I just started a trial game of AD&D Online: Stormreach tonight. The game itself has a small world feel to it so far, not many people playing, or at least in the starting towns.

A friend of mine told me that there was a 10 day free trial, and the download took probably three hours and around 2.4gb of hard drive space. After downloading it, it took another hour or so to install and download close to 1500 updates. They should really update their client more often so that people don't have to wait forever to get updates.

The game starts you out on a small piece of land with a bunch of popup tutorials, and you have to do 2 or 3 little learning quests before going into stormreach.

The game reminds me a lot of Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, another AD&D game. Dark Alliance is an offline game, however.

Although I sort of liked Dark Alliance, it's a game that you can beat in a day and be done with it. It is still a bit fun when I get in that rare mood to play that sort of game again.

The reason I put so much emphasis on comparing the two games is because, in general, I hate Action RPGs. So many past genres like arcade/fighting, arcade adventure, and action adventure are now considered Action RPGs.

Even though this game reminds me a lot of dark alliance, I also do see a lot of influences from Dungeon Siege and Diablo and various other point and click RPGs.

I don't want to be too quickly to judge this game, especially since playing it only a bit over an hour so far, but so far, I don't see much worth paying for. I suppose many people think the same way, because there just didn't seem to be heavy population on the servers.