back in as the random client crashed happened.

But then the pressure on the login server increased. In addition to 8881 pioneers (give or take) a number of normal Settlers attempted to get into the game (and some reportedly with success – even though they where not supposed to get in until the day later). And as the pressure climbed the login server buckled.

Since then the normal settlers have all been allowed into the game. But the login server never stays up for long. So getting into the game is quite a battle in prime-time. As of this writing I haven’t been online from home since the initial hour or so monday… But then I wasn’t home all tuesday.

As for my initial impression of the game? Well… I’m not sure I have one really. The game client is buggy. But the UI seems to be sufficiently customizable to be usable. But UI settings are not saved if you crash. So you need to quit the game yourself to get it saved… Quite risque since you don’t know if you can get back in.

Apart from that with only 4 FXP levels under my belt I am still only a citizen. I have no class/path skills and I’ve still not really formed an opinion on the game yet. I will say – however – that the scale of the game seems huge. I haven’t been off the n00b island yet. But just flying around on my dragon I managed to get lost right away. I guess some more ingame time will eventually make me more comfortable with my surroundings so that won’t happen so often.

In any event I’ll be making the character page for aspiring caster-of-some-sort ‘Eldarath’ and his pet dragon ‘Catherine’ as soon as I get back into the game and figure out how to make screenshots