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Just Keep Running

A Review of NCSoft’s Dungeon Runners

By Cody “Micajah” Bye

Laughter is the best medicine, or at least that’s the common saying. With typical MMORPGs, everyone gets bogged down in the seriousness of damage-per-second, developer scandals, and statistical super-buffing, but often gamers just want to play a title where they can relax and spend a few minutes killing beasties in their down time. They want to be able to join their friends in a rousing romp of killing while chatting a bit in-between monster crushing. With much of the MMOG market devoted to serious and in-depth MMOGs, the games that have allowed this sort of ease-of-play have been few and far between with only a spattering of honest-to-goodness fun thrown in.

Enter Dungeon Runners, an MMOG developed by NCsoft specifically for people looking for a diversion from standard gameplay seen in today’s massively multiplayer games. Built upon the notion of fast, intuitive, and humorous gameplay, Dungeon Runners is attempting to strike at those users who are sick of raiding for hours upon hours. Instead, Dungeon Runners offers gamers the chance to drop into the game world, fight a couple monsters, find epic loot, get a gut-rolling chuckle, and still be able to sit down and eat dinner with their family.

Becoming a True Dungeon Runner

On top of this foundation of fun, NCsoft has opted to make Dungeon Runners free to download and play. Instead of bottle-necking the number of users willing to play their title, NCsoft opened the game up to any user with a computer and invited them all inside. A $5.00 / month membership few is available, but the only limitations users will ever experience concerning the membership few is access to the “best” items, a bank account, and stackable potions.

Arguably, a gamer could play through the entire game without any of these options, but the player would have a relatively dull experience compared to users of a similar level. Once a gamer reaches level 6-7, they will begin finding more and more items that are “membership only”. Upon first encountering this problem, a user will probably be dismayed that he isn’t able to wear the “Enraged Armor of the Whispering Baby Seal” and be tempted to plunk down his $5 simply to strap on the item.

And it’s no wonder this occurs, as NCsoft has done a stellar (or is it frustrating?) job of making the “membership only” items much more powerful than the standard items. While a non-paying member might have two or three statistics increased on his best piece of mail, his member friend might have all six statistics raised along with his movement speed and an exceptional increase in armor. This is true even at the lowest levels. The $5 membership fee is extremely tempting to anyone trying to resist it.

But the membership fee wouldn’t matter a bit if the gameplay of Dungeon Runners didn’t live up to its promise of humorous and light-hearted fun. NCsoft has certainly provided ample amounts of this, along with some other aspects that any gamer might find pleasing.

Dugeon Runners is meant to be fun and fast.

Delving into the Dungeons

The initial set up of Dungeon Runners is a fairly simple process, and NCsoft has taken the steps necessary to insure that users will be able to quickly and efficiently download the client and activate their free account for Dungeon Runners. Any trouble spots that users may encounter will probably spawn from confusion generated when they have to activate the game through the NCsoft store. Nothing is charged to a credit card, but users still need to “buy” the game.

Once you have an active Dungeon Runners account and have logged into the game, you’re presented with the very Spartan character creation screen. Unlike most pay-to-play MMOs (and even some free titles), you’re only able to create one Dungeon Runner at a time. There are no race options aside from the standard human, but there are three different classes to choose from, Fighter (the melee warrior), Ranger (ranged combat), and Mage (the magic wielder). It’s a difficult choice, especially for the beginning of the game, and NCsoft could have spared players (or at least members) the initial trouble of deciding upon a character class if that had allowed for more than one character per account.