The beginning of the March break I had the opprotunity to be in on the stress test beta for The Matrix Online. For any of you that live under rocks, this is the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) based in the Matrix universe. The game takes place right after the third movie, during the tedious peace that now exists between the machines and mankind.

Overall, I found the game to be interesting. I thought that there was quite a bit of story potential there, which is refreshing. They’re making a big deal over the fact that the game’s story will evolve and change, and that people who play the game will be the ones that drive the story. No longer (we’re told) will the story move AROUND all of the players, but the players will help to move the story forward. That’s something I wasn’t able to test in the beta, but I’m pretty stoked about that possibility.

From what I could test, I was pretty happy. The controls are… interesting. You run around and such as you would expect, but the fighting system is both more restrictive and more open then you would expect. It’s restrictive because once you enter into combat you’re basically limited to 4 basic attacks, plus a few special attacks that can be aquired. You’ve got a fast jab, an strong attack, a dodge, and something to regenerate your “concentration”. Those will be taken against whatever basic attack your opponent is using, and naturally some attacks are better at “beating” other attacks, while some do more damage. That’s pretty restrictive, but it makes it really nice for players on modems (yes, there still are a few players on modems out there) (Yes, I know its a multi-gigabyte game, and it’ll take them literally days to simply patch their games, but at least they can play it eventually). The openness comes from the special attacks and something called “ability code”.

Remember in The Matrix when they wanted to learn how to do something, all they had to do is call their operator and ask how? Same idea here. You can learn new abilities that you aquire (usually at a price). This seperates The Matrix from every other MMORPG that I know of, in that if you want to kick some ass, you load up the ability code for ass kicking. You want to go around healing people, you load up the healing ability code. You’re only limited by your available “memory” (which stops you from being everything at once). I found the idea that you weren’t ever limited to be very refreshing.

The missions are hard to judge on how good they are. When I played them they were mostly extremely buggey, which sucked. For example, mission 1, you had to go to a specified building, go to a specific floor, and talk to 3 people. For the first half of the beta, those people weren’t there, so the mission was uncompleteable. I’m hoping that’s fixed soon (up until a day or two ago I was still hearing from people having problems with Non Player Characters not wanting to follow them as they were supposed to in missions).

From what I could see the graphics were solid, if not a little bit “blah” (though, that’s what you’d expect, the movies made a big deal of making the world “blah”). I’m probably not the best one to ask about the graphics, as my computer could just barely run the game (seriously, there was a black square where my character would be because my graphics system couldn’t handle it), but my graphics system is really crappy, anyone with a good graphics card can probably handle this game well.

I’d definately pick this game up if not for the $15 a month fee. If the fee was a more reasonable $5 or $10 it’d be easier to justify with, “well, I’ll enjoy this more then a movie” but, as it is, the game itself is $60 and then there’s $15 a month on top of that, that seems a bit steep to me for ANY game.

EDIT: My bad, just checked out Future Shop - $69.99 for the game itself, and a 60 day game card costs $39.99, so, we’re talking $20 a month. That’s more then my old dialup access cost me.