We also upgraded our barbarian's skills, quickly filling up the hotkey slots with special lunges, overhead attacks and impressively grisly special kills that actually splatter blood on the screen. One particularly memorable melee match ended with us thrusting the oar into a character's chest, pushing them down to the ground and twisting the wooden weapon right through them before grunting and reefing it out.

Certainly the combat looks like a traditional MMO: third person view, click on your target, and so on - but there's a real sense of immediate danger, especially when more than one foe attacks. We soon learned that - as well hard as we were - dashing into a camp full of thieves was bad news. Especially when they have pet jaguars. Just as we were getting accustomed to the single player experience we found a key, opened a gate and were transported to the PvP lobby. Here a veritable menagerie of characters and creatures greeted us.