Global Agenda: Day 1, Day One, Day Juan, Intro and beyond

I've decided to break my MMO drought with Global Agenda: Free Agent because it has jetpacks and guns instead of wings and swords.  Which is ironic considering I've taken a break from Fantasy in my reading schedule in favor of Sci-Fi titles such as Snow Crash and Daemon.  The only Fantasy in my life is The Witcher, a single-player RPG, and Terraria, a whatever you want to call it RPG/Minecraft thingy game.  To my surprise, Global Agenda is a refreshing change of pace.

I started the game last night with the Robotics class which is a pet class that has drones and turrets as it's main feature.  As a long time Team Fortress 2 Engineer player, I am intimately familiar with deploy-able turrets and I immediately fell in line with my Robotics character.  Sadly, it took me a few levels to realize that I could boost my turret's effectiveness with a repair tool that was attached to my shoulder.  Once I had the basics down, I was rollin' in style.

I played through several newbie quests in one of the open-ended areas.  Global Agenda is actually just a series of instances, not a true persistent world ala World of Warcraft.  These quests were simple go there, kill X, get reward style.  I ran accross a couple other players, but didn't really interact with them.  This is not unsurprising.  There hasn't been an MMO since Ultima Online where I truly felt like I was meant to interact with other players initially.  All that social stuff is meant for the "end game" anyways.  Right?

After the solo quests, I was lead to a "mission terminal" (which I later discovered I could just access at anytime from anywhere).  I was able to jump into some randomly formed low level, randomly generated missions.  I was often the lowest level in the group, but it didn't seem to be as detrimental as expected.  For example, one group was me at level 7 with three level 18s and I ended up being able to carry about 20% of the healing/damage.  If I knew the game better, I could have most likely carried my fair share of 25%.

So far I'm impressed.  My biggest complaint is the limited use of the Robotics turrets (I don't really have drones yet, so not sure how they function).  By the time I put the turret down in a group mission, the group has moved on.  In solo play, enemy NPCs just constantly stopped outside of the turrets range and therefore the turret did nothing.  The only time the turret was of use was to plunk down next to the boss NPC in the missions and let it plink away until it was killed off.

I finished up at level 8.  My in-game name is, of course, heartlessgamer.