This Game Has a Great crafting system, Interesting skill leveling system, and the taming system is great.
Now as for the negatives;
1. Town layout is poorly thought out, such that in some of the towns, Players can just Gank you while walking around, and completely avoid guard patrols, while doing so.
This is Exacerbated by The Fact that Guards in towns don't aggro based on line of sight but, also have a pretty small aggro zone, smaller than some of the hostile NPCs by a noticeable amount.
This means a player can gank you while in town, while you can see the guards clearly, and are not very far away from said guards, and they will at times just stand there and do nothing while this happens.
2. The games hostile NPC layout is also not well thought out either, With bandits and other mobs, Right at the entrance of some of the starting towns, after leaving the starting zone.
This results in a situation where they attack you when you try to leave town your starting town in around 1/3 of the starting towns.
Said Mobs, are much stronger than a max level player, with the best gear and tames possible out of the starting zone.
Also, Yes I did grind to max level, and did grind every skill that can be obtained in the starting zone to max level too, before leaving the starting zone, Tamed a bear and trained it to the highest level possible, and I did make sure to craft the best gear that can be obtained there too, to verify this point.
Also, bears from the starting zone are weaker than the weakest normal bears, by alot.
This means if you start in around 1/3rd of the towns, Good luck getting started, because even leaving town is a gamble.
3. While the taming system is great, Mob lay outs are god awful, all through out the game, with them rarely making sense.
So, If you want to tame a mob you need to memorize where they spawn, at around the strength you need, because mob levels are, all over the place, to put it mildly.
It is as if the devs just randomly scattered mob spawns all over the place at random, and didn't really bug test on it too.
What I mean by this is as follows;
You can be walking down the road, and you will at random, on the road, Come across wolves, Bears, and bandits, of seemingly random variations of strength, some 4 to 5 times weaker or stronger than others of the same type, more or less having zone level be all over the place, and this can happen in the period of walking around 5 small houses in distance if they were stacked right next to each other.
This means if you can take a bear, You might not be able to take a bear if you are even Slightly off from the bear spawn you are looking for, because there may be a bear spawn very close by where the bears are 5 times stronger for no Logical reason what so ever, and same goes for just about any mob.
What's more Some times if you place your house on/near a mob spawn, they will randomly spawn in your house, all though that is rare, it happens.
4. Speaking of housing, All the areas are mostly taken, so you have to ride for an hour+ out of most towns to find a place to build your house.
Placement is jank, so If you try to build near a river or lake, on the bank of it, It may spawn half your house in the water, with little indication that is the case until you place it.
What's more, if it looks like you can place the building, due to jank placement mechanics, it might just not be place-able, for no logical reason, with no real proper feed back as to why.
What's more still, Due to said jank placement mechanics, You can sometimes have your house after placement, be inaccessible due to floating stairs or something, with again little to no feed back/indication of that until you place it.
Trying to replace it means you have to re-farm the blue print, and all the mats, as you can not just retrieve them once placed.
With the pvp nature of this game, Good luck building even the most simple of starting homes.
5. Also, The combat system is a bit jank too, at least as far as melee goes.
It is suppose to have a dynamic block system like mount and blade, But it is way more buggy and unresponsive than mount and blade.
Around 1/4th of the time, your block will not be in the direction you blocked in.
For me it was worse, in actual combat, but I sat around doing clear tests for around 30 mins moving the mouse one direction, in an exaggerated way, just to see if it would block in that direction.
It does at most around 3/4ths of the time from what I can tell, and that's under ideal conditions.
This inevitably results in most players I have seen using necromancy, tames, and ranged attacks, and nearly no one actually using melee, outside the starting zone.
6. Also, As far as I can tell, player economy, is decent, but it seems to be somewhat localized per city/town, which forces you to travel to other towns to get many items needed.
Not too bad, if issue 5, and 2+3 were not so glaring.
Traveling to a new area as per "Issue 2" means, you will likely have a hard time due to random mobs, that may be stupid strong just being randomly around every road, so you don't even know when you will encounter them.
Due to "Issue 3" If your horse Dies due to "issue 2" Kinda hard to get a new one if you are not very familiar with the area you are in.
Due to issue 5+Issue 2 Combined, Hoofing it is kinda a hard no, if you want to not die on the way to random NPCs.
This is assuming players don't try to gank you.
7. Farming mats for some gear, May be hard due to the issues mentioned that makes Issue 6, an issue in the first place, Not every area has every mat/type of mat.
So, Travel issues apply even for crafting.
8. The Penalties for ganking other players are nearly nothing, do around 1 quest and you can wipe any bounty you may have had, for around 2 to 3 ganks.
This is assuming the other player cares enough/knows enough about the game to report your gank, if they don't, Then no penalty at all in the first place.
This means ganking new players who don't yet fully understand the PvP rules, is a great way to get no penalty for ganking.
Due to their being no "safe zones" due to issue 1, this results in very few new players staying long, So kind of No real influx of player base, and I can see why.
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This Review was Made after around 300 hours of playtime.
I even ran a small guild for around half a year.
So, I am at least somewhat versed in the game play, even if not the most experienced player.
With the monthly Sub, I would very much not recommend it.
I would have hesitated to recommend it even before the subscription, to anyone other than the most avid PvP Fans, because there are better/comparable offerings out there for PvP, and PvP is the only thing it really does well due largely to the issues I mentioned above.
