Some of the upcoming changes are polish as expected like additional audio – ambient noises, NPC dialog and mob combat effects.

The game could really use the audio polish. Seeing as how lots of them are, you know, missing. Other exciting items of note are new classes (Runedancer, Druids? Possibly..) and the new race – likely Elves.

Maybe I’ll have to login again after a few more patches. LotRO is just too absorbing at the mo.

You must think I’m nuts. I downloaded 67 GIGABYTES worth of MMOGs to test. 26 of the suckers, 10 of which I’m focussing on here. As for the other 16? Well, they’re listed at the bottom of the article. If and when I get around to discussing them, they’ll be linked here as well. Let’s just say they weren’t worth my time to review, for one reason or another. Not necessarily because they were bad (although some were beyond bad)… just that I had to choose a sample that would be the games that I’d be most interested in trying out. Besides, it’s not as if one MMO isn’t enough already for most people that actually want a social life. Like you know, a social life that doesn’t involve hitting / or ENTER first.  And I had to pick and choose. So these are the ones I chose:

Dungeon Runners (overview forthcoming)

Guild Wars (overview forthcoming)

Pirates of the Caribbean Online

Everquest II

World of Warcraft (overview forthcoming)

City of Heroes/Villains

Lord of the Rings Online

Runes of Magic

Ryzom

The Chronicles of Spellborn

Happily, I can say that I managed thus far (knock on wood) to avoid severe addiction to any of them. Well, mostly.

The Scope

Before I even get started, I should mention something: I’m a PvEer. I don’t play PvP and it’s not my focus, nor interest. So I didn’t test out any PvP while playing these games. If that’s your thing, these articles may still be of interest to you, but they are talking only in terms of the PvE component of these games. Just thought I’d mention that up front.

I’m not going to be writing hard-core, in-depth reviews of each of these games. If you want reviews of them, the vast majority of these games (perhaps excepting a lot of the free to play ones) have been reviewed ad nauseum elsewhere on the web. What I’m going to do is tell you which ones I think are worth the time downloading and testing. I’ll tell you what I liked, what annoyed me, and what I thought stood out – both in a good and bad way. If you are a newbie, this might be a good place to start before you get your download on.

Just FYI, I don’t really get into that whole ‘role-playing’ business very much. I play these games to get sweet loot. I play to kill monsters.. of some sort or another. I suppose leveling and assign skills or stats has become synonymous with role-playing, which I don’t entirely buy, or take part in. But whatever, that’s for another article.

NEWB!

First and foremost, the difference between a ‘newbie/newb’ and a ‘noob/n00b’. The Urban Dictionary breaks it down like this: Newbs are those who are new to some task* and are very beginner at it, possibly a little overconfident about it, but they are willing to learn and fix their errors to move out of that stage. n00bs, on the other hand, know little and have no will to learn any more.

Read more here: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=noob.

The Breakdown

The articles are broken up into 3 main categories, as I see them:  Free to play games with cash shops (Part 1), Free to play games with caveats (Part 2), and Pay to play games (Part 3).

For each game, I’ve tried to give it an honest shot. Really. Even if it sucked and I swore at myself for doing this while playing, I pushed on. I put myself through the torture so you wouldn’t have to. For the greater good, right? That’s not to say that I played each of these games up to level 30 or anything. Heck, I doubt I broke level 10 in more than a handful. But that wasn’t really the point of these articles; if you want guides, go elsewhere. These articles are intended to give you first impressions of the games and to summarize whether or not it’s worth your while to wait several days (for anything over 3gb) to download and play.

The System

I’ll be talking a bit about how the games perform, so I should give you some context about what I’m running them all on. It’s not a dream rig, but it isn’t bad. I put it together about 6 months ago for a modest $1700 or so. You should be able to build a similar machine now for much less. Nothing’s overclocked, it’s all running at defaults.

Here’s the specs:

Intel Core 2 Quad 2.83Ghz
4 GB RAM
BFG GTX 260 896MB
Built-in Realtek sound
640 GB HDD
Windows XP SP3
26″ LCD running at 1920×1200

I attempted to run every game at full screen and at my default resolution. If possible, I cranked the graphics to the max. I’ll let you know how each game performed at those settings.

The Games

These overviews focus on three main types of MMORPGs: Free to Play games with Cash Shops, Free to Play games with Caveats, and Pay to Play games.

For the uninitiated, the first type listed are games that are (and this is loudly screamed at you on pretty much EVERY game’s site) – Free to Sign Up (no credit card necessary), Free to Download, and Free to Play. So what’s a Cash Shop? That’s how these games make their money. They offer bits & bobs for you to buy via RMT or MT – short for Real Money Transactions or Micro-Transactions – which allow you to enhance your character or overall playing experience. Whether or not you buy anything is completely up to you. So theoretically, you could play each and every one of the following games without every spending a dime.

The second type are Free to Play, but have caveats that adjust your gameplay experience. So what are the caveats? Well, that’s different for each game. I’ll outline what the limitations are on a game-by-game basis.

The final type are Pay to Play games. Clearly, if you want to play them beyond the trial, you have to pay monthly to do so. In some cases, you’ll also have to pay for the game before you can play them, on top of the monthly fee.

I’ve downloaded and tested the following games:

Free to Play games with Cash Shops
Runes of Magic

Free to Play games with Caveats

The Chronicles of Spellborn
Dungeon Runners
Guild Wars
Pirates of the Caribbean Online
Ryzom (formerly the Saga of Ryzom and Ryzom Ring)

Pay to Play games

City of Heroes/Villains

Everquest II

Lord of the Rings Online

World of Warcraft

All right, enough precursor, click on the links below to read what I thought about these games.

Other games I tried in the name of science:

2 Moons

9 Dragons

Air Rivals

Archlord

Atlantica Online

Ether Saga Online

Florensia

Rohan Online

Perfect World International

Pirates of the Burning Sea

Shaiya

Star Wars Galaxies

Talisman Online (shudder)

Vanguard

Warhammer Online

World of Kung Fu

State: Final
Website: http://us.runesofmagic.com
Developer/Publisher: Frogster Interactive/Runewaker Entertainment
The Pitch: Enter Taborea, a mystical world full of wonders and ancient secrets. Meet mysterious and dangerous creatures and solve the enigmas of old kingdoms long-lost in the mists of time.

That pitch is SO marketing-speak for ‘Kill things. Run a lot.’ I played this game for a couple months in beta and those are things I did. Not ONCE did I solve an enigma. Not once.

Performance

It ran pretty much flawlessly. I experienced no crashes. I ran it in fullscreen, at the highest resolution, with all the graphical settings maxed. My average framerate was in the 20s in cities, but 40+ everywhere else.

Unique to Runes of Magic

Dual-class system. This is quasi-unique. There’s other games that have it, like Guild Wars, but it’s done differently here. The way it works is this: when your chosen character hits level 10, you may train a secondary class. So I could become a Mage/Priest, for instance. The tradeoff is two things: your classes don’t level simultaneously and you can only use your current secondary class’s secondary skills. So you need to switch back and forth (and only at your house or at your skills trainer) to level each. And once you do switch, only a subset of that class’s skills are available to you.

The Good

Attractive, stylized visuals. Clearly, it’s an homage (okay, pretty much direct rip) of World of Warcraft, visually. This is a Good Thing(tm). Why is that? It allows people with computers of all levels of spec to be able to play it and it still looks reasonably attractive visually as it has an art style that doesn’t degrade overly with lower graphics settings. This is good for a further reason: the more people that can run it will correlate loosely with the number of people playing. For many people, the more that play an MMORPG, the more fun they’re going to have. So that’s a plus.

Decent Character Creation. RoM offers the standard character creation options: you can be male or female and start as one of 6 classes: Mage, Priest, Rogue, Scout, Warrior, and Knight. Pretty bland, if you ask me. The difference to this comes in the Dual-class system which I discuss later. As for customization of your character, you have a reasonably range of tweaking available to you via quite a few sliders. I still found that most people looked very similar in the game, but it’s not as limited as World of Warcraft, say.

Inspired by many. Lots of people may argue about whether or not RoM copies WoW. I’m not going to get into that beyond the visuals, but it is apparent that RoM is taking inspiration from many other games here, from Lord of the Rings online to City of Heroes. What this means to you the player, is that if you’ve ever played a mainstream MMO, you’re likely to feel pretty much at home here with little, if any, transition shock.
Easy Gameplay. Runes of Magic plays smoothly and easily. They start you out, like every other MMO, in a tutorial/training area and move you on from there. You start off fighting mushrooms. Fungi. Truly. Don’t worry, it gets better. Happily you can use WASD for movement and it is mapped for you. Using your skills is straightforward – hit the # on your keybaord that corresponds to the skill you want to use on your skill bar. You can run using the Right+Left mousebutton combination we all know and love. Auto-run is mapped to the NumLock. Sound familiar?

UI. The User Interface (UI) is fantastic. Immediately upon install, you can move a lot of things around and hide some elements to allow you to customize it how you like. On top of that, a user base has quickly grown around the game, and has developed hundreds of addons to tweak your experience. I list some of my favorites at the end of the article. Additionally, Tooltips are ubiquitous and responsive and also show equpped items, where applicable.

Lots and lots of Quests. I’m not sure if this is ‘good’, per se. There’s a lot of ‘em, for sure. They’re reasonably imaginative and well-chained.

The Bad

Dual-Class System. I like it in theory, but the fact that not even a little teensy-tiny bit of your XP from your main level gets allocated to your secondary drove me nutso. So I’m playing away and I’m level 10. Hooray! I get my new class and guess what? Now I’m level 1 again. Great… back to the fungi. The developers have thoughtfully added a second low-level area that you can teleport to to level up your secondary class, but so what? Can you say GRIND? And even once I manage to level up my secondary to the same as my primary, well you then have to switch back. Why? Because you can’t level your secondary class higher than your primary class. The way they’ve implemented this system is, in my opinion, asinine. I get that they want you to have to play the game twice as long in the hopes that you’re spending twice as much on the cash shop. But I sure as heck didn’t like it. If they had allowed you to allocate a percentage of your primary class’s XP to your secondary class, it would have been great. As it stands, it just feels like you’re playing all the same areas and quests repeatedly. Because you ARE.

Sounds. The music is really nicely done. When it’s there. A huge portion of the time you’ll run around the world and hear NOTHING. I don’t mean just ambient noises. I mean squat. Zip. Nada. Footsteps are there (I think) as are some ambient noises, but they’re so quiet even with the sound up as to be nonexistant. The music rarely makes an appearance; seemingly only in cities or dungeons and then it fades away pretty much for no reason at all that I could fathom. On top of that, there’s many sounds that are still just flat-out missing. Like a bunch of my Mages’ spells. All crafting sounds – yes, ALL. So chopping, pickaxing, harvesting… Yes, all completely silent. It’s eerie. There’s also no noise at all when you’re running through water, swimming, or by the waterfall. Also eerie.

Click-to-move. If you want auto-move to attack turned on, (which is a nice feature for melee characters, imo) it comes bundled with Click to move. Yeah, it’s one option. And it’s really annoying when you’re in the middle of combat and you accidentally click your mouse and your character starts running off to the horizon, pulling aggro all the way. Wheeeeee.

Non-removable popups. There’s a ton of annoying, scrolling banner messages that tells you not to buy diamonds from one of the annoying spam sellers in your general chat. (see below) Or the annoying message that tells you you have to face your target to attack. Yeah, I KNOW. Thanks for the tip. So why doesn’t the game just auto-face target? No clue. These messages can be removed with an addon called Streamline.

Spam. Yep, there’s gold sellers. Lots of ‘em. But there’s also addons to block ‘em. This is pretty much in all games, so although it IS a negative, it’s pretty much defacto, I guess.

Summary

Runes of Magic is worth your time to download. If you’re interested in playing something for free, this would be my first choice. You don’t have to use the cash shop to play the game, although it certainly comes in handy, if only because you get a bucketload of stuff when you’re out fighting mobs and only 2 bags to put all that crap into. I played it for a few months, more than any other cash shop free to play game. For that specific category, it’s the best option out there right now. Is it better than all of the big AAA Pay to Play MMOs? No. But it does put some of them to shame. And for a free game, that’s awfully impressive.

Download value: [rating:8] (8)

Addons:

pbInfo – A tooltip info addon
XBar - Replacement bar for stats and info
WoWMap – Makes the worldmap of RoM feel like you may know it from WoW
yBag - Replacement of the default backpack, bank and house chest
yGather – Records resource stacks locations and displays them on Worldmap and minimap