First Impressions: Frogster Interactive’s Runes of Magic

Ryan has loked into Frogster Interactive’s latest title, Runes of Magic. The free-to-play game is currently in open beta. Keep a look out for our review when the game goes live.

I had originally written up an impressions piece on Frogster Interactive’s Runes of Magic a few weeks back, before open beta hit. That piece was based on what I had seen so far in its closed stage. After playing the title for about a week since open beta hit, I wanted to rewrite the piece as a lot of the qualms I had were squashed with the new client. I understand as well as anyone else that beta testing is just that, testing. Most of the qualms I had were localization issues. It’s kind of hard to test and write about things that you can’t understand because it’s in another language.

On December 15th, Runes of Magic launched its open beta with a new client that took care of just about every complaint I had about the title so far, and you can bet that they will be updating it continuously as open beta rolls along. That’s great, because Runes of Magic is an exceptionally solid title, especially being in the Free 2 Play sub-genre. If there is going to be any game out there in the next year that is going to open us Westerner players and developers as to what the F2P genre can be, it’s going to be Runes of Magic.

Just don’t go into the title expecting something all-new, because you won’t find completely new mechanics here. What you will find in Runes of Magic is a fun, easy to get into combat system, player housing, dual classes, tradeskills, a (so far) lower emphasis on grinding compared to most F2P MMO’s and even a PvP server or two. There will be a lot of people who will call shenanigans right off the bat as to how closely the title resembles and plays many other games in the MMO genre. While I agree that RoM can seem very similar to other titles, I personally haven’t seen a ground breaking MMO in quite a while, let a lone a F2P title with this much to offer a player.

If you’re looking for something new and yet tried and true with some new twists, check out the open beta for Runes of Magic. It’s free to download and play, and might just surprise you a little with how much the title has to offer.