First Impressions: Runes of Magic

Hopefuly the sheer volume of incoming users who are running Vista, will push Frogster/RW to resolve the disapearing log-in fields on the initial screen. RoM rocks and deserves every chance.

Runes of Magic was terribly boring for me. Far too wow-like without enough reason to keep going. The novelty wore off too quick.
ATM, I'm trying Ether Saga (Open beta JUST released like a couple days ago or so) and its been very entertaining.
Time and time again, you hear people saying Pokemon should be an mmo, etc. Well guess what? Ether Saga is a Pokemon-esque MMO. EVERY class gets to have a pet, and can pick ANY pet type. Nobody is excluded. You can buy or capture more pets, and can trade them. (Sound familiar)?
IN addition, you can fuse with pets in your inventory, to share their power and you can also find card drops to TRANSFORM into various animals found in the game.
For a Free-to-play game, i gotta say its been worth trying.

Did fall a sleep just looking at the screen shots and crappy trailers.

Wait, mushroom people? ...I'm out.

I've been playing it and it's not bad at all. I can't see a lot that a subscription mmo would have over this.

It'd be nice if people would actually try it before becoming flaming trolltards based on screen shots.

I played Runes of Magic for 5 minutes and was weirded out by all the minutia of detail that was exactly copied from Warcraft. Indeed, I would think that it would have been much easier to create an MMO similar to WoW than it must have been to capture every small interface and character movement detail... that is unless a large part of the game interface was directly copied. I'm not saying that's what happened... but it is troubling to me that the developers felt they needed to go to so much trouble to make a game that could be considered reverse engineering at best.

One of the game's most difficult problems overcome is going to be that it resembles WoW so thoroughly that it's hard not to compare the two. Even as much as it's obvious that the powers that be tried to make them the same in many cases, the two have some differences.

The models of course are not similar to WoW; and are someone stylized and fairly interesting. Aside from some contrast trouble with the color scheme, the models are the best part of the game that I witnessed.

I continued to play the game into around level 17. Many of the places that Runes departs from WoW need some improvement; monster AI is nearly absent in many cases. The quest Log is crazy busy and hard to look at. There are no cut scenes that I saw that might have been helpful in unfolding some compelling storyline. (a storyline that was hidden from me as I played.)

Grinding can be fun if you enjoy grind. Personally, I find most free to play games overdo the grindiness and Runes is no exception.

It's hard to say how the final release of the game will differ from this late stage beta version but I hope it does. I would have preferred something a little less wowish. Still, the game functioned well, without giltchness. And at least by copying WoW's movement and tracking, navigation throughout the lands was a breeze.

I will keep my eye on Runes.. and hope something good comes of it.

Dawn

There are some big differences between this and WoW if you look:

PVP
-corpse looting, that's hardcore
-Castle Raids, like Conan but better

Cross-Classing
-this is the most fun part, I've played several characters just to see how the cross classing affects things
-lets you work on your main class when your friends aren't online, and then switch when they are

Fluff
-housing, something wow always lacked
-costumes, another thing wow did terrible

So its really more like a combination of the best in MMO's today. Sure the art direction is like a WoW-type anime inspired cartoon show, but there are some really nice feature set if you get past that.

That said, this IS a micro trans game that is heavy on the "renting". You rent extra space, you rent your mounts, you rent home improvements. Even if you pay real money, you've only rented what you've payed for.

Ugh...This is where MMO players fail. They don't even give the game a chance.

Do you bitch that Saints 2 is so similar to GTA?
Do you complain that Halo is exactly like every other god damn FPS out there? No.
Do you complain that an MMO has traist similar to another MMO. Yes.
It makes no sense.

The game is good, and best of all it's FREE. It's not WoW amazing, but you're getting what you pay for, which is nothing, and you're getting a decent product out of that nothing.

it's a good game!

More complete than Conan's ever been. And I could list others that people have payed 50 bucks for.

"Why pay $15 per month to play ______ when you can probably enjoy RoM just as much for free?" I ask. It may not be perfect, but I honestly don't feel that it's any more or less flawed than the leading p2p games out there. The hidden bonus of it being free: absolutely zero guilt for not playing it.

This looks interesting. I'm ashamed to say I've gotten addicted to wow's style of graphics. I can't handle most other MMOs because the character models, art and animation just doesn't do it for me.

One thing I can't find anywhere, how does the actual gameplay match up? Is there any grouping content? Do I have to think when I play or is everything basically just tank and spank? Does it have the standard threat/aggro/healing/crowd control dynamics of MMOs? Is there any challenge to playing?