Summer means inevitable downtime when away from work and it has given me the perfect opportunity to try out a new MMORPG. I had been searching for one ever since Warhammer Online became available last year, but I was unable to play it due to my limited system and inferior Intel video card.
Enter: Runes of Magic by Frogster Entertainment, a free to play MMORPG that has been called a Wow clone and compared to old school EQ. Well, I never played EQ but I have played my share of MMORPGS from DDO to LOTRO to Wow and this one is not half bad so far. I was able to level up a character to 3 rather easily, even though I was a bit annoyed by the inferior quality of the camera controls for the characters. “You get what you pay for” or maybe I am just used to Wow and its ease of movement for my horde toons, nonetheless the huge landscape of Taborea in which this game is set offers much to explore and I think that I will try out a few classes before I am done examining the game.
On the plus side, the game interface is almost identical to Wow’s and there appears to be no shortage of quests and NPCs in this game and while I prefer to play a tank, I am not adverse to trying out the two new races that the game seems to have added recently. Also, I have mostly been dealing with NPCs but with a level cap of 52 and over 200 quests, RoM may be the perfect solution to the p2p MMORPG blues even though I have yet to engage the community or to explore any guilds.
Another tempting feature to this game is the ability to level a dual class beginning with 10. This means that I can have both my warrior and another class dueling on the game server with various skill sets, although I am not quite sure how this works yet.
Wow’s new game patch is expected to drop next month and some of its benefits include mounts at level 20 and flying mounts for the Lich King expansion areas. The jury is still out on Runes of Magic, it might be the best free MMORPG out there, or it might just fizzle out like a curious summertime concoction.
Behind My Byline 