Runes of Magic Review

Runes of Magic

State: Final
Website: http://us.runesofmagic.com
Developer/Publisher: Frogster Interactive/Runewaker Entertainment
The Pitch: Enter Taborea, a mystical world full of wonders and ancient secrets. Meet mysterious and dangerous creatures and solve the enigmas of old kingdoms long-lost in the mists of time.

That pitch is SO marketing-speak for ‘Kill things. Run a lot.’ I played this game for a couple months in beta and those are things I did. Not ONCE did I solve an enigma. Not once.

 

Performance

 

It ran pretty much flawlessly. I experienced no crashes. I ran it in fullscreen, at the highest resolution, with all the graphical settings maxed. My average framerate was in the 20s in cities, but 40+ everywhere else.

 

Unique to Runes of Magic

 

Dual-class system. This is quasi-unique. There’s other games that have it, like Guild Wars, but it’s done differently here. The way it works is this: when your chosen character hits level 10, you may train a secondary class. So I could become a Mage/Priest, for instance. The tradeoff is two things: your classes don’t level simultaneously and you can only use your current secondary class’s secondary skills. So you need to switch back and forth (and only at your house or at your skills trainer) to level each. And once you do switch, only a subset of that class’s skills are available to you.

The Good

 

Attractive, stylized visuals. Clearly, it’s an homage (okay, pretty much direct rip) of World of Warcraft, visually. This is a Good Thing(tm). Why is that? It allows people with computers of all levels of spec to be able to play it and it still looks reasonably attractive visually as it has an art style that doesn’t degrade overly with lower graphics settings. This is good for a further reason: the more people that can run it will correlate loosely with the number of people playing. For many people, the more that play an MMORPG, the more fun they’re going to have. So that’s a plus.

Decent Character Creation. RoM offers the standard character creation options: you can be male or female and start as one of 6 classes: Mage, Priest, Rogue, Scout, Warrior, and Knight. Pretty bland, if you ask me. The difference to this comes in the Dual-class system which I discuss later. As for customization of your character, you have a reasonably range of tweaking available to you via quite a few sliders. I still found that most people looked very similar in the game, but it’s not as limited as World of Warcraft, say.

Inspired by many. Lots of people may argue about whether or not RoM copies WoW. I’m not going to get into that beyond the visuals, but it is apparent that RoM is taking inspiration from many other games here, from Lord of the Rings online to City of Heroes. What this means to you the player, is that if you’ve ever played a mainstream MMO, you’re likely to feel pretty much at home here with little, if any, transition shock.
Easy Gameplay. Runes of Magic plays smoothly and easily. They start you out, like every other MMO, in a tutorial/training area and move you on from there. You start off fighting mushrooms. Fungi. Truly. Don’t worry, it gets better. Happily you can use WASD for movement and it is mapped for you. Using your skills is straightforward – hit the # on your keybaord that corresponds to the skill you want to use on your skill bar. You can run using the Right+Left mousebutton combination we all know and love. Auto-run is mapped to the NumLock. Sound familiar?

UI. The User Interface (UI) is fantastic. Immediately upon install, you can move a lot of things around and hide some elements to allow you to customize it how you like. On top of that, a user base has quickly grown around the game, and has developed hundreds of addons to tweak your experience. I list some of my favorites at the end of the article. Additionally, Tooltips are ubiquitous and responsive and also show equpped items, where applicable.

Lots and lots of Quests. I’m not sure if this is ‘good’, per se. There’s a lot of ‘em, for sure. They’re reasonably imaginative and well-chained.

 

The Bad

 

Dual-Class System. I like it in theory, but the fact that not even a little teensy-tiny bit of your XP from your main level gets allocated to your secondary drove me nutso. So I’m playing away and I’m level 10. Hooray! I get my new class and guess what? Now I’m level 1 again. Great… back to the fungi. The developers have thoughtfully added a second low-level area that you can teleport to to level up your secondary class, but so what? Can you say GRIND? And even once I manage to level up my secondary to the same as my primary, well you then have to switch back. Why? Because you can’t level your secondary class higher than your primary class. The way they’ve implemented this system is, in my opinion, asinine. I get that they want you to have to play the game twice as long in the hopes that you’re spending twice as much on the cash shop. But I sure as heck didn’t like it. If they had allowed you to allocate a percentage of your primary class’s XP to your secondary class, it would have been great. As it stands, it just feels like you’re playing all the same areas and quests repeatedly. Because you ARE.

Sounds. The music is really nicely done. When it’s there. A huge portion of the time you’ll run around the world and hear NOTHING. I don’t mean just ambient noises. I mean squat. Zip. Nada. Footsteps are there (I think) as are some ambient noises, but they’re so quiet even with the sound up as to be nonexistant. The music rarely makes an appearance; seemingly only in cities or dungeons and then it fades away pretty much for no reason at all that I could fathom. On top of that, there’s many sounds that are still just flat-out missing. Like a bunch of my Mages’ spells. All crafting sounds – yes, ALL. So chopping, pickaxing, harvesting… Yes, all completely silent. It’s eerie. There’s also no noise at all when you’re running through water, swimming, or by the waterfall. Also eerie.

Click-to-move. If you want auto-move to attack turned on, (which is a nice feature for melee characters, imo) it comes bundled with Click to move. Yeah, it’s one option. And it’s really annoying when you’re in the middle of combat and you accidentally click your mouse and your character starts running off to the horizon, pulling aggro all the way. Wheeeeee.

Non-removable popups. There’s a ton of annoying, scrolling banner messages that tells you not to buy diamonds from one of the annoying spam sellers in your general chat. (see below) Or the annoying message that tells you you have to face your target to attack. Yeah, I KNOW. Thanks for the tip. So why doesn’t the game just auto-face target? No clue. These messages can be removed with an addon called Streamline.

Spam. Yep, there’s gold sellers. Lots of ‘em. But there’s also addons to block ‘em. This is pretty much in all games, so although it IS a negative, it’s pretty much defacto, I guess.

 

Summary

 

Runes of Magic is worth your time to download. If you’re interested in playing something for free, this would be my first choice. You don’t have to use the cash shop to play the game, although it certainly comes in handy, if only because you get a bucketload of stuff when you’re out fighting mobs and only 2 bags to put all that crap into. I played it for a few months, more than any other cash shop free to play game. For that specific category, it’s the best option out there right now. Is it better than all of the big AAA Pay to Play MMOs? No. But it does put some of them to shame. And for a free game, that’s awfully impressive.

 

Download value: [rating:8] (8)

 

Addons:

 

pbInfo – A tooltip info addon
XBar - Replacement bar for stats and info
WoWMap – Makes the worldmap of RoM feel like you may know it from WoW
yBag - Replacement of the default backpack, bank and house chest
yGather – Records resource stacks locations and displays them on Worldmap and minimap