What I’m Playing:
Due to an extremely busy summer, I’ve put my RIFT account on hold for awhile because I simply don’t have enough time to commit to it right now. I’ve also “finished” all the 5 person content and since my guild is small (and many are quitting), there’s not much for me to do on my main character at this time. As a result, I’ve been trying out some Free to Play (F2P) MMOs when I have the time. I haven’t spent a very long time with them, (only somewhere around 10 hours with each), but I though I’d let you guys know about them in case you want to try them out. If I end up playing either of them more seriously, I’ll definitely do a full MMOCO article on it to let you know more about what I think they have to offer in the co-opportunities department. As of right now, however, I only have my first impressions to offer up.
Forsaken World
Forsaken World is the westernized sister of the older F2P MMO Perfect World. It was one of the games that Steam started offering when it began to support F2P games. The game offers several different races and classes (with some racial restrictions on certain classes), character customization via talent trees, and has pretty good graphics for a F2P game. There are dungeons you can do (though only a certain number of times a day), and there’s even a group queueing system in place for the dungeons, so you can pop in queue for a particular dungeon and eventually get placed into a group and teleported in. A nice feature it has (which is becoming more popular with a lot of F2P MMOs) is the ability to auto-run to a particular quest NPC or enemy type for quests. You simply click on their name on the window that pops up when you hover above the quest tracker, and away you go.
I do have a couple complaints with the game, however. As is the problem with many F2P MMOs, many things are not explained very well, which results in spending a good amount of time doing research on the internet, or simply plodding along until you figure it out. I also have yet to be excited about much I’m doing in the game. This may get better later on, but right now as I’m just auto-running from quest to quest, it’s hard to feel very immersed in the world. The questing system itself has a few hiccups for players who are trying to play consistently with friends. Lots of times my friends and I ended up with different daily quests from the same person (seems to be random dailies from some NPCs). I’ve done a few dungeons (some which yielded amazing XP), but I didn’t feel very challenged - it was mostly attack the enemy until it dies, spam potions if needed, move onto the next. Again, though, hopefully this changes later on in the game. I’ll certainly keep playing and see how it goes.