Dream of Mirror Online

The obviously misnamed Eversun City at sunset, outside the Planetarium. I just can’t get it out of my head that Dream of Mirror Online is the real successor to EverQuest. Not the game as it is today – a high level game where raiding is king – but the old, old, pre-expansion, social game. They have open dungeons here! That just blows me away. The usual trend these days is toward instancing. I haven’t found an instanced dungeon yet. I’ve also become used to having quests lead me from place to place. Again, unlike EverQuest, and unlike DOMO. There’s lots of interesting little spots here and there, and while they all have some quests associated with them, you won’t find many of them by running around looking for question marks on people’s heads. Oh yeah. There’s no way of telling by looking at an NPC if it has a quest for you. You have to click on them and see if they’ll talk, and if they do, they might have a quest… but come back another time. ...

If you’re going to have RMT in your game, make it weird, kooky and over the top – like this Santa’s sleigh mount from Dream of Mirror Online. Complete with reindeer (but it looks like the shadow costs extra or something). And me in my Mecha outfit, killing Pus with hydraulic power.

Dream of Mirror Online was down most of the night last night. When it came back up, I mostly just ran around collecting jobs – after Norikue’s cool suggestion to have Musician as my secondary job to give my pet somewhat more survivability, I figured I should definitely get that one. I stumbled onto the Shaman job (honestly, I didn’t know that was the job quest until I finished it). ...

You think you’re strong. You think you can play the game without using RMT. Gonna game Aeria, gonna take all their stuff and give nothing back, cuz FREE means FREE, dunnit? Then they come out and say they will give you THREE MONTHS of double experience, starting when you give the word… PLUS a MECHA COSTUME… if you buy that potion between this noon and the next. OMG. EVIL. ...

Norikue pointed out the possible reason why everyone but me seemed to be stripped to their skivvies. The mysterious check box marked “Show Equipment” in the Options window, which I (of course) had checked. Here’s what part of the crowd near the Eversun teleport point looks like with that switch checked: CLEAR that switch, and suddenly, everyone’s wonderful clothing suddenly appears! And it also answers another question of mine – which was, how come everyone but me fights exclusively hand-to-hand? ...

People just get looking meaner and meaner as they level in Dream of Mirror Online. Well, I do, anyway. I have NO IDEA why most other people seem naked, or nearly so. Maybe their inhuman physicques (few people seem to choose human characters, as I did) just don’t take well to clothing. I dunno. The mask is a 7-day free mask given out by GMs at a GM event celebrating DOMO’s birthday. ...

In Dream of Mirror Online – DOMO – there’s no real need for alts because your character can change classes to any they have unlocked with a free class change at your friendly local Career Advisor, such as the one in the dojo in Eversun City. But even then, your main job is just one aspect of your character. When you change jobs, you you can take up to five skill sets from the other jobs you have unlocked. ...

With Wizard 101’s Dragonspyre world still in the unforeseeable future (WHEN, KingsIsle?), and Chronicles of Spellborn also months away (and the German one that should be showing up in a few days almost certainly impossible to play from the US), I needed a casual game. EQ2 is still my main game (and hours spent yesterday in the Moors and Befallen prove that), but I just can’t play one game… so I went back to an old favorite, Dream of Mirror Online. ...

Adventure on land and sea? Lush, detailed world? Dual talent trees that let you mold your character however you like? How can it miss? Florensia’s kinship with Dream of Mirror Online couldn’t be more unmistakable. That same sort of soft focus, cell-shaded look of the characters against backdrops so lush they seem to be almost painted. And these guys don’t just sit around and swing at each other… they put their bodies into it, jumping and swinging and spiking stuff at the enemy. The birth of the aerobic adventurer. ...

As I was working through DOMO-like* Florensia last night (expect a separate article about it tonight), I was thinking, and this goes back to my MMO DNA project, wouldn’t it be nice to take one of those F2P imports and really play the heck out of it, and blog about it, every day for a month? I think it woulld take that long to really get a thorough sense for a game. EVERY MMO is pretty similar at the start – pick up quests, go kill quick-spawning beasties, level up, etc. You can’t review a game based purely on the new player experience, as important a part as that might be. ...