Dragon Blogger Review – Runes of Magic

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I am fan of role playing games and when I had been doing some research and learned that a free MMO called Runes of Magic was getting some good reviews and didn’t cost a penny to play, I thought I would download it and check it out.

The download took almost a day since the installer configures and the game is just over 3gb download, so don’t expect to download and play immediately, you will probably have to download the game just before you go to sleep and have it finish by morning or the following day. Once installed it then goes through and patches the game files, so there is another thirty minute wait while it updates all of the local files. This is no different than Guildwars which has to update files almost every time I open the game, but it does seem to be a bit slower with the downloads and updates than GuildWars.

Finally the game opened and I entered my account and password, but it wouldn’t recognize it. I troubleshoot for an hour and even created a 2nd free game account, but nothing I did worked. So I opened a support ticket with Frogster the games parent company and waited until they returned my email for support, which they did the next business day. I was told the territory wasn’t picked up right and I had to edit one of my config files and manually change the game server name, once I did this it worked like a charm and I was able to log into the game with my game account without issue.

Creating a character in the game is fairly enjoyable, there are several classes to choose from including Warrior, Knight, Rogue, Priest, Mage and Scout (I may be missing a class, but I hear there are two hidden classes as well). You can also pick one of the standard fantasy races Human, Elf, Dwarf…etc. One thing that make the game similar to Guild Wars is that you can dual class and pick up a second class after you reach level 10.

The character construction is far more flexible than Guildwars, not just picking height, weight, hair color and such, but you can actually stretch out the arms, legs, torso, chest, head to really make some unique looking figures. You can make your guy have giant tree trunk arms, or be as skinny as a skeleton, you can give them a classic giant upper torso with really skinny waist, or make them really rotund in appearance. It is quite fun creating your unique character, I just wish they had a little more diversity in skin color, as it is much more limited than choosing hair color. Also they don’t give styles of hair very much which would have been nice, with no ability to pick facial hair.

My red headed warrior was created with my five year old son, and together we launched the world and started playing. The mission play structure was similar to Guild Wars, but the fact that you are in a perpetual world is more like World of Warcraft. Other live players are all around you, and choosing and accepting missions are with ease. Unlike Guildwars and more like WoW, you can develop skills and use those skills to make money, I picked up some mining skills and blacksmithing to turn some ore into more precious zinc ingots which I could sell.

It is a little hard at first telling apart the difference between NPC and Player Characters, I wish you could hold down the alt or cntr keys and see which are which.  But they do have a good way to determine when quests are completed as you see a glowing check mark over the NPC with the completed quest you accepted.

So far I have played Runes of Magic for about 3 hours total, reached level 4 and have to say for a free MMO it is the best one I have played to date. Anyone who is a fan of WoW or Guildwars but doesn’t want to spend the monthly fee for WoW should really check out Runes of Magic.

-Dragon Blogger