Runes of Magic

http://www.runesofmagic.com/en/index.html

A couple of weeks ago I downloaded Runes of Magic (RoM) to try it out. I hadn’t really heard much about this game before, but seeing it’s free I thought I’d give it a shot. Before going any further I have to admit that I’m still a rather low level, as I didn’t had that much time to play due to schoolwork (and also because I restarted on a different server a week ago, after I discovered a friend of mine plays RoM as well). Nevertheless I have a pretty good idea of what the game has to offer.

Stats & gear

As you level up you will notice something: you don’t get any stat points to customize your character, meaning everyone of the same class and level as yourself will have the same stats. Stat customization in this game comes from stat-boosting runes that are placed on your armor and weaponry. Equipment is often given as a quest reward, so you’ll usually have decent gear just from doing quests. Of course there’s some high-end gear to be found (or bought) as well, but you’ll only be able to wear this at about level 50 (the current max. level is 55).

Armor and weapons can be upgraded by using the Arcane Transmutor, you unlock this feature as early as level 10 but it is advised to stay away from it until you have end-game gear. In case you were thinking upgrading gear is always better: you’re right. So why did I just advise you the opposite? The answer to this brings us to my next subject: RMT (Real Money Transactions).

Free only goes so far…

As said above, RoM is free but some things have to be bought from the item store, with diamonds or rubies, that are bought with real-life money. Examples of the things you can buy here are: Arcane Transmutator charges (hence why you shouldn’t upgrade lower level gear), the upgrade items you put on your equipment and permanent mounts (you can hire mounts for in-game money; these last for 15 minutes or 2 hours).

Luckily for those who don’t want to spend real money on the game, you can buy diamonds in the Auction House (they’re about 19k each on the server I’m on, making a permanent mount, other than the standard horse, cost over 5 million gold). But there’s also the possibility to buy some (e.g. no perm. mounts) item store-items with special tokens, which are acquired from doing daily quests (max 100 tokens a day). By the time you'll need end-game gear, you'll probably have a lot of gold (or at least will be able to earn it by doing instances), so getting diamonds won't really be a problem I think.

Now that we’re talking economics I have to say that this game has a lot of Real World Traders, who sell in-game money for real-life money. Don’t look surprised when you’re playing the game and suddenly see a whisper of someone offering to sell gold. Personally I get far too many of these whispers and got rather annoyed by them, but there’s not really anything you can do to stop it.

Combat

Of course combat is the most important of the game, and you pretty much get everything you’d expect. There are 8 classes, you choose one as your primary and at level 10 another one as your secondary. Based on that choice you get unique elite skills when both your classes are level 15, and a new one every 5 levels.

Leveling your secondary class doesn’t happen simultaneously with your primary. You’ll have to set your second class as your primary in order to level it. Gameplay-wise this means you’ll be level 1 again the first time you switch (something I didn’t expect to be honest). Results of this are that you won’t be able to use higher-level gear and that your health and damage will be considerably lower again. So basically you’ll need at least 2 sets of equipment. Besides the normal creatures, there are also bosses and instances. Of course there’s PvP as well (PvP servers).

Crafting

There’s also the ability to craft items and gather resources. Though less important than combat, this does add an extra thing to do in the game whenever you don’t want to do combat. Seems to me gathering resources is a fairly decent way of earning money, but the big gold is to be gained in instances.

Conclusion

Runes of Magic pretty much offers everything you’d expect to find in a MMORPG. Though you’ll eventually have to get diamonds somehow to get the most out of your equipment and possibly to get a permanent mount, you’ll be able to play for quite some time without ever spending real-life money on the game. Overall I like the game and I’ll definitely continue playing it.

Got an opinion on Runes of Magic? Do let us know!

RuneScape

http://www.runescape.com

One of the biggest strengths RuneScape (RS) has is that basically anyone can play it. You just need the latest version of Java and a decent internet connection and you’re good to go. On top of that a part of the game is free-to-play (F2P) so you can just try it out without having to pay money.

Of course Jagex has to get their money somewhere so there’s a pay-to-play (P2P) version of the game as well; this offers more items, more skills, more quests, more of everything actually.
Another strong point is that there’s plenty to do. Doing quests, training skills, playing mini-games, killing monsters (or eachother), earning gold or just hanging out; you’ll always find something to do.

Skills

A large part of the game will be training the various skills (24 in total). These can roughly be divided in a few categories: gathering resources, processing them and combat (of course there are some exceptions). At first you’ll be gaining levels every few minutes but after a while this becomes hours or, at the higher levels, even days. This makes training rather repetitive, but while talking to other people it’s not too bad.
Most skills don’t have any new things you can do past around level 80 (of 99), however, Jagex has been releasing more high-level content lately.
There will probably be a new skill later this year (Jagex tries to release them on a yearly basis), but there hasn’t been an official announcement regarding to which skill this will become.

Combat

RuneScape doesn’t have any classes, meaning you can use a single character to use all combat styles (melee, ranged and magic) . All you need to do is get the right equipment for a style and train the skills you’ll need for it. You also have more supportive skills that can be used regardless of your combat style; these skills are prayer (to boost your damage and/or defense for a limited time) and summoning (to create a familiar who aids in combat or carries extra food for you).

You’ll most likely be training on fairly weak monsters or using the slayer skill, but there are bigger things out there as well in the form of bosses. There are some bosses that have been around for years, such as the Kalphite Queen, but the most popular (and profitable) farming area in the game as it is today, would be the God Wars Dungeon. In this dungeon there are 4 bosses that drop some of the strongest weapons (Godswords: the name says it all I guess) and armor (Bandos for melee, Armadyl for ranged) in the game. Obviously, I won’t have to tell you that these items are worth quite some gold. There is a new dungeon in development, but again there hasn’t been an official announcement or any hints about new high-level items.

PvP

Personally I’ve never went pking (playerkilling, mostly done in an area called “The Wilderness”) in P2P so I’ll just say that it’s unbalanced (due to overpowered weapons that can kill players in a few hits without them being able to do anything about it) and move on to the F2P aspect.
In F2P you can’t use the higher-level gear P2P has, so you’ll never have to run away or maybe even die only because the other guy can afford better gear. Most of the RS pking is done in clans and over the years a solid clan community was created. As a result of having no classes, most clans will request that you bring more than one combat style (generally melee-ranged for damage or melee-magic to immobilize your target using the bind spell).
Pking isn’t the only PvP in the game, there also are competitive mini-games. My all-time favourite here is Castle-Wars, which offers team-based capture the flag action.

To view some pk videos please visit the (recently created) YouTube channel of The RuneScape Warhunger Federation (TRWF):
http://www.youtube.com/user/TRWFWarhungers

Trading

Trading has gone a long way in RS; from flooding the chat (with all sorts of text colors and effects) on the nearly-always-full servers 1 and 2 to the smooth system there is today with the Grand Exchange (GE). The GE is located in the capital of the F2P-area, so everyone can use it. It pretty much works like an auction house in any other game; you place your offers and continue doing whatever you were doing or log off. The GE also introduced an item database which gives you all the prices of any item you search on it, and in addition you also get a graph showing the price evolution of the last 6 months. This became a valuable tool for merchants, who buy and sell items at the right time to make profit.

Watch the official RuneScape trailer here:



Have you played RS as well or have any comments? Don’t hesitate to share your opinion with us!