Runes of Magic

Apologies to Randall Munroe Yes, I really do believe you can’t honestly review an MMO without investing yourself in it for a fairly substantial bit of time, so that any oddities with controls and stuff become second nature and you can understand the core of what the game developers were striving for. A 1999 EverQuest review could have written all about the low polygons and stiffness of the character models, the laughably sharp-cornered world and so on, and missed the forest for the trees. You have to play a MMO long enough to see and appreciate the forest before you stamp a score on a review. ...

Yes, this is the Daily Blogroll MY OWN BLOG didn’t want you to see! I’m kinda tired of Free Realms. Not the game; heck, considering my computer now refuses to run Lord of the Rings Online for long, I’ve been spending most of my gaming time in Free Realms. Beau is having fun playing. Pete at Dragonchasers took a 75 degree turn and went from being marginal about the game to a fan in just three short days. Syp of Bio Break is still dubious, but what does he care – his wife is Tinker Bell! ...

Runes of Magic has been getting a lot of attention from the blogosphere lately. Though obviously heavily inspired by World of Warcraft, this Taiwan import adds multi-classing and many other little twists to the basic formula. It’s been in beta for months, goes live in March, and today sent me an email saying they had over 450,000 players worldwide. That’s not just beta signups – that’s implying there’s 450,000 people – worldwide – playing Runes of Magic. And that is a very, very good thing. ...

Much anticipated Asian/European WoW-like Runes of Magic starts its closed beta August 28th. Even though no North American publisher is yet announced, they vow to have English servers for those who prefer that language, and they don’t care where you’re from. It’s all free, after all. They’ll also have French and German servers for the Gallicly and Teutonically inclined. They will also be showing the game at the annual Games Convention in Leipzig, along with lots of other games we may never see here. Leipzig is pronounced “LIPE-zig”. I checked, this time. ...

There’s two MMOs out there you have probably not heard of. There’s HUNDREDS of those, right? Once you get out of the calm, safe, bathwater-warm surf of the current crowd of big budget MMOs, it’s a wild tide of MMOs with names you can’t remember and details you can’t recall. None of them will challenge WoW, so you WoW-ians can get back in your chairs. I am not going to say anything negative about the current crop. ...