Runes of Magic

So today I deemed it Long Enough for the aggravation of downloading and installing the Runes of Magic beta client to wear off, allowing me to give the game a fair chance. Problem is, there seems to be an NDA in place, which makes no kind of sense to me… what’s the point of an NDA with an Open Beta? For what its worth, I didn’t notice anything for them to be worried about in letting people talk about the game.

I’m going to ride a fine line here and talk about stuff that you could find out from ‘authorized sources’ with a bit of Googling. You’ve probably heard RoM referred to as a WoW clone, and that definitely is the first impression you get, from the art style (though with a lot more ‘cute’ thrown in here) to the interface. If you’ve played WoW, the game will feel very familiar to you. But then, that could be said for most fantasy-themed MMOs, and you could swap “WoW” for “EQ” or “DAoC” and it’d still pretty much apply. Combat and Harvesting are both very WoW-like indeed, but beyond that the game does diverge somewhat.

The most obvious difference is that there’s no subscription fee, and the idea is that you buy “Diamonds” with real cash to spend in-game on items. To that end, a lot of things in the game are time-limited, and you get a taste of this early on in the life of a character when you get a gift bag with a 24-hour mount in it. This is a horse that’ll be with your character for 24 hours from the time you get it (and I’m assuming they mean 24 real hours regardless of if you’re logged in or not, but I’ll check on that [EDIT: Confirmed, I popped in for a second this morning and my horse had 10 hours left.]). The “Item Shop” is full of stuff like this… buff potions and limited time mounts and so forth. We call these micro-transactions but they aren’t all micro – a permanent mount without a time limit will cost you about $20 USD in Diamonds. Hopefully there are other ways to gain a means of transportation.

housekeeperAnother big difference from WoW is that there is housing, and every player gets a small instanced house early on in their career (I had mine by level 6). There is no charge for the basic house, and you get a nice chest to store items in. But the biggest deal of all is that every house comes with a housekeeper! That’s her to the right there. She looks very professional, doesn’t she? You can expand your house in various ways by spending House Energy, which you get in exchange for Diamonds, which you got in exchange for real cash. Housing looks closer to EQ2 than to LOTRO. Rather than the very-limited “hooks” of LOTRO, it seems like you can place items at will in your house. That was true of the storage chest you’re given, at least. I haven’t managed to get any furniture yet.

Another difference: every character gets a secondary class. My character hasn’t gotten there yet, and there was a lot of debate in chat over whether you can change your secondary class or if, once picked, it’s a permanent part of your character. More exploration needed there.

And then there are the titular Runes. From very early on you’ll be finding Runes of various kinds. Runes can be attached to certain weapons and armor (assuming said item has Rune Slots in it) to give them bonuses, and they are also used in Crafting. They work as you’d probably expect: once a Rune is attached to an item it can’t be removed (possible exception: there’s a potion in the “Item Shop” that sounds like it would remove a Rune). It requires no special skill to apply a Rune to an item. Just right-click the Rune and click on the item you want to attach it to.

New characters get a nice quest chain that takes you through combat and getting harvesting skills and stuff, as well as good basic equipment. I was playing a Scout (think Hunter) and quickly got a nice range of skills to use (ha! pun not intended). Every time you level up you get a bunch of skill points to apply to these skills; so far I’ve been able to keep everything maxed, but I’m sure that won’t be true over the long run.

All in all, it seemed OK. I had fun for the short time I played and will probably give it some more time eventually, as long as I’m not forced to do much buying from the Item Store. I get that they need to fund the game somehow, but $20 for a horse seems pretty steep to me. But there’s no real “US” store to buy Diamonds from, so maybe they’ll adjust the costs for release? I will say that of all the free2play MMOs I’ve tried, this feels the closest to a “traditional” sub-based, fantasy-themed MMO. Whether this is good or bad, I leave to the reader. If you can’t afford WoW or EQ2 its nice to have an option, but its also nice to find unique offerings in the free2play-space like Wizard101 or Atlantica Online

Vanguard crafting

Tonight I popped back into Vanguard to do the crafting intro quests. I’d forgotten how complex the crafting system is. Basically its a turn-based mini-strategy game where you have a finite number of Action Points to create an item. You can spend these points to progress the item towards completion, or to try to improve the quality of the item. Sometimes bad things happen, and then you need to spend Action Points to counter the bad things. That’s a very, very brief overview.

I’ve been doing a lot of crafting in EQ2 recently and the differences & similarities of the two systems are interesting. EQ2’s system is a lot simpler (the current system…at launch it was quite complex) but happens in real time. You fire off skills to improve progress and durability. Durability goes down as progress goes up and the goal is to keep durability high while progress climbs from zero. Sometimes bad things happen, and then you need to cast a skill to counter it.

So in both systems you need to get Progress to 100%. Both systems use raw materials to start the creation process. In Vanguard, you do what you can to improve Quality from Grade D to C to B to A. If you run out of Action Points, you fail to make anything. But there’s no timer… you can stop and ponder your next action for as long as you like. Some actions use various additives which are consumed in the process of crafting, and you can only bring a finite number of these additives into the crafting mini-game.

In EQ2, you strive to keep the Durability meter high. There are 4 ‘tiers’ of Durability and the quality of the finished product depends on what tier the Durability meter is in. At lower Tiers you’ll create nothing but might get some components back. At Tier 3 you’ll get a basic item, and at Tier 4 you’ll get a Pristine item (this varies with what you’re making..sometimes you’ll get a higher quantity rather than better quality). The limiting factor here is your mana, since casting skills use that up. And the clock is always ticking. You aren’t limited in the amount of time you take, but you are limited in the amount of time you have to react to bad things happening.

The EQ2 process quickly becomes fairly routine and doesn’t take much thought. It’s a good unwinding exercise; something you can do while chatting or just kind of zoning out and letting the cares of the day drain away. It’s very rare that you fail to make a Pristine item once you have the system down. And you can churn out item after item pretty quickly.

It’ll be interesting to see how Vanguard compares to this experience. Running through the newbie quests, I was fairly bewildered, and things are very simple at the start. Apparently the number of Actions available rises as you get to higher levels of crafting. At this stage, it’s more fun and interesting than crafting in EQ2, but I’m not sure if that’ll hold up when it comes time to grind for levels. One nice thing is that you can get Work Orders that don’t seem to require raw materials (and don’t produce anything usable) just to skill-up on. Of course, EQ2 has Work Orders as well, but they require raws. On the other hand they generate status for you and your guild, so there’s an added benefit to them.

Anyway, I just find the two systems from two SOE games to be similar in some ways and yet very different. I’m not sure how far I’ll get crafting in Vanguard for now, but I hope some time to be able to return and take it to higher levels.

Honestly, the lure of adventure is pretty strong right now. So many bizarre creatures out there to hunt!
Vanguard Moon

EDIT: Or not… logged back in to Train (because I know me, otherwise I’d forget) and got caught up in a bunch of crafting quests and did almost no more fighting!! Fun crafting quests, too. Helping build defenses for a village under attack by Hobgoblins. 🙂