Free Realms beta early impressions

So I got into said beta on Saturday. Although the game sounds pretty interesting, I was most keen on trying out their supposedly super-fast download system. According to the Sony folks, the client streams to your machine while you create your character on the website.

I was skeptical. Not that I didn’t believe them. Okay, I didn’t believe them. I figured that although it would stream quickly, I didn’t figure there was any way it’d be ready to go as soon as I was done a-clicking and a-sliding my way to a quasi-unique replication of myself.

Whaddya know. I was surprised. Sure enough, in the short space of a couple minutes, I was able to hop right into the game with my newly created character, Luke Oakenshield. Pretty spiffy. However, the character creation part is darn limited. I’d like to see lots more but seeing as how it’s still beta, I’ll cut it some slack.

Since I haven’t played it enough yet to go in-depth, I’ll give y’all the short takes:

• Visually very nice. It looks as good as the screenshots, only everything’s moving. So it’s even better.
• No slowdown. I was impressed. With approximately 40 – 50 characters running around onscreen, I didn’t get an ounce of lag or stutter, even with all settings completely maxed. I have a decent rig, but at 1920 x 1200, in most other games, they start to stutter badly when this happens.
• It crashed twice in about an hour and a half of play. Once when changing settings, once when changing zones.
• Although you could play it as an adult, it really isn’t a game for adults. I was hoping it might hold a little pearl of depth within it’s candy-coated exterior, but alas, it looks like this one is for the parents-with-kids crowd. Or just for kids. It’s just a bit too shallow for anyone who’s played an ‘adult’ MMO before. And I don’t mean one where you run around nearly naked. Even though God knows that happens enough in most MMOs as is.
• Super-easy to get going, with all your different jobs and pets and such.
• Mini-games!! These were kinda cool. They’d get repetetive, I’m sure, but since there’s quite a few to choose from, if you just switch em up a bit, you’ll likely not notice the repetition.
• Nice ‘greencrumb trail’ to find your quest target. I suspect this was lifted partially from EQ2′s ‘wisp’.

So that’s my thoughts so far. I’ll play it again, but I’m really doubting that I’ll sign up for this one. For those of you in the beta, what are your thoughts so far?