My quests have sent me past the starter zone and quest-hub, on to the first major city. My Priest leveling stopped at 11 and I’m now working on leveling up my Warrior. I still haven’t tapped into crafting. WingedNazgul was kind enough to link to an article from Massive about ROM crafting. You can read it here. I’m enjoying the game-play. The quality of content, quests, graphics and zones are – well, very good. I keep waiting for the shoe to drop. I keep wondering if this is just an Age of Conan first-20-levels-are-great façade. Is this all going to come crashing to a buggy halt beyond the first capitol city? If not, then this will be a very good game.
We can’t expect the leveling excellence pumped out by Blizzard or the tightly interwoven back story of games with famous intellectual-property like WAR or LOTRO but so far, this is pretty damned good. I’m actually so surprised and just waiting to hit the shit parts, that I’m being overly cautious about using the adjectives that come to mind when describing the game-play thus far.
I’m on the crest of another personal achievement in Wizard101 and want to get time in on my Runes of Magic (ROM) Warrior so I’m going to keep this short and highlight a few points over several posts.
Unique Ideas
Dual class training is going to be very beneficial. It completely eliminates tanks and healers being gimped when not performing those roles for groups. It doesn’t exist in ROM. Your actual spec will be impacted by making talent choices more geared toward group play if that’s your choice but you’re not locked into that class. Having dabbled with the feature more, I’ve found that I can play as only my Warrior, only my Priest, Priest/Warrior or Warrior/Priest. I can change to the class and/or combination, most appropriate for the situation. I would guess that players who are targeting end-game raiding or competitive PVP will do min/max to such an extreme that this won’t be as beneficial to them but for the average player, this is huge.
Gifts from the Gods appear in my backpack for every level. I don’t know how long the game does this but it’s certainly unique and refreshing. You start the game with a closed bag inside your backpack. When you open the bag it places appropriate level gifts into your pack – a piece of armor, sometimes a weapon, a rune, potions, accessories, etc. AND it also gives you another closed bag that can’t be opened until your next level. Talk about a “go ding” present. These aren’t uber items but they’re usually an upgrade. If not, it’s free vendor-trash gold. Sahweet! I really like this idea. The benefit is multifold. You need gear for two classes in ROM. With these presents I’ve already put aside items for my Warrior that weren’t beneficial for my Priest. It’s also a nice way to help players upgrade their items if they’re not questing and haven’t gotten those elusive random drop upgrades.
Versatile payment options are all win in a game. I’m so tempted to spend a little money to furnish my room. However, I won’t do that until I know I’m going to stick around. I’m saving my in-game gold for gear and mounts. But I’m really tempted to spend $10 bucks of real money to buy some furniture. Clearly, I don’t “need” furniture in my room. However, I SO love player housing that having an empty one is not really a house. As it stands now, you can only buy furniture. You can use in-game gold or RMT. It’s rumored that the carpentry profession will at some point have access to furniture recipes.
Quests
To date, the MMO industry has only revealed a limited set of quest types and mechanics for advancing your character’s levels. ROM has implemented all of them. The kill x of y, retrieve x from y, deliver and go fetch are all there. There’s nothing new or outstanding here except to say that I would rate them as good as original WOW, AOC and WAR, while being superior to EQ2 based purely on what I like when I’m questing. I’m leveling right now purely through quests and don’t mind it at all. If this continues, I will have been made a liar about questing. This would the 3-for-3 where I’ve exclusively leveled via quests: WAR (never intentionally ground mobs other than for mats & influence, not for XP), W101 and now ROM. And like AOC there are more quests in a zone than you need to level. Let’s hope it stays that way through-out.
Leveling Experience
Leveling doesn’t happen as quickly as the early levels of a game like WOW but it’s not painfully slow either. What is slow is the killing of mobs. They don’t have a lot of health but you don’t do a lot of damage. I don’t think this is going to be a game of putting up high critical strike numbers. That might change in the end-game or higher levels as you upgrade and customize you gear. For now, I change out of items too quickly to invest gold in twinking it out. I’ve exclusively used Runes dropped by mobs, provided by my gift bag or received as quest rewards. To me at least, I don’t hold on to an item long enough to spend my gold on fancier Runes. This leaves me with moderate damage and something like 10 swings to kill something with only 100 hit points. I think this is where some people will feel a grind. It’s not the quests. It’s the kill 15 of those with 10+ swings per kill.
Runes
Runes are magical items that can be used to upgrade your gear stats. Think WOW sockets and gems. I like this idea and I’d love to see games take it a bit further – or backward to AC2 gear mechanics. The gear itself is good but generic in as far as class dependency. Let’s remove the “Priest gear”, “Tank gear” and ZOMG don’t you dare roll on my “Rogue gear” from the game. Cloth wearers are similar in class archetype so they can all wear the same gear. What makes it Mage, Priest or hybrid is how you customized the stats. In a game like WOW you have enchants and gems. In ROM you have runes. I like that games are going in this direction so let’s keep heading down that road.
That’s not to say that there shouldn’t be class specific sets. I’m fine with that concept. ROM has them from what I’ve gathered. The items are quest rewards – DING! Not random go melt your brain in an instance and hope your set piece drops and it’s the piece you need. I don’t know if this is 100% accurate. However, I asked a few players about the gear they had on because it looked so sweet. All of them told me they had gotten them from class-specific quest chains. While I love that idea as someone who solos and think it’s better for casual players, it does make me wonder what is obtained from raiding. I don’t have that answer yet.
Summary
In closing, if I had to choose between ROM and EQ2, I’d play ROM. I find the quests more engaging and less tedious. There are more of them than I need which allows me to freely drop things I can’t be bothered to complete. Now factor in the options for acquiring items and no subscription, on the surface it’s a superior choice. Of all the games I wished I enjoyed more, EQ2 has been number one for years. No other games has made me wish so hard that I could tolerate the leveling and questing system more than EQ2. I keep going back and giving it an honest effort but I-just-can't-stand-leveling in EQ2. Now here comes ROM and it has those EQ2-like features – from what I can tell so far, and I enjoy the leveling much more. This is certainly turning out to be a very interesting foray into another F2P/RMT game.
Do I dare to hope that I've found a full featured fantasy MMO to hang out in for a while? W101 isn't going anywhere. It's just too much EASY FUN! Giving up W101 would be like throwing away a favorite candy. Still, there's room in my line-up for a more expansive fantasy MMO experience. ROM is F2P but they'd get there money's worth out of me just like W101. I'm easily tempted by vanity items - pets, pretty clothes, furnished housing, etc. Unless things change drastically, I don't see a need to buy gear with real money. There's plenty of decent items for sale that can be purchased with in-game gold.
Anywho, I'm off to play the Warrior side of my character for a while. This evening when I have time for games again, I'll see if I can skirt my way into another training point in W101. Zeke is about to have to fork one over for me finding all of the Blue Oysters. The only one missing is from a zone I still can't access. Grrrrrrr. I think I'm close to unlocking it though because I've been given a quest to go there - can't be long now. All 'round fire trap card here I come. I'm going to be raining down meteors all over the place.
Just popped into RoM for a bit after your post yesterday. It still feels like they need to add more needed audio in the game as a lot of activities are strangely silent and stuff like fighting with my Knight sounds strangely like wind chime wars.
But I will check in on this title from time to time. The great thing about F2P is you don't have to feel like you're funding a Beta like in some games.
Posted by: Winged Nazgul | January 31, 2009 at 02:25 PM
I was going to comment on that in a article about ambiance which is noticeably missing. I know many gamers who mute game sounds and music but I'm not one of them. I noticed the lack of audio within the first few minutes. Fortunately, it's something that's probably easy to add later. The other issue is the mobs all sound the same when you're fighting them - like yipping children which isn't a good visual when I'm whacking things with a broad sword. :-)
Exactly - come and go. You don't have to get your box price worth or subscription's worth.
I hate to ask but what level are you in W101? *winces*
Posted by: Alysianah aka Saylah | January 31, 2009 at 02:46 PM
43 - Got my Helephant and Stormzilla spells and also farmed a bit for my first sword off Oyutomi - woot!
Posted by: Winged Nazgul | January 31, 2009 at 02:51 PM
@Winged - Wow nice. Still no sword but I haven't tried farming for one yet.
Posted by: Alysianah aka Saylah | January 31, 2009 at 03:40 PM
"Of all the games I wished I enjoyed more, EQ2 has been number one for years. No other games has made me wish so hard that I could tolerate the leveling and questing system more than EQ2."
Saylah, we are very much the same on that score. I adore the housing aspect in EQ2 and I like the crafting system as well (though at times, when I was having a marathon crafting session, I would wish that I could change to the easy 'click and wait' type system) -- I have always said that EQ2 ought to have been THE perfect game for me, since it is just full of stuff that I love, and full of fluff. But alas, I really disliked the questing system. I disliked how you had to go searching for a 'named' mob for some quests and if you didn't find him, you had to just keep killing generic mobs until he decided to spawn; I hated the map system (I don't know who thought it was a good idea to just have continent names slapped on a map without any way to go into closer detail -- dude, I didn't grow up in Norrath. I have no idea where this area I'm supposed to go is, or even what continent)I hated how combat was handled ...
It got bad enough that by the time I was level 27 all I did was run around gathering resources so I could level up my carpentry (ah, how I loved my carpenter and all the furniture and decorations she could make), because -- to put it bluntly -- the questing and combat in EQ2 just annoyed the shit out of me.
(And one thing that always irritated me was the way dresses looked on females. Seriously, the leg slits? On EVERY single dress? UGH.)
Even with all that, I always look at EQ2 with sincere regret that I couldn't get into it. Housing in LotRO feels like a complete joke (i.e., 'decorating hooks') after experiencing the EQ2 housing and decorating system, what with its 'put anything anywhere, and with some ingenuity and imagination you could turn this space into a recreation of an Arabian harem room or theater or jazz lounge or whatever you desire.' I liked that everyone could gather everything, and that it was the rares that popped up from time to time during harvesting that were used to create the more powerful things. (I don't like the crit system in LotRO crafting. I tend to ignore it for now, because I don't feel like getting myself worked up about failing to get a critical success after going to all the trouble to gather various materials and a rare or two to attempt to craft a powerful version of a normal item.)
I miss the housing, carpentry profession, crafting, craft writs, guild leveling system, the fact that you could have a top-level crafter while being a very low-level adventurer or not even going out of the city at all ... basically I miss all the things outside of the combat, the questing, the zoning, the choppiness (despite my computer being able to handle the latest games on highest settings), and the graphics.
Ah, EQ2. No matter how many times I tried (4), I just couldn't get into it. I'd love half the game and hate the other half, and the half I hated was a rather important part.
Posted by: Mallika | February 01, 2009 at 05:58 AM
Actually, the MMO that I wish I could really get into but just never could was Star Wars Galaxy when it first came out. But Everquest II is a really close second.
Posted by: Winged Nazgul | February 01, 2009 at 07:26 AM
Great review, makes me want to play!
Posted by: Tipa | February 01, 2009 at 07:50 AM
@Mallika - To Sony's credit they continue to try and make the game more causual friendly. They've revamped crafting multiple times, have added more solo-friendly content, user friendly zones and even crafting instances. However, that can't offset the fundamentals of a game that has been around for years so, I just can't. :-)
@Winged - SWG never tickled my fancy but am intested in seeing how KOTOR turns out.
@Tipa - I don't think you'd get as much enjoyment. You love EQ2 and this doesn't have the same level of polish and ambiance. For a true EQ2 player I think the shortcomings would be rather glaring to you. But hey, it's free so when you have some spare time drop in. I'll show you my room. YES, I already succumbed to furnishing it. I couldn't resist. :-)
Posted by: Alysianah aka Saylah | February 01, 2009 at 01:32 PM
I been playing ROM for the passed two days. I'm currently doing Mage (11) /Priest (9).
I'm enjoying the game, it feels just like WOW for me, but free, heh.
As far as the enemies go, I believe their health when fighting is based on a percentage. I usually hit for 70-100 with my Fireballs and I do not 1-shot them, however their health go down by like 35-45 instead of the shown damaged I made which leads me to believe it's a percentage and not the actual amount.
Posted by: JT | February 17, 2009 at 09:33 PM