Various free MMORPGs

Let's see, within the past week I have downloaded and tried two free mmorpgs and am working on the third download/install.

Dungeon Runners
Cheesy low poly graphics with the old school charm of Diablo set in the 3d world. You have a handful of classes that you can play, I picked the ranger. And as soon as I disabled the mouse-click to move feature I was able to stand in one spot and send arrowed death to my foes.

All of the dungeons are random creations, in fact the first real zone where you kill stuff is a 5 level dungeon with a rapping rat as the final boss. All of your quests take place inside the instance, with a nifty scroll of teleport letting you poof back to the start zone to sell junk. Nice feature about this, which I still haven't played with yet, is that when you use your teleportation scroll, you can port back into the instance exactly where you left. No more running back through 3 levels to pick up where you left off slaughtering various baddies.

The game has an interesting sense of humor, your starting weapon is usually made out of cardboard. Think I was using a cardboard crossbow, not really sure how that works, but I still managed to kill things. Diablo and WoW fans will recognize the suffixes on armor and weapons, "of the whale, of the hawk, etc" is still live and kicking.

You can pay for extra features, a bigger bank, better armor, potions to stack. But why? True it's only $5 a month for those features, but that defeats the purpose of the game for me. I wanted something that I can pick up, spend half an hour clearing out a dungeon, grabbing loot, selling stuff and log for the night. This suits my needs. And makes me smile while doing it.

Shaiya
Pure frustration for me for the first two hours. I rolled a fighter to run around hacking and slashing to get a feel for the game. Almost every UI component in the game can be moved, except for some key items. And it's those key items that bug me. You can semi-modify the key binds in the game, unfortunately not the ones I wanted to change either.

The ~ key is set to target the next mob and begin to auto-attack. Well, that's also my vent button. Tab switches between running and walking. Why you'd ever want to walk, I don't know. I could change the run/walk button, but not the target enemy button. And no explanation why. Even fiddling with the configuration files on my hard drive didn't help. Though, I was finally able to set a proper monitor resolution.

After I fixed the resolution, then I actually started enjoying the game. Doesn't help that I played it all last night with a crappy resolution. But that's ok.

The game does have several features that I do like though. The minimap and full map have color coded dots indicating where you can pick up quests and where you can turn quests in. Very nice when you're lost in the middle of the zone, looking for the next quest hub.

Levels earn you points which you can spend on your stats. On normal mode you get 5 points per level. I chose to dump 3 into strength and 2 into dex on every even level, then switch on the odd levels. But I could have put them into LUC (crit rating as far as I can tell) for a crit based fighter. You earn skill points which are used to unlock a skill or it's next level. Higher level skills have level restrictions.

Passive skills, active skills, buffs, specials all use the same skill points to unlock. Once you've spent your points you can't get them back. So any skill investments are really that, investments. I purchased first level ranks in a couple of skills that I will never level up. But even those first level skills are useful.

I can see myself playing this game for a while, probably not as much as I used to play WoW, but it does have a draw to it. Once I got over my preconceptions about it, it became an enjoyable game.

Runes of Magic
Installing it now. From what I've read and seen, this looks to be my new game, unless something just goes horribly wrong.

Dual class leveling game. Think I'll make a Rogue/Fighter, a Scout/Priest, or a Knight/Mage. Those combinations seem the most appealing to me without even playing the game.

Woots! It finally installed, off to see what I think about it. :D

...and now it's patching. *sighs* That's ok. I'm patient, right? >.>