In a lot of ways, playing MXO is a big step back to the early days of MMOGs. When I called it "primitive" in my last entry I was right on the money.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not unhappy with the game - but it does make one wonder where these Monolith guys have been! I just can't imagine how, or why, a company would make a MMOG as if they were living in the early 90's and inventing the whole thing. No doubt that is overly harsh. I'm just a newb and very possibly don't know what I'm talking about. It just seems, from the low level perspective, that they have made many, if not all of the same mistakes that were made in UO, EQ and AC seven years ago. Have they chosen to step back to an older style for some reason?
You're probably wishing, at this point, that I would stop flaming and list some specific issues. Ok, here goes:
While the combat interface is beautiful and sophisticated, the -running around exploring- interface is clunky and awkward. There's no autorun button at all. The camera movement is often stilted and strange.
For general comparison, in Asheron's Call (which uses roughly the same 3rd person camera position) you float gracefully behind your character like a guardian angel. Camera movement is fluid and adds to the sense of immersion in the game as you never feel like you are working at controlling your character - he is an extension of yourself.
The Matrix is a polar opposite. The camera sticks and jumps. It almost feels like you're trying to follow your character around with a small remote control helicopter while at the same time trying to control where he goes. It's not really quite that bad but the camera does often seem to have a mind of its own. Instead of the sense of floating gracefully behind him, I feel like I spend all my time in game (except during combat, mind you) wrestling against the will of the camera, each of us fighting for control of the character from moment to moment.
The missions you have to do to work your way up through the first ten levels are profoundly monotonous. As Ophelea has said, the buildings are all exactly precisely identical in every imaginable way. The missions themselves vary only in the minutest details. DAoC has those delivery quests you can do in the newb stages and they are boring, but they are less significant a part of the game/story, and in DAoC those boring delivery quests introduce you to the wide countryside and the varied landscape and towns. In MXO they introduce you to the lack of imagination on the part of the developers.
While these are moderately significant problems that, it seems to me, could have been avoided simply by having been around the MMOG scene for the last 6-8 years, they are by no means fatal to the value or playability of this game. They clearly have some revolutionary ideas that may very well work, and I'm still really getting a kick out of combat!
On the other hand, this game needs PEOPLE. Many of the NPCs spout the value of a group. I have not seen any other players. I think I saw one. Once. And that sucks. The first thing they've got to do is give up on selling the $50 boxes. They need to make the game free to download and try for two weeks or something. People will pay $10 a month to play this game. But $50 for the box? Many will go play AC2 instead, and some may say that that, um, ain't saying much. 
