Thanks to features like Anarchy Online's mission system, you'll never, ever find yourself at a loss for something to do. Your character can accept a randomly generated mission from any of the mission kiosks located all over Rubi-Ka at any point in time. Once you've accepted a mission, you must locate the mission area (which may be in a house, a cave, or a secret passage), enter it, and accomplish your objective to obtain your reward, which may consist of either lots of experience points or lots of anarchy online credits --plus weapons, armor, nanoformulas, and more. Currently, the game features a number of simplistic mission types that might require you to meet with or assassinate a character, recover an item, or use an item on a fixture. You can customize the difficulty, types of enemies, and type of reward you'll receive from any mission and perform them alone or with friends by having your character purchase a mission key duplicator for a few ao credits. Once you enter a mission, you'll find enemies that may be easy or difficult to defeat (depending on the difficulty level you selected). You'll also find treasure chests and doors that may be unlocked, locked, or trapped, as well as secret doors.
At their very best, Anarchy Online's missions are fun (and profitable) dungeon hacks that can be enjoyed without having to deal with the overcrowding that plagues the highly trafficked dungeons of other online RPGs. The game's missions recall the dungeons of classic node-based first-person role-playing games such as The Bard's Tale and Wizardry. Unfortunately, the game's missions aren't polished some walls and doorways in some missions can sometimes create a strange and blurry "hall of mirrors" visual effect onscreen. In addition, some enemies may actually attack you through walls out of your line of sight--though you can retaliate through walls, which can make for a strange-looking fight indeed. But neither of these problems changes the fact that, when you can get past the game's technical issues and get into a mission, they're a perfect way for solo players or small groups to adventure gainfully without having to worry about competing with other players to find monsters to fight for experience and loot, or having to wait in line to hunt rare monsters that leave specific items behind when defeated. And many missions that are set on easier difficulty settings can be completed within 30 minutes to an hour, which--lag and connectivity problems notwithstanding--makes a brief session of Anarchy Online easy to fit into your schedule, in contrast to the endless hunting and "camping" (remaining in one place to fight the same monsters) of other online RPGs.
Anarchy Online also offers a completely unprecedented amount of content geared specifically toward players who don't just want to fight and loot all the time. It's even open-ended enough to let creative players stage all sorts of social events, including fashion shows, rave dance parties, arts-and-crafts trade shows, and more. And these social elements--and player interaction and conflict, along with missions and faction affiliations--will become even more important and useful when the game's four-year story begins this fall. Anarchy Online's story was devised by Funcom designer Ragnar Tornquist, who previously created the story for the superb graphical adventure game The Longest Journey, and it will change dynamically depending entirely on players' actions.
So is Anarchy Online a truly great game? Yes. It's the best-looking online role-playing game out there, and it offers a truly enjoyable and varied play experience that in many ways is far more sophisticated than other online RPGs and much easier to fit into your schedule. But is it also still really buggy and unstable? Yes, unfortunately, it's that as well. Buy the game now and you'll most likely encounter lag and frame rate problems, and you may not even be able to register properly. But given the game's significant progress after release, its already extremely enjoyable content, and its upcoming four-year story, Anarchy Online will clearly only get better and better in the coming weeks and if it can conquer its technical problems, Anarchy Online will be the very best online role-playing game around.
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