Lexton “Lunarhound” Collins was kind enough to review the upcoming MMORPG, Runes Of Magic, for us. Lexton has been playing the open beta of Runes of Magic for a few months now. Here he discusses Runes of Magic in particular and the free-to-play gaming model in general. Runes will be officially released on March 19th, 2009.
Free online RPG’s have been around for a while now. Besides the text-based Multi User Dungeons of old, games like Runescape were experimenting with free-to-play models years ago. The model has evolved, and in places like Korea and other parts of Asia, free is the primary way of doing business. Furnishing players with a downloadable client and unlimited play time at no cost, then giving them the option to purchase extra goodies in a ‘cash shop’ has proven to be very profitable. In the eyes of the Western gaming public, though, these titles have never come close to living up to the heavy-hitters; the ones hyped on major web sites and in magazines, who put out a fancy box with a 60.00 price tag and expect a further commitment of 15.00 or so a month for the privilege of playing. The free to play titles have always been seen as second rate, and not without reason. Many of them are very poorly translated, have atrocious customer service, are sorely lacking in the depth and game play departments, and are often just plain ugly.
And now, there’s Runes of Magic. It’s aiming squarely for a more Western feel, with WASD controls (though point and click is still available for those who want it), a heavy focus on quests, brisk advancement pace, higher localization standards, and a user-friendly approachability sorely lacking in many other free games. Its creators are determined to prove that you can make a free MMO that’s just as good as any of the more expensive ones out there.
One way it’s doing this is by blatantly copying the current best. The term ‘WoW clone’ is tossed around a lot these days, but it usually doesn’t have much basis in fact. Here, though, the similarities in both graphics and game play are immediately obvious. While die hard fans of the game will protest mightily that this is absolutely not World of Warcraft in any way, an honest assessment quickly proves this to be wishful thinking. The aesthetic isn’t identical, but it comes extremely close sometimes. While it might have been nice if they’d set themselves apart a bit more in the art department, it’s hard not to feel that adopting the same interface, control scheme and core play mechanics was the right thing to do. If you’ve played WoW before, everything will feel immediately familiar and the learning curve, at least when it comes to the basics of getting around and playing with the UI, will be reduced to almost zero. If you haven’t, the same intuitiveness that makes Blizzard’s masterpiece so easy to get into will still ensure that you spend more time playing than learning how to play in Runes of Magic.
In many ways, it almost feels like an improvement over WoW as far as features are concerned. Visual customization options for your character are more extensive, with sliders for adjusting height and resizing various body parts. Once in the game, the customization options expand via the cash shop, with purchasable facial tattoos and the option to dye your clothing and mount in the colors of your choice. All players are granted a free house, without any rental fees, early in the game. This can be upgraded to larger sizes, decorated with furniture that grants a rest bonus similar to WoW’s, equipped with crafting tools, and used to store possessions. Besides the standard instanced dungeons, there are varieties with randomly generated maps that yield a special treasure at the end. There’s a dual class system, allowing you to mix and match abilities from any two classes. It’s possible to wipe the stats from a favorite piece of equipment and transfer the stats of a different piece to it, so that if you find a great new breastplate but like the way your old one looks better, you can keep both the appearance of the old and the benefits of the new. The interface is even modifiable via XML, and a sizable collection of useful addons can already be found at curse.com.
What it doesn’t have down quite yet is World of Warcraft’s amazing diversity of environments. Nothing here looks bad and, taken individually, each area actually looks pretty good. But there are very few surprises or (excuse the pun) “wow” moments. The game has the basic fantasy staples – green fields and forests, dark caves, snowy mountains – but very little of the raw creativity that makes WoW so stunning. Blizzard’s environments are brimming with personality and a sense of artistry that elevate them above standard fantasy fare, despite that being exactly what they are. Azeroth has a real sense of place. Taborea doesn’t. It’s not boring and it’s not bad, it just doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be besides a traditional pseudo-medieval fantasy RPG. The developers haven’t yet figured out how to capture that sense of wonder that seeing Darnassus or the underground tram for the first time can evoke.
One place where more creative energy has been spent is on the story. Taborea’s background is involved and interesting. There are no scene-setting cinematics or mood-setting cut scenes to draw you into it – you’re just dropped unceremoniously into the world – so some players might not take enough interest to pay attention to what the NPC’s are saying. If you do, you’ll be treated to a rather unique (as fantasy MMO’s go) pioneering storyline. Unfortunately, this will probably be lost on a large portion of players, as the fairly simple goals of many of the initial quests (talk to him, give this to her, kill that) don’t seem to be worth the large blocks of text that precede them.
The dual class system is interesting and useful, but can often feel cumbersome. Though each class holds up well on its own, the fact that your secondary eventually provides all of your base stats with a bonus means that going without one will leave your character crippled later in the game. Because each of your two classes must be leveled independently (you can swap your primary and secondary at your house, and only the primary is able to gain experience points or raise its skills), it often feels as if you’re being forced to play two characters. Some won’t mind this, but those that don’t have as much time to devote to the game or simply don’t like playing alts will likely find it irritating. The flip side of this is that the system allows for a lot of great options and it really is fun to play with different class combinations. If you enjoy a traditional paladin character, a knight/priest fits the bill and comes with the added benefit of being able to change to a full-on healer if the need ever arises. What if you like tanking but aren’t so fond of the low damage output? Try a knight/warrior or knight/rogue. A rogue/mage can hurl fireballs from the shadows as well as holds its own in melee, a mage/priest can both dish out serious punishment and make up for its lack of fortitude with healing spells, and a warrior/scout can hold its own in both melee and ranged combat. The individual classes feel complete on their own, but each pairing also feels like its own specific class, with its own strengths and weaknesses. It’s just too bad that it has the downside of requiring you to essentially level two separate characters.
One of the features that could still use a bit of work is upgrading. Runes of Magic features an upgrade system that allows you to bolster the power of your equipment in several ways. One is with runes. Through defeating enemies and dismantling equipment, you’ll be able to gain runes that can enhance equipment with various bonuses. How many bonuses one piece can support depends on how many rune slots it has. With the use of a special device that you’ll acquire early in the game, you can combine lower tiered runes of the same type into more powerful, higher tiered runes of that type. This all works fine. What isn’t so polished are the direct stat upgrades through the use of jewels. Certain special jewels offer the chance to increase a piece of equipment’s base stats, with the risk that you could also get nothing at all, or even a downgrade. Each increase will put a +1, +2, etc. after the name of the equipment, up to +6. The problem with this is that increasing a piece of equipment to the point that you’ll notice any tangible benefits is so low as to make the entire system almost pointless. Getting to +1 after a few tries isn’t too difficult, but beyond that, the chance of failure or a downgrade seem to be so much higher than the chance of an upgrade that it’s not even worth the effort. The jewels are expensive and you can often end up spending thousands of gold with no positive result, or even a negative one, to show for it. Worse, these jewels are offered for sale in the cash shop. While their tooltips clearly warn of the chance of failure or downgrade, they don’t highlight just how high that chance is, and several players have already complained of spending significant amounts of real money hoping for an upgrade, with nothing at all to show for it. What’s even more baffling is that the upgrades, when successful, are so slight. If the developers were so afraid of equipment becoming too powerful, it’s hard to understand why they decided to include the upgrade system at all.
All in all, Runes of Magic is a pretty impressive package. It has a solid beginning, it’s at least as good as a lot of other games that require a fee, and it puts a number of features from the genre’s best in one place. There’s nothing revolutionary about the game design itself, and if you’re sick to death of traditional MMO’s, it likely won’t do anything for you. What makes it stand out is the fact that, despite a few flaws (and it’s still early enough that they could be worked out), it’s both free and a genuinely good game. If you’ve played pay to play MMO’s in the past, it’s easy to forget, while playing this one, that it doesn’t have to cost anything. Though it falls just short, it comes closer than any other completely free game has to being able to stand toe-to-toe with the big boys. Hopefully, it will become popular and visible enough that it will start a trend.
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It’s not often when my interests in China and gaming collide. Nate, of the China blog 
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