The First Ten Hours: Runes of Magic Review
Filed under: MMOCrunch News, Reviews
The First Ten Hours is a multi-part editorial column by iTZKooPA. During his journey he will spend a solid ten hours tackling the opening of today’s hottest MMORPGs that he hasn’t played to death. Be it new game, old game, new faction, or new class, it’ll all be new to him. All titles are judged on the same basic points as described below.
Welcome to my early review of Runes of Magic. As the premiere WoW-a-like free-to-play title, it’s only fair that we tackle Runewaker’s MMORPG, and Frogster’s localization of it. The title has been out for months now, allowing me to jump in and take in all that is Taborea on a few different characters – the highest being a level 18/15 Rogue/Scout. It’s also allowed the tandem of Frogster and Runewaker ample time to ferret out any glaring bugs.
Character Creation: There are many games out there with crazy amounts of character customization. However, Runes of Magic is not one of them. The game is severely limiting for your basic choice of race, Humans being the only candidate at launch. Thankfully the latest Chapter has added a second race, the love-em or hate-em pointy eared Elves. Although gamers are limited to only two races, and obviously two sexes (look to sci-fi MMOGs to change that one day), to start, once we select our poison the creation opens up. From hairstyle to bust size to foot size, the game is loaded with thirteen additional multi-position sliders. The mix of combinations gives Runes of Magic one of the more in-depth character creation systems in the fantasy genre. But that’s assuming you can look past the extremely limiting number of races at the surface.
Opening & Lore: Diving into this title is incredibly bland. There’s no opening cinematic to speak of, and no opening quest lines to get you started. You just pop into existence and are hit with a minimap full of icons demanding your attention. If one wants to find out what’s going on, then your best bet is to spend time on the title’s official website (perhaps while downloading the beastly package). Played any other MMORPG in your life? Then expect to be bored to tears with the opening of Runes of Magic. “Kill 10 foozles” and then “Kill 10 foozles” some more.
User Interface: Runes of Magic’s interface is something that MMORPGers will be very comfortable with. The control scheme is essentially a clone of so many other titles and the keybindings match World of Warcraft’s more often than not. RoM has a myriad of buttons surrounding the very busy minimap, most of which take you to useful places like the Item Shop. For better, or for worse, everything is in your face and readily accessible.
Quests & Grinding: Get ready to be bored. Considering that the opening of the game is very uneventful it’s unlikely that the later levels get anywhere near epic. After leveling my Rogue/Scout for a healthy amount of time I have yet to find an interesting quest. Making matters more tedious is the fact that the company employs the idea of daily quests from the early going. And all of them have you grinding a collection of foozles. For those of you who leveled a WoW character back in Stranglethorn Vale, you’re probably familiar with the The Green Hills of Stranglethorn quest. The original designer of the quest has admitted that it’s the worst quest in WoW for numerous reasons. Yet the creators of Runes of Maker copied it, right down to the required page numbers. How’s that for a synopsis of quest design?
Dungeons: Dungeons are everywhere in Runes of Magic. They present themselves through kill quests early on in the game and offer appropriately awesome rewards. They aren’t exactly original or expertly designed, but they offer a good distraction to the monotonous grindfest of the quests proper. It’s worth mentioning that RoM has a ton of outdoor bosses, or named mobs if you prefer. I call them bosses because you have absolutely no business attacking these suckers if you’re around their level and alone. They hit like trucks and possess a healthy amount of hitpoints. Another worthwhile distraction to the awful quest design.
Polish: Polish is one of those things that isn’t often categorized. It’s an ongoing process in every MMORPG, and title’s always get more polished the longer they are around. Therefore many titles are launched in what is labeled as an unpolished state. Runes of Magic is one of the titles where its obvious that the idea of polish is not at the forefront of the developer’s mind. Actually it’s a mixed bag, some of the issues can be squarely placed on the localizing agent, Frogster America. Poor graphics, mixed framerate performance, jerky animations and balance issues lie squarely on Runewaker. Frogster is at fault mainly for the incredibly shoddy job of localization. The company seems to have taken on too much by trying to localize multiple languages at the same time. In all of the languages there are glaring errors including spelling and grammar mistakes and buffs who’s tooltips don’t specify what they do. Instead a player is shown a placeholder message. Annoying gamers further is that both companies seem to ignore the issue, releasing new content without fixing the glaring problems before them. Some problems can be fixed in just few minutes time.
Uniqueness: Runes of Magic is an admitted WoW-a-Like. It was designed specifically to cater to a crowd that enjoys World of Warcraft, but doesn’t have the time to invest in that title to make them a hero. Or doesn’t want to pay a static fee. At the surface it’s a simple clone, but RoM does offer plenty of uniqueness including the dual class feature (hence why I am a Rogue/Scout), a deeper crafting system, guild and personal housing and a quick content development cycle.
Overall: If you love World of Warcraft, but can no longer afford the time or monetary investment then Runes of Magic might be a good fit for you. It kept me, a staunch WoW lover, mildly interested much further than the intended ten hours of play time. I’ll likely keep it installed as I work my way up to the level cap of 50/50. And why not, it’s free.
Not a fan of World of Warcraft? Then Runes of Magic isn’t for you.
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September 20th, 2009 at 12:40 pm
Koop,
I played runes from closed beta and recently logged on with some old guildmates to check out some of the new content. A lot has changed and so many abilities have been gimped or nerfed that I feel that I am not playing the same character as before. I had left an unfinished priest/knight back at launch because I just couldn’t take the gear grind anymore.
I am not saying runes is a bad game. For what it is, a free to play grinder it’s fun and good to tool around with on some off time. I can also tell you that even though it is free, there is no free lunch here.
Endgame is very expensive in the ways of bag and bankspace; that’s where they get you. Mounts aren’t cheap either but they run sales regularly, always look when a new mount is released they sometimes offer it on a discount.
Last, your review is on key. It does become increasingly boring but it still has some enjoyable parts. However, what made Stranglethorn Vale fun was the fact it was contested territory and you never knew when a good ganking was coming your way.
That is the main element that I feel is missing from runes, pvp. There is pvp server that is an absolute ffa, but if you go for a pve server the pvp is bland and almost non-existent. I heard they changed some things and added guild wars and such, but they are still working on balancing issues. They have practically rendered scouts and warriors useless through the build changes. I know they changed up priest at least 4-5 times, frustrating having to retool your build every few months.
I hope you enjoy your game, what server are you playing on? I have a character on Machentacht and might be able to pass you some gear I am not going to use. Which is all of it, because unless they offer something that I really, really want, I am probably not going to return.
It was good while it lasted.
September 20th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
You might want to examine that “deeper crafting system” a little bit further. My experience has been that grinding for mats is incredibly boring and labor-intensive (“rare” recipes require literally 100+ pieces of material) and that the end product is no better than what can be obtained from the five-minute “murder ten foozles” quests.
Also, of course you can do what you want with your free time, but your review calls the game “bland,” “boring,” and unpolished. Why on earth would you willingly continue to play it? Just because something’s “free” (and as you note, level capped players definitely “need” to pay real money if they want to continue advancing gear-wise) doesn’t make it worthy.
September 22nd, 2009 at 6:50 am
You both have no idea! the game rocks and leveling is not boring at all as I have just leveled an elf to 46/35 and it was fun to do so. Obtaining great gear is also a peice of cake if u know what you are doing. Also expensive is wrong when your talk about buying mounts or bag space when it is possible to make 3-4 million gold per hour. I don’t know what game you guys are playing but like I said before this one rocks.
September 22nd, 2009 at 2:16 pm
@Chris
There are two main reasons I will continue to play it on and off. First, I want to see if the game changes, perhaps gets better or simply grows on me as I get deeper into it. And secondly, I feel obligated to get to some of the endgame so I can get the full scope of the content being offered.
A lesser reason is because my brother, whom I enjoy gaming with, refuses to subscribe to another MMOG, so this is a pretty good fit for us. Although it appears I convinced him to at least check out DDO: EU.
As for your point about the crafting system, true it is mat heavy and needs a bit of balancing, but it still is deeper than WoW’s very basic system.
September 22nd, 2009 at 2:23 pm
Inktomi: I am on the original PvP server Grimdal, but most of my spare MMO time is being dedicated to Champions Online currently – a game that’s pretty refreshing to all the fantasy stuff out there.
September 30th, 2009 at 10:24 pm
I agree that the game need lots of polishing. After playing WoW, I really miss good sound effects and smooth animation in Runes of Magic. Their talents system is also awful, there aren’t enough TP even to support 4-5 primary spells at maximum level. Or you have to buy potions to get more talent points, but for the real money.
I also have an allergy on Mountain Demon Grass, that is required for almost every craft at the beginning. You need TONS of it to level up your crafting skills. And gathering is MUCH slower than in WoW.
Also I don’t like an idea with the boss that appears only within a certain amount of time.
But besides of that, I love more features of that game. Quests seems to be not as dumb as in WoW where you mostly have to kill dozens of creatures for no reason. They also have tier sets of armor for low-levels and mounts from the first level. Double class system is also a huge advantage. But I really expected from them to polish the game a bit with the release of Chapter 2, but that doesn’t happened =(
October 19th, 2009 at 3:30 am
It’s kind of a morphine to wows cocaine.
Really wow has many of the problems described here as well. Less so, but at the same time you pay a fee for it.
It depends if you just have a mmorpg itch that you want to work off, or if you really want to dive into the itch/addiction – if you want to dive, pay the 15 per month. If your just working off an itch, you don’t need as high a quality game (and by that I mean wow has the same problems, but worked on them more – wow hasn’t magically avoided these problems) or to pay per month.
There’s a few other things I’d say, but I’ve got that on my website.
January 21st, 2010 at 11:16 pm
I’m new to Runes of Magic and I got the same first impression as the reviewer but as expected from the first review I read there was a lot more to it.
The thing that really attracted me to this game is what was in that review. The game has the look and feel of wow with all the epic features from the other MMO’s I liked.
Free2play has got to be the first good point you come across so I’ll say that’s the first feature that attracted me.
There IS pvp on the pvp servers, it’s rather confusing at first cause the pvp tutorials don’t explain everything it should and the wiki has out of date info (every pvper has to like having pk drops ^^).
The talent system is non-existant so it’s missing that but I always thought those were just stupid imbalancer’s anyways. You have enough classes to choose from to make it unique as each combo has it’s own set of elite skills (and you can switch between the two).
Modding from WoW, oh that is an epic step forward in gaming. The functions are hard to learn but they don’t change in totality with each patch like they did in WoW so I don’t have to download a new version of each mod every time. The main ones you can just do a replace all for one command in the lua files (if any) and your’e set. I plan on writing a pvp addon like the old CT pvp KoS with the allies list and blacklist. The ingame one is so lacking it’s stupid. (if you’re still playing be sure to install Steamline and pbinfo as they add to the game’s ease of play, removing tedious clicks through potentially laggy prompts and showing info on monsters you’re always wondering about)
The Itemshop is reminicient of PWI but at the same time it has 3 different currencies that can be farmed for or paid for via IRL money. Like an earlier reply said, in the early levels farming for gold isn’t really possible but later on it’s easy to make money in game and buy diamonds dirt cheap. I’d been saving up for a while and bought cheap diamonds during the diamond half-price event. The next week I got a half-priced high-speed mount with the diamonds I bought.
ARMOR MODIFICATION – This generally goes over everyone’s head. It’s a complicated system that transmuter is. But those that play on pvp servers have seen the twinks and know the epic possibilities. You can do anything from adding sets of stats, to adding extra slots, to moving the entire piece of armor to a different armor model (they call it aggregation, haven’t done half of this yet). You can get some pretty nice costumes in the itemshop too and stick your armor in those for a nice uniform look if so desired.
FREE POSTAGE – Lol, how many times did I hate paying the postage in WoW or EQ or even other games I transfered items between characters on. All mailing in RoM is free and instant to boot. No one hour waits or fees for sending items/money. You have the option of massmailing groups for cost of diamonds (A nice restriction if you ask me) and you still have the CoD option from the other games.
I mentioned the mount earlier. The lack of races make this obvious but there are no race restrictions on the mounts and they are more unique. Animations for the mounts moving at different angles are better too, you horse doesn’t move like a train being diverted on the rails. Early on you can rent horses for 15 minutes at a time to run those “run” quests and I’m sure you noticed there are quite a few of those in the game as well as the woozle killing ones.
I could go on but ranting about the game isn’t something I really wanna do. Recently the out of date pvp info got me to go evil and the exit strategy to it no panning out was one of the things removed from the game. If you’re gonna go evil, make sure you’re top level and have all the prevent hi-jack sealers you need.
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