I played Horizons back during the open beta. Had a guild all set up with crafting assignments set and just waiting for launch. But when I finally got into beta I saw how buggy it was and how you could run for what seemed like forever exploring and never see a single mob. This game was a dream come true until I experienced it. I decided not to buy the game and canceled my preorder. And saw the game basically die to a premature launch.
Then I waited for a free trial to see if they fixed the game and when they finally offered a free trial it required a credit card. And after hearing the horror stories with billing was reluctant to give my credit card information for a free trial.
Now a Free to play option is available so I decided to give the game a try again. Game installed fine then the patcher took forever (about 2 hours) for 132+ Megs. Which to me seems insane. Got to Character creation and messed around with creating a dragon just for the fun of it and then started creating my human. I noticed that the human customizations are severely lacking compared to the Dragon customizations, one of the things I was hoping had changed from the beta but had not. Then went to hit next after making my toon look like I wanted it to and the game crashed.
Started the game back up and the game wanted to scan all the files to check for updates and was taking a while so I unchecked the scan option but got an error stating that since I did not have a character created I had to scan all the files. After quite a while I was allowed to create a character again and got it created and started the tutorial. I chose scout and skipped some of the basic help topics and went to kill the first 3 mobs for the quest. After finding the right distance to be able to attack with the bow I let fire and was disappointed to see that the scout arches the shots instead of straight shooting like you would use at such short ranges. It just looks stupid to arch the arrow. Continued to shoot until the mob got close and noticed that my health was going down faster than the mob's health so I switched to sword and shield and still the mob killed me. So I abandoned that quest and selected warrior and went out to kill the same mob again I died to the mob and became frustrated and quit for the night.
How is it that the very first mob you are supposed to kill is able to kill you so easily? I looked and didn't find any special attacks or skills besides magical defense that I could use.
I will try again tonight. I want so very much to like this game. I had such high hopes for the game when I first found out about it before it was released. I will be a paying customer if I find that the game is fun and not as messed up as it was in beta.