Free to play has to suck, right?
I heard rumblings about a new game called Runes of Magic over the last few weeks, but largely dismissed them since it is a free to play game. After seeing a few more articles about Runes of Magic, I finally decided to give it a try. However, I was already biased before I had even tried it. A free to play game HAS to be a pile of fail, right? It is originally developed by Runewalker Entertainment, a Taiwanese company. Surely they don't get the American market and will deliver a very Asian game to non Asian players, and they will hate it. Regardless, I had nothing to lose and its free to download and free to play, so why not try it? The game is currently in open beta so I expected alot of problems.

RoM seems like the real deal
What I found left me truly impressed, and an entire weekend was soon gone...Runes of Magic just pulled me right in. The first thing 90% of the people that take a quick look at this will say one thing immediately: WoW clone. Frogster (the company converting the game for North American consumption) makes no bones about it, this game borrows heavily from WoW. It borrows from several others too, as it attempts to take solid designs from several different games and combine them into RoM. While many have claimed to do this before, to date I've found that they have largely pulled it off and have a wonderful game for us all to play.

There's alot to like here
After spending several days in Runes of Magic, I have a level 12 Rogue/12 Scout. While I still have a way to go to fully experience all that RoM has to offer, I've experienced enough to give you the scoop on the things I did experience. Nearly all of them were good. The stability of the game was solid, I had little to no server lag and not one single client crash. This allowed me for a nearly uninterrupted play experience that earned the game some quality points right off the bat. The starter areas were pretty heavily populated on the PVP server I chose, so its not like I was in a ghost town. Character creation was straightforward, with a few more options than WoW's character creation, but with one drawback, only 1 race: human. That limitation and the semi present anime graphic style put me off a bit, but not much as it was all still tolerable, and the game's feature set more than made up for it.

Here's a run down of the features that I thought were well done in RoM:

• On screen keyboard for login - The very first thing I thought when I first saw this was, "Why doesn't every game do this?" as it just seems like a simple but effective security measure for accounts. No typing for your login info and no copy/paste are good measures against keylogging.
  
• Dual classes - This is the bread and butter of RoM. Max level is 50, so you can basically be 50/50 in two professions of your choosing and have 100 total levels of character development. The combinations and strategy behind formulating your toon's combination is a nice addition to traditional play. I'm not going to cover it in depth as you can read more about it here. Certain class combinations offer elite skills as well, so there's alot to think through when picking your classes.
  
• Player housing and inventory - Player housing is a nice addition to RoM, and reminds me of housing in games like EQII and SWG to some degree. After you land a house, you'll have well over 100 inventory slots between your bags, bank and house. You can purchase more slots if needed.
  
• Crafting - Crafting is the one area of the game that seemed to progress very slowly to me, but I enjoy it because there is alot to do with it due to the depth of the system. You can learn 3 gathering/refining skills and several different production skills to make everything from armor and weapons to potions and food. I'm not limited to learning only 1 production skill, at level 12/12 I have 5 of them.
  
• Gear upgrades via runes and arcane transmutor - RoM has a rune system that can upgrade armor and weapons. Often drops from mobs, you'll acquire these small stones that grant additional stat bonuses. You'll also come across armor and weapons with rune slots on them. You guessed it, put the rune in the slot and you enhance the item. The Arcane Transmutor is a sub system launched from your backpack of all places, and it allows you to create stronger runes, make runes that have combined stats of other runes, facilitates upgrades to new gear by converting old gear into powerful runes, and more. Its a really nice system that can make a mini game out of gear upgrades all by itself.
  
• User Interface - The UI is familiar for anyone that has played an MMORPG in the last 5 years, especially if you've played WoW. It does a few cool things out of the blocks though, like tooltips that show what quest a certain mob or NPC is related to, so that you know if you need to kill a certain type of mob or not. Its also got the capability for modding via Lua scripting, just like games like WoW and WAR have.
  
• Teleportation - By level 10 you'll have your normal hearth/recall type skill, plus 2 more teleport spells to different areas. Sadly these share the same cooldown, but the Transport Book fixes that problem. If you have certain reagents in your inventory, you can mark certain locations (x,y coordinates) to teleport back to. You get a macro icon that you can simply click to teleport to that exact spot (if you have the reagents) with no cooldown. The main city is large, and also offers teleports around its main sections to reduce the amount of running needed.
• Mount rental - Sure you can buy a mount, but you can also rent a mount for a certain time period for a manageable price. You also get a mount to get you through the first 24 hours of game play free.
  
• Talent Points - When you gain a level, you automatically gain any new skills associated with your class. You don't have to go to a trainer npc to learn new skills or skill levels. In RoM you gain talent points while you level, and these points are used to upgrade the skills you get. So you'd use your bank of talent points to upgrade your Scout's Vampire Arrow skill from 11 to 12 (if you were level 12) for example.
  
• Automatic movement to NPC's - Certain NPC's can be found via automatic movement. Simply right click their name in the quest log, select "Move to" and your character automatically runs toward the NPC. You have to watch it to ensure it doesn't get stuck on something or run through a pack of hostile mobs, but it does a pretty good job of navigating all by itself.
  
• Free to download and play - Because it is free to download I risked nothing but some time to try it out, and I like that very much. Its not a time limited or feature limited trial, its the full game. No subscription needed, if I get to max level and something sucks or they didn't deliver what they said, then I can bail with nothing but hours lost...not money. Because of their implementation of RMT via the item shop, I can play the game just like anyone else and not feel really gimped if I don't buy stuff from the store.
  

Other items or systems in the game that I don't dislike, but not sure if I like them either as I need more experience or time spent with them:

• Item decay - Your items have durability, and when they decay to 0 durability you have to replace them with new gear. Die a few too many times without repairing at certain NPC's and your gear is gone. Be smart and repair your gear or lose it.
• Currency - It seems pretty easy to amass large piles of gold, but gold isn't the only currency around. Can diamonds and rubies only be purchased through the store via RMT? If so, I guess that is the reality of playing a free to play game, but I can still manage to do almost anything I want without using real money if I so choose. I can suppose that I wouldn't mind if I spent 5 or 10 bucks to buy some, if this is a game I will commit to. You guessed it, I don't have a religious stance against RMT. Honestly I hope it becomes viable in the North American market, but let me not get too much further off track on an RMT discussion.
• Art style - I'm not an Asian anime art style fan, and that's been an immediate turn off to me for most Asian mmo's. There is still a semi-strong Asian art style to the games graphics, but it is tolerable and when its all said and done its not much more graphically different than World of Warcraft.
• Only 1 race - You can make a human...or a human. That's it. I'd like to see some variety in the races, but this isn't a dealbreaker to me so much as it is a mild annoyance.
  
• Dropping your items in PVP death - There is a very deep set of rules for PVP, but you still have a chance to drop that Holy Handgrenade of Antioch if you die in PVP. This may put some people off, but I can live with it. Actually, I might just come to love the fear it will instill in all the players engaging in PVP...you potentially have alot to lose if you fall.
• Experience/Talent Point Debt - When you die, you accrue debt to you experience pool and your talent point pool that you must earn again. Repetitive deaths are not good and can set you back some precious leveling time. If you can make it back to your tombstone you can regain some (or all?) of the xp/tp you went into debt for when you died. I'm almost positive I don't like this one, but can live with it...for now.
  

The game is currently in open beta and is highly polished. More importantly, its stable. It is scheduled to launch in a few weeks, on March 19th. Frogster seems to be working hard at getting the game up to snuff with fixes, balancing, localization and feature additions. The game was just patched with plenty of fixes and new functionality like guild halls, so things are happening fast an furious. There is also a plan for upcoming functionality and content that the game will see soon.

Feature rich and deep game play
One of the reasons I've loved World of Warcraft so much is that it has been what I call an "every day" game to me. Logging on to WoW was part of my daily routine, much like people watch TV. every day it could be something different. One day arenas, another battle grounds. Later, a raid. Maybe some questing or crafting in between. There is alot to do in WoW, and there's a big population to do it with. RoM is like WoW in that there are many things to do and explore, and because its free to play you can bet the population will be large.

Recommended to try, you've got little to lose
All things considered, I'm pleasantly suprised by Runes of Magic and plan to play this game as much as I can, and I recommend it highly to anyone that is interested in fantasy a MMORPG. I've seen a few sources mention this game as one of the top (if not #1) of the free to play MMORPG's out there. Its free, its new, and no one has much to lose by giving it a try besides some bandwidth and a few hours. Head over to http://www.runesofmagic.com to download and give it a spin!

I've got lots of video footage captured, produced and uploading to our YouTube channel as we speak. Check there first, but I'll be breaking down alot of the functionality in RoM to help you get a solid understanding of it before you give it a go.