Legends of Equestria - Playtest Notes · 5:26am Aug 9th, 2014
"Legends of Equestria", a pony MMO, is doing an open server test this weekend. (Be sure to uncheck the default "I want to emigrate" button on the login screen. 
) I tried it out once months ago, then once more for a few minutes but found it was crashing/logging out enough to make me give up, and then a bit today with NuclearPony.
It looks nice, especially Cloudsdale Cloudopolis (can't use the canon names), but overall, there's a heavy focus on making something that looks like a pony cartoon, to the exclusion of actually being at all like that world. Buildings are non-interactive except for a few famous spots where teleport portals let you warp to the interior of that library tree or that bakery. NPCs generally utter one canned line of text, or a script error. You'd think getting around would be easy what with such a colorful world, but I gave up on a tutorial quest after 10+ minutes of trying to find the starting NPC in Cloudopolis again. Too bad, because unlike a regular fetch quest it was a bit of world-building. "Ask around and find out why us pegasi are so great!"
The music is nice, but there's very little sound. For their engine, Unity, you can buy a sound effects library for $20. Why are there not at least obvious "you got hit" sounds?
I think you could make something more Equestrian by focusing on the character interaction, than by continuing to focus on imitating standard MMORPG mechanics. Doesn't have to involve super AI, but how about characters with more than one thing to say? Or a backstory or background info readable in the style of "Morrowind"? Or doing anything at all besides standing there?
The game's bugs are so severe that they make the game nearly unplayable. The chat window autoscrolls up to hide the recent conversations, quests don't appear for me in the quest journal, I can't trade on the trade screen, my skills randomly vanished once from the skill bar, and I've been randomly disconnected repeatedly, once in such a way that I wasn't actually booted but was left to realize that the world had stopped being even slightly interactive, with NPCs ignoring me and PCs not moving. Creepy.
So, I'm not impressed yet, other than that the developers managed to build a neat 3D colorful world you can walk around. Or fly around, because us pegasi are the coolest.
I tried really hard not to make a pegasus character. Annnnnnd I failed.
Aside from that another easy fix would be to get the map system up and running so that players could more easily find their way to where they are going.
Maybe need some system where by fans can create venues as there is a lot of dead unused space in this game to the point it reminds me of ARMA 2, which is a military sim where you cant really tell just by looking which buildings you can and cannot enter and about 75% of them you cant.
Yeah, I've had a slightly more positive experience, technically, than you did, but I can see that being a problem.
It has improved substantially from earlier tests, though. The tutorial, for one, is not only really neat from a story perspective, but also something to do right off the bat.
They do have the basis (and early implementation) of branching dialogue, or at the very least saying things the way you want to for roleplaying effect.
And of course, the art style is incredibly good. Detail is somewhat lacking, but they've captured the show's style to a T.
Overall, a very promising start, with marked improvement from test to test. It's already worth a look around, just to marvel at it (and fly, because awesome!), and in the future, I'm pretty sure it'll be worth playing for content alone, assuming they don't get C&D'ed.
I couldn't figure out how to use magic skills or get quests. At all. All I managed to do was fly around Cloudopolis, talk to NPCs, and occasionally chase some real people until I managed to right-click and hit "Friend".
Music is great, though.
When are they adding some gameplay?
I want to emigrate. Emigrate me now! Dammit, CelestA.I., get my hairless ass emigrated pronto!
Yeah, my experience has been "This is cool but so obviously an alpha." Still, with a price of "free" and a competition in the pony-MMO field of "none", it's pretty impressive.
And, um, yes... I have also been playing pegasi.
"Cloudopolis"? Ugh. I would've gone with Nimbopolis.
In any case, that's open alpha for you. More bugs than a parasprite-infested Weird Al concert. Hopefully, they're collecting reports on all of the problems. Now, if only they could automate this, get some kind of regulatory system in place that could detect dips in value satisfaction...
I always like it when someone says that pegasi or Earth ponies are the coolest race. It makes us unicorns seem more humble when we explain how we're best.
2355739
I don't think you want to emigrate to this one! What with the "randomly disconnect while still being in the now-unresponsive world" bug, it'd be worse than the scenario in "Edge of Singularity".
2356019
Canon Canterlot disturbed me a bit because they seem to have a one-race-dominated noble elite that spends its time attending garden parties and art auctions. Not really a problem in LoE because the city's basically empty.
Unicorns... humble?
2356180 I did say, "seem" more humble.
2355556
There was a tutorial?
2356447
Well, I know there was an Earth Pony one. If you look around the starting area, there's an NPC who gives you a movement tutorial, and then tells you to go out and explore the town, and find out how Earth Ponies are special - there are a couple NPCs around who will teach you about the various abilities and perks.
I assumed the other races had them too, and if not already, I'm sure will soon.
2356180
I always imagined that in canon the different racial elites live in different cities: Cloudsdale for pegasi, Canterlot for unicorns, and Manehattan for Earth ponies. Or in other words: unicorns in control of formal nobility and academia, Earth ponies in control of the economy and the food system, pegasi in control of the military and the skies. It's a traditional Medieval "farmers, fighters, and priests" class division.
2357863
It's a bit mixed up from the traditional "those who work/pray/fight" system, because the unicorn caste apparently were the formal rulers as opposed to the warriors being the source of nobility. Also, no class mobility and no "fourth estate". But yes, the writers apparently used that as a model.
Hadn't thought of Manehattan being an EP stronghold before. In that case I'd portray it as having amazingly solid construction with towering buildings combined with plants. Give each city a racial theme similar to the "Avatar: The Last Airbender" elemental civilizations.
I imagine the Hearth's Warming pageant thing being a double-censored story because it's a G-rated cartoon version of an in-universe play suitable for kids, like a Thanksgiving pageant where Pilgrims and Indians get along great. Reading between the lines, their world had at least verbal racial fighting with famine, total destruction of the country I'll call Eohippus, and revolution against all three castes' rulers. Also, what was going on that they needed a third of the population to be a standing air force? ...And why haven't I seen anything about adventurers going back to the ruins of that country?
</overthinking>
2358660
Because you haven't written it yet, duh
.