Recruit for Ryzom, win fabulous prizes!

Ryzom is undergoing a recruitment drive at the moment, and the team is looking to the players for help. A spiffy contest has been posted on the official site to see which players can rope in the most new warm bodies for the cause.

Each player is tasked with recruiting friends and family members via a unique link that will count toward their tally during the month of November. After November 30th, the Ryzom team will see which players have netted the biggest catch and will dole out rewards accordingly.

The first place winner gets a choice of tempting prizes: either an original concept art drawing or an Nvidia GeForce GTX 480 graphics card. Second place can choose from the drawing or a lifetime subscription to the game, and third through sixth place winners will receive a three-month subscription.

Ryzom is currently free-to-play with an optional subscription package.

Reader Comments (15)

Based on the screenshot above I sincerely hope they're not "awarding" the first place prize winner with concept art, unless the piece is supposed to double as kindling.

@(Unverified) Sorry, didn't meant to just crap on the above art style without clarification. Let's go into detail of why that texture work on the model above is so amateur:

Eyes - way too spaced for the nose and mouth. The general rule of drawing is the inner eye "tips" begin at the upper lip's apex points. When this rule is not follow you get very odd looking specimens, such as the above.
Nose - nostril edges are far greater than their typical end. They should end roughly around the eye tips. A little more is okay. A lot more, like the character above, results in bizarre qualities.
Mouth - I'm not sure if the "white goatee" effect is due to lighting systems in the game or poor texture brushed highlights, but it looks terrible. A relaxed mouth position's "tips" need to end at the mid section of each eye. The philtrum is WAY too defined giving an almost cat like quality.

I know we're not looking at some cutting edge game, but the texture work on one of the key features people tend to associate with (the face) is indicative of how little artistic talent this team has.

@(Unverified) I don't think the character in that picture is supposed to be human.

@Lenn I was thinking the same thing, but I don't think even in non-human characters the portions are anywhere near correct.

Their concept art does look more solid, wonder if the guy who textured the above model was an intern or something.

@(Unverified) When you're talking about non-human characters, realistic proportions aren't important anymore. Having "off" proportions is exactly what makes them non-human.

@(Unverified)

More likely it was someone from an outsource studio in china knowing thats where most art departments shop for cheap and abundant assets required to fill an MMO.

Its also not fair to pick apart that texture as sometimes artists have no control over how their stuff gets down rezz'ed into games due to technical limitations. It could be a technical artist, or another lead who actually signs off on things even if the artist who made it doesn't like the way it turned out in the build regardless.

@(Unverified)
sry mate, but Ryzom had (an has) one of the best grafic styles in the industry. your drawing 'rules' .. well ... na, guess you know what they are ^^
pls dont comment on things you got no clue of, ty.

@(Unverified)
you guys are propably too young, but Ryzom was one of the better mmo's in the golden aera of mmo's some years back :D

@(Unverified)

Ryzom still does many things better than any MMO released since. And although they may have outsourced work to China, I doubt it considering it was an independent French studio that began developing the game over ten years ago. The art is highly stylized, so I doubt they were shooting for accurate facial ratios when building the character models.

Either way, it's a great game, with great atmosphere, and a shame it never received the attention it deserved.

@(Unverified)

As an artist, I'd just like to say you're full of crap. Those rules are for humans and humans only. Breaking the rules is actually preferable for non-humans if you want to be even the least bit realistic.

This was one of my favorites way back i the day but problems with devs not completing content, doing the mouth thing, and a couple billing debaucles really thinned the world down.

It still has ancient graphics, it still has broken content after years, and content that was never finished, again, after years. A few haphazard updates to try and fix raid bosses did nothing to get new subs and theme to this day is very empty if you go in, even at prime time its like a desert.

This title is NOT solo friendly. You must have in game aquaintences help you harvest the high level mats (not being successful in some of the prime areas, a couple of rare material explosions will kill you) and large groups to take down the rare mats bosses when they are up. Because of the level and scaling of the mobs, solo players will die one on one with the higher level random mobs running around, some are quite brutal.

Dont bother with melee classes i this game either, ranged classes and nuke mages own the world, no questions asked.

Pvp, may as well not talk about it, two clans schedule taking and releasing the farms, random battles are non existant.

Oh and for the young male teen crowd this french made title has a boob slider just for you.

Lots of work to be done on this title before it can even think about going mainstream, right now its just niche meat. It was fun while it lasted though.

@Graill440

Heh, got my boxed copy somewhere. Mining in the Prime Roots was a technicolour nightmare, patrolling mobs with one hit kills (shudders).

Ryzom was (and still is innovative), what with the seasons, animal migrations and harvesting almost being a mini-game in itself.

I remember taking part in mass migrations from one capital city to another - those journesy were tough !

I only played this game back in beta abusing the free 200 resources of whatever material was provided on each new character with my brother to farm up extra starting resources, I thought the game world was quite interesting in style back then and the characters were quite strange yet not entirely off putting, but then not so long after I heard the game was having some trouble in reality I thought it was shut down at some point,
I don't know how many people play it now but in reality I'm not sure how much its changed since then or wherever its worth it to come back,

great game hardly anyone knows about it probably cause it closed doors and re-opened

Recruit for Ryzom, win fabulous prizes!

Reader Comments (15)

Posted: Nov 4th 2011 2:21PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Nov 4th 2011 2:34PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Nov 4th 2011 2:35PM Lenn said

Posted: Nov 4th 2011 2:37PM Lenn said

Posted: Nov 4th 2011 2:42PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Nov 4th 2011 3:03PM Lenn said

Posted: Nov 4th 2011 3:50PM Kalex716 said

Posted: Nov 4th 2011 5:04PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Nov 4th 2011 5:06PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Nov 4th 2011 5:36PM Plastic said

Posted: Nov 4th 2011 9:20PM JuliusSeizure said

Posted: Nov 4th 2011 7:10PM Graill440 said

Posted: Nov 5th 2011 7:31AM Hurbster said

Posted: Nov 5th 2011 7:50AM KureAc said

Posted: Nov 7th 2011 5:29PM zuchaka said

Info

Description

MSRP

Release Date

Genre

Developer

Publisher

Rating

Breaking News

The Secret World launch delayed to July 3rd

Featured Stories

The Mog Log: The Legacy rewards and what they mean

The Tattered Notebook: The passing of Ribbitribbitt

The Firing Line: PlanetSide 2's Matt Higby on the MMOFPS revolution

Engadget

Joystiq

WoW

TUAW