Sorry for such a long AFK time. I finished school, went on vacation, and got a second job as a video game tester at Foundation 9 Entertainment / Griptonite Games (Now I’m working 7 days a week).
Anyway, my friend, my roommate, and I have been looking for games that all three of us can play. We’re all really into RPGs, so while we wait for Diablo III to come out (Which, unfortunately, will not be anytime soon), we decided to check out some free MMORPGs. Here’s what we found, in order from worst to best:
Game name: Flyff
Publisher: Gala-Net/gPotato.com
Developer: Aeonsoft
Platform: PC
Flyff is a good MMORPG for people that don’t play video games much, at least from what I could tell in the short time (Level 10ish) that I could tell. The monsters drop candy, the graphics are fluffy, and the gameplay seemed to be quite easy, although tedious. I only got 2 skills, and one of them actually did less damage, because it takes a long time to wind up, so auto attacking would do more damage. There’s no pathfinding when you click to move, and if you get caught on a small object, it’s annoying to get unstuck. All in all, I wouldn’t suggest playing Flyff, as it seemed like it would just be a ton of grinding.
Game name: Rappelz
Publisher: gPotato.com
Developer: nFlavor
Platform: PC
My friends and I played Rappelz for a lot longer than Flyff, though we didn’t get to end game or anything like that. Rappelz seemed to be a lot more hardcore than Flyff, aimed at your average gamer. From what we looked up, they have end game content, as well as decent PVP (There are three different factions). The skill system seemed to work well, and there is a cool combat pet system in which every class gets a pet. One problem that we saw with Rappelz is that there was one area (A ghost ship) that was ridiculously hard, even though there were three of us and it was a low level area. Also, as far as we can tell, only one class gets the ability to heal their pet, and when your pet dies, it doesn’t come back with full health. This would require the other classes to either wait for their pet to heal, or just not use their pet. Once again, we didn’t play this one all too much, but that’s what we could figure out.
Game name: Runes of Magic
Publisher: Frogster Interactive, Frogster America
Developer: Runewaker Entertainment
Platform: PC
Runes of Magic is the game we are currently playing, and will probably be playing until Diablo III comes out. RoM is basically WoW, but a little bit less polished. The skill system is a little bit different, and there are no talent points (So as far as I can tell most characters will be the same come end game). Also, there’s a dual class system which seems a little funny at first, but you get used to it. There are a few things that I think RoM actually does better than WoW. For example, a lot of quest items / enemies are highlighted on your mini map, you can put markers on your map for quests by right clicking tags in the quest log, and you can run toward certain quest tags by right clicking on them in your quest log as well. Other than that, the game is pretty much the exact same as WoW – quests, kill enemies, get professions, go through zones, etc. I haven’t found out how PVP works in RoM yet, but I think it’s just kill whoever you want starting at a certain level, which wouldn’t be that great in my opinion. I HIGHLY suggest playing RoM, especially if you want to play WoW, but you don’t want to / can’t pay for WoW.
Paul Kankiewicz 