Because it's not required in order to advance (characters will be able to level up without ever killing a monster), combat in SOE's upcoming free-to-play MMO
Free Realms is a bit different than you may be accustomed to. When we sat down to chat with Lead Designer Laralyn McWilliams at
E3 this week, she described the combat system by saying, "Combat is our biggest mini-game." Monsters will never attack you as you're exploring the world -- only when you enter clearly marked combat zones. "We took a very Disneyland apprach," said McWilliams. "You're walking around Disneyland, you see Space Mountain, it looks awesome, and so you think, 'I want to go on Space Mountain!' Our content broadcasts itself to you." In the screenshot above, you see the entrance to a combat zone: a gate clearly proclaiming danger. So like any good MMO player, what do you do but walk up to it and see what dangers await you on the other side? Interacting with the gate, like launching any other mini-game in
Free Realms, will give you a choice of several different combat encounters associated with the area.
In the screenshot above we see the mini-game start screen, which explains the objectives of this particular combat mini-game (if you've done this mini-game before, you'll see if you missed completing any objectives), the difficulty of the scenario, and previous high scores. If you're in a group, your group's information will be listed here as well.
Whenever you go into one of
Free Realms' combat mini-games, you're going into an instance with just you and your group -- so you'll never find yourself waiting respawns or fighting other players to kill a specific spawn. As you can tell by the above screenshot, we're playing a ninja, which means we're using ninja abilities like shuriken toss and sneak attack all. The ninja class is in particular is all about being stealthy and attacking enemies, making it ideal for participating in combat. As you fight enemies, you earn stars, which are the
Free Realms equivalent of experience points.
To use our newly earned stars, we head to the character progression screen where you can see all available class abilities. From here, you can chose any ability and spend stars on leveling up that ability, which is how you level up every class independently (and how you can level up without ever bothering with combat, if you so desire). So if we were a miner and playing, for example, the
Bejeweled-like mini-game to mine for ore, he would be earning stars which he would spend on mining abilities.
