I mentioned that currently I’m slowing down Arwellyn’s too-rapid (for my tastes) journey towards 60 in LOTRO, so while I’m still playing daily I’m doing things like the Yule festival quests for tokens and other activities that don’t involve gaining XP. I’ve also been putting more consecutive time on the 360 in the past month than it’s seen in the two years I’ve owned it.
But I thought I would add another column to the blog about F2P games that make any sort of positive impressions in any way. This won’t be a regular column, just whenever I actually happen to spend any amount of time in an F2P that I feel is worthy of discussion.
To clarify my own definition of F2P, I will only use that acronym to refer to games that are free to download as well, meaning Guild Wars does not qualify, nor will any other “buy to play” games that may exist.
My expectations of F2P games are fairly low. Poor graphics, poor communities — if a “community” exists at all — with chat mostly filled with spam from gold-selling sites, a “world” filled mostly with bots for said gold-selling sites, poor localization “featuring” at best some barely legible broken Engrish with funky characters and no word wrap in the worst possible font imaginable, AI (and I’m using that term loosely) that consists of ‘if $aggro { AI::Monster::Kill; }‘ (ok ok, been a few years since I’ve so much as glanced at Perl… gimme a break!), a shallow experience consisting of endlessly grinding rapidly respawning mobs, and of course item shops for microtransactions. Did I miss anything? Probably, but I think that pretty much gets across my overall low expectations of F2P and why the majority of the ones I install take longer to patch than I actually play them before uninstalling. So I’ll only be writing about ones that make any positive impressions at all, even if they inevitably end up falling into the “shallow and poor gameplay” category.
I do enjoy reading Tipas articles on Dream of Mirror Online (DOMO) which I was in beta for but that one must have crossed a line somewhere of being too Asian in its execution for me. I don’t mind cel-shading but I did mind the way DOMO did it. The pathing was horrid too; click to move straight ahead of you but the game can’t figure out how to do that so you end up walking in S-turns. Drunk of Mirror Online? Sheesh. Everything mouse-driven and the chat window is always active so every key I inadvertently press gets queued up for accidental chat. In beta I never even made it out of the starter town, never saw another player, never saw a single line of chat from anyone speaking. I tried DOMO this morning briefly and it still makes mostly negative impressions but I at least did the 2 or 3 quests (yes, that’s all it took, and I couldn’t bring myself to do them in beta!) it takes to get out of the starter area into the first city. Hey! There’s actually players now! That’s probably a good thing for what is billed as a “Social MMO.” Regardless, I just don’t know if I can make myself tolerate it enough to really get anywhere. We’ll see…
I do have my own first F2P article slowly working but with the holiday so near, preparations will likely be taking up my weekend, and I will be away most of next week — I finally have an appointment with an FAA consultant to hopefully get me back to work and then I’ll be traveling to the frozen tundra of Ohio to spend the holiday with the family before coming back home. Non-revving over a holiday is usually a nightmare only the truly desperate and insane attempt so on a completely selfish note I rather hope the economy makes for light holiday travel loads on the airlines…
On that note, if I don’t get the first F2P article up this weekend, you all have a wonderful holiday season, regardless which one(s) you observe (or not) and I’ll catch ya afterward!
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I’m glad you’re open to f2p games, despite the (well-deserved) criticisms aimed at the genre. I do try some from time to time, but haven’t had much luck with any until recently — maybe the quality of f2p games have gone up? In any case, I’ve tried Atlantica Online, DOMO, Wizard101 (well, the free areas at least), and … hmm … something else, and I quite liked them all. Atlantica Online’s turn-based combat is rather addictive, though I haven’t gotten far.
I downloaded Runes of Magic and would have given the game a chance, but it seems more inclined to crash every time I turned my character around, so I uninstalled it and am going to try it again in a week or so when things have settled down a bit.
I guess one of the things that f2p games have going for them is that they require zero investment, beyond some bandwidth and time to download them. I sometimes wonder if I’ll ever find something that would be completely “whoa, this is IT.”
(Yay my comment went through!!
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Oh, forgot to say one thing. I think part of the reason I’m quite open to f2p games is that I don’t really have a problem with RMT — at the very least, I’m not completely against the idea as some bloggers seem to be. I think it’s due to the fact that one of the best games I’ve ever played, in terms of society and interpersonal relationships and roleplay, is Achaea. That MUD, as with all MUDs from Iron Realms Entertainment, have aspects of RMT in them, and I never really thought much about it even though the necessity to purchase credits (the second currency in the game) was much higher than any of the graphical f2p games.
I didn’t really mind though, as in the end that game gave me four years of entertainment and great times. I had a shop, I created jewelry, I was quite the well-known craftsman and had a high position in the player-run druid guild (all guilds and cities were player-run, with the requisite politics and schemes and whatnot).
Heh, I should probably start a blog again instead of running off at the mouth in other people’s comments section.
Most of them are definitely just godawful. I give a lot of them a try. At this point I’m not sure why as only maybe 1 or 2 have held enough of my interest to not be instantaneously uninstalled. I suppose there’s some shred of hope that I’ll really like one of these and I can play it without spending money. I have no interest in the microtransaction stuff these games sell, so it’s mostly a win for me.
@Mallika: I like Atlantica Online too. It suffers from some of the typical problems, but it does some unique things too. Runes of Magic isn’t terrible either, it reminds me a lot of WoW in some ways. These two and Shin Megami Tensei Imagine: Online are the only ones I keep around.
Shin Megami Tensei was quite interesting but, the lag, ouch.
The slow run is also irritating. Combat is neat, but the game seems like it could get quite grindy.
I may go back.
I still have fond memories of Silkroad and Dekaron (2 Moons in the US), but overall, the quality of these games are really “You get what you pay for”
The only other game cool that is F2P is Perfect World…JUST to fly all day.
That was done right.
I’ve enjoyed Atlantica Online. Puzzle Pirates is brilliant. W101 is great fun, but the sub barrier makes me mutter.
I keep meaning to try Runes of Magic. Maybe later this week… when Wintersday ends in Guild Wars.
I did beta for Wizard101 and it was fun though since I wasn’t the target demographic I figured once it went live it would have a population primarily of children and I typically avoid that. Runes of Magic, I was approved to beta but the .rar file to install was corrupted. Maybe soon though.
One thing I look for immediately is whether the game supports modern widescreen resolutions or not. Preferably in the options. Most save their options in a text file that I can edit and set my “custom” resolution that way, but I grumble about doing it. It’s one thing setting configs in Linux in a text editor, but for GUI software (including in Linux) I expect a GUI config too, and one that includes every option. But for F2P if it won’t support my monitor’s resolution, I refuse to play with blurry resolutions (an unfortunate side-effect of LCD monitors and their “one true resolution” design) so they get uninstalled immediately.