Another week has gone by, and with the sweet taste of href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/50656" target="_blank">reviewing
a
real MMOG fresh in my mouth, it was hard to go back to the
tasteless bowl of gruel known as F2P games. Since the whole goal of
these reviews is to plow through the monstrous list of MMO games in an
effort to keep our readers from wasting their time, I grabbed my spoon
and asked for another bowl. [Editor’s
Note: He even throws in
the Oliver Twist voice for good measure.] This week, the
flavor of
choice is href="http://mwo.enjoymmo.com/index.php" target="_blank">Magic
World Online, an F2P MMOG with a horrendously disastrous
addition I’ll explain more in a bit.



Upon entering the game, you're asked to choose a class and a name for
your character. Yep, it's a short sentence, but that's honestly the
amount of choice you have in your decision. There is no customization
in any form at initial creation. No hair changes, no stat distribution,
nothing. It's not game breaking, but it's a point of contention for me.
I understand that a lot people playing these games have no issue
looking exactly like everyone else, but it's something that annoys me.
I’ll leave that href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/showthread.php?t=38403"
target="_blank">tale
for the forums.



On the surface, MWO
reminds me a lot of Lineage due to its 2D top-down
graphics and intensive grindfest mentality. Unlike Lineage though, the
game does a good job of giving you some purpose for your quests. For
this reason, it's easy to see why it's been on href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/50655" target="_blank">Ralsu's
Top
Ten Free to Play Games list. The story is interesting, if not
groundbreaking, and it’s a refreshing change from being told
to go kill five Whozits just because some NPC told you to. The quest
objectives aren't much different in essence, but if you don't mind
reading the text, you'll be pleasantly surprised at the depth and
variety in the reasons you receive to go traipsing back and forth
across the lands like a drunken gold digger from the Old West.

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href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/51175" target="_blank"> title="A Keep Siege" alt="A Keep Siege"
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Every game
needs desert battles.

By the time it's all said and done, you'll be loaded down like just
like one of those previously mentioned gold diggers, so here's hoping
you've got a strong back. Mobs drop the normal loot fare we've all come
to expect from every fantasy based MMOG since the genre began, but just
like every other game out there, it also seems to cheat. It doesn't
steal your loot, but I bet it giggled like a schoolgirl every time it
dropped a piece of loot I couldn’t use. After playing for a
while, I had enough Summoner, Archer, and Mage gear to twink out an alt
like nobody’s business. Gods forbid the game drop a single
piece of armor my dashing Warrior could have used though.



On the plus side, with all the loot you've gathered it's a simple
process of selling it all to a local armor vendor in order to buy
yourself a decent set of gear. Any player of these games will quickly
be put at ease with the intuitive NPC vendor interaction. In fact, the
user interface as a whole is exactly what I found most of the game to
be - standard fantasy MMOG fare. This isn't necessarily a bad thing
(especially when dealing with inventory, stats, UI, etc.) and some
other F2P games could learn a lesson or two from Ingle Games, Ltd. When
getting into a new game, I don't want to feel like a monkey looking at
a math problem while I'm trying to figure out the basic mechanics. In
this regard, MWO
does a good job of getting you into the flow of things
quickly.



Even though the majority of the game appears to be par for the course,
there are a few things that make MWO
stand out from its crowd of
competitors. Characters have the ability to raise their own mount from
an egg, "grow" (improve) weapons as they level, and begin branching
into different class specializations starting at level 15. When your
mage hits 65, you can be a href="http://mwo.enjoymmo.com/game-guide/class/class-transfer.html"
target="_blank">Freezing
Uranus. Yep, I said it. If you're going to name a class that,
don’t blame me when I jump on it faster than Rosie
O’Donnell  on a cupcake.



So far, so good (or at least not horrible), right? Yeah, hang onto that
feeling because I'm about to put it through a meat grinder. I'll warn
you now, the last aspect of the game I'm going to talk about is not
pretty... not even that drunken haze, 2 AM at last call kind of pretty.
There's not enough alcohol in the world to cover this much ugly.



The game has, and I swear it's not a sadistic joke, an href="http://mwo.enjoymmo.com/game-guide/game-intro/features-freeurhands.html"
target="_blank">in-game
official BOT. This isn't some fancy new acronym the game has
come up with; it literally means that with the push of a button, you
can set the game to play itself. I'll go ahead and give you a minute to
let that truly sink in.

 

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href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/51176" target="_blank"> title="PvE Combat" alt="PvE Combat"
src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/51176"
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style="font-style: italic;">Someone should have scared the
waste out of the translators.

Caught your breath yet?



The reason given by the development team is to allow players to get to
the endgame PvP content while avoiding the endless grind of having to
level like they must in other games.



I can't possibly express how flabbergasted I was when I saw this. I
immediately went to the official site to see what the deal was, and
discovered it wasn't just some cruel Easter egg hidden in there by a
disgruntled employee. They did it on purpose. Maybe I'm crazy, but at
this point, I have to ask, "What the hell were you thinking?" What
point is there in playing a game if the game plays it for you? Oh yeah,
that's right, so you can reach level 65 to participate in the weekly
City Sieges. Just for the sake of argument, let's assume that's the
real reason. No, no... hang on here. I said we'll assume.



If that's really the entire purpose of it, why not just start
characters off at level 65? Give them a set of points to distribute
between statistics, make their class path choices, and give them a
certain amount of gold to go towards various pieces of armor, weapons,
and mounts? At least that would add some kind of character
customization to the game. "Well they won't know how to play their
characters then," you say? How is anyone going to know anything about
their characters if they simply BOT them to 65?



If you choose to play the game without using the BOT or available item
mall (which rumor has you'll have to or be at a huge disadvantage by
the end game), then there is a distinct feeling of enjoyment you can
get from MWO
in a nostalgic Diablo-esque kind of way. For a free game
(that the main site states is in beta), it's not a bad way to kill an
afternoon. The officially provided BOT in this game has me so disgusted
though, it's hard to give MWO even the single hammer I did.

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(1 / 5 Hammers)