Free Realms vs. EQ2: Impressions from the FR Beta

All the blogs are coming out with reviews on Free Realms. Heck, Massively Speaking #50 turned into the Free Realms Fanboi podcast. I’ll admit for the short time I played in beta, I liked the game and found various things that could get me hooked if I wasn’t already involved in EverQuest 2. But when I’m writing, I like to come up with an unusual take on what I’m writing about. So I’ll take a different approach and compare Free Realms to a traditional Triple-A MMORPG title, EverQuest 2, based on my experience in beta.

Leveling? What’s that? In traditional MMOs like EQ2, players level their characters very quickly through the first few levels as they learn to play the game. Maybe I didn’t play the game right, but after 3 hours of game play in Free Realms I was still at level 1 with all my jobs. I found myself exploring the world looking for the tutorials (and bugs) and following quest lines to see what the next cool mini-game would be. In EQ2, I think I was either level 7 or 8 after about 3 hours into the game on my first character and I could probably be much higher if I were to create a new character today. In traditional MMOs, you have to level to get to the good content, which leads to the race to max level and whining about the lack of high level content by those players who refuse to stop and smell the roses. I really have the feeling that Free Realms has slowed down the race to the top.

Who needs alts? In EQ2, I have a character I adventure with and a small army (7) of crafting alts who made a lot of my equipment and advanced combat arts as I leveled up and still make my food, drink, ammunition and adornments. None of that infrastructure is required in Free Realms since your character can do everything. Okay, your character can do everything if you pay $4.99 a month for a member account, but you get the idea. But your character can do a lot even playing on a non-subscription account.

For those who like alts, you will have to pay for the privilege. Non-member accounts only get 1 character and member accounts can have 3. So if you want to have both a male and female pixie and a male and female human on the same account, you’re out of luck. Hmmm … reminds me of another game in which you can’t play all races and all character classes.

What’s a bot? A big difference I see between Free Realms and EQ2 is the absence of the ability to create macros. (Maybe I’m wrong, but I didn’t see the ability to do it.) Even though I love my macros in EQ2, I see this as a good thing. Think about it. Do you really want kids to play a game in which how good they are is based on the mods they are using? Yes, I’m thinking of my time in World of Warcraft where using some mods (like the late and sorely missed Decursive) were mandatory to be a good player.

When I’m playing EverQuest 2, I use macros that allow me to change into my fighting gear, my crafting gear, my harvesting gear, and into my running shoes when I have to go someplace in a hurry. But those are unnecessary in Free Realms. All you do is change your job and your clothes and gear change automatically. The mechanic is sort of like what happens when you change from fighting to crafting to diplomacy in Vanguard, except in Free Realms your avatar does a cool tornado-type twirl and your clothes are changed.

Another big difference on the scripting side of gaming is I really don’t see how people will be able to create bots to do things like crafting and harvesting. In EverQuest 2, I’ve seen people using harvesting scripts to go from point to point where resource nodes spawn. If you’ve ever been in the same area harvesting as one of those bots, you know how annoying bots really are. In Free Realms, you don’t have to worry about those annoying bots interfering with your game play as those activities are mini-games that require mouse movements. If you want to craft and harvest, I don’t see any way around playing the mini-games. In other words, players can’t cheat (at least that way) to get ahead in the economy.

Mommy, can I get a dog? Pleeeaaase??? Yes, you can use Station Cash in both EQ2 and Free Realms to buy a pet. But in EQ2 there are other ways to get a pet in-game. As a ranger, I have a tiger, bear, falcon, and water creature that can follow me around on my adventures that I either won or purchased with in-game gold. Did I mention I have a unicorn I ride? If all else fails, a player can get a pet just by worshipping a deity. And of course, there are a lot of house pets that are quest rewards.

Of course, in Free Realms pet training is one of the jobs everyone can do and you can train your pet to do really cool things. Just remember you need Station Cash to get the pet. And if you’re a kid how do you get the cash? Allowance? Mowing lawns? Shoveling snow? Chores? Hmmm … I wonder if the FR devs have taken into account the possibility of kids giving their parents in-game gold in exchange for Station Cash. Puts a whole different spin on real money transactions (RMT) in Free Realms, doesn’t it?

Another instance? Please make it stop! One of the features that makes World of Warcraft so great is that zoning from area to area is seamless. In EverQuest 2, running around Qeynos on my first character just about drove me crazy. Free Realms is chock full of mini-games. You go to do something, you load up a game. Or if you are used to playing traditional MMOs, you enter another instance every 5 minutes. I’m so glad the instancing in Free Realms usually goes quickly, or I’d bang my head on my keyboard. I really don’t want to do that because the keys glow in the dark and I don’t want to break it.

I’m going to leave off on the comparisons for now. I wrote this before I logged the live release version of Free Realms for the first time. While Free Realms will not be my main game, I’ll be poking my head into the game from time to time and might have some things to say in the future.

Free Realms Not Open Yet

Yesterday, a message was displayed on the Free Realms website indicating that the game would launch today. Upon further review, the message said "We'll be launching Tuesday". I just assumed that meant today. The message didn't really say WHICH Tuesday. My bad.

Update: Heard from Elquin on the Jethal Silverwing Show that no one is going home until the game is launched. Sounds like a long night for some folks in San Diego. Just checked the web site and it is still down.

Update 2: It's 11pm PDT and Laralyn on the twitter feed is indicating they are getting close. Well, I guess if they get it up in the next hour they technically launched on Tuesday.

Update 3: It's 11:30pm PDT and I'm at the character creation screen. So it was a Tuesday launch after all. Too bad I'm in Chicago where its Wednesday already.

Update 4: It's 11:55pm PDT. I finished the first couple of tutorials. Things look pretty good. But before I continue, I had heard something about if you have the SOE Station Pass that you are automatically a member. I'm not sure that's correct. At least, I don't see that happening. I'll wait til later today (yes, I stayed up til 2am waiting for the game to come up) to gather more details.

Free Realms Launches On April 28

Oh my! I got home tonight and decided to log onto Free Realms for a little kart racing. But instead of getting to log into the game, I got a message stating...

"The Free Realms website is undergoing maintenace in preparation for
launch. We'll be launching Tuesday and look forward to seeing you in the game."

That had to be the shortest closed beta in the history of gaming.

What I've Been Listening To: April 19-25, 2009

Sometimes listening to podcasts comes in handy. At work this week, the programmer who introduced me to World of Warcraft told me he let his account expire because he was going back to City of Heroes. I immediately knew from listening to podcasts like Van Hemlock #47, Virgin Worlds #143 and Massively Speaking #49 that he was interested in the mission architect feature. Maybe I just work in the right place, but we have a lot of people at work who play MMORPGs (mostly WoW) and it's nice to be able to talk about games with everyone.

Here is what I've listened to over the past week.

Virgin Worlds #143 (Host: Brent) - Brent is back with a 30 minute podcast after last episode's marathon coverage of the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco. Brent talks about the City of Heroes mission architect, Love, more moves at Linden Labs, StarGate Worlds, the Eve Online expansion, Fallen Earth's upcoming rating, World of Warcraft in China, Paragon Games, and more. If you can't listen to a lot of podcasts but want to keep up with the news, this is a good one to listen to.

Van Hemlock #48 (Hosts: Tim Dale and Jon Shute) - Episode #48 found our intrepid podcasters talking about the upcoming closure of Shadowbane, upgrades in the U.K.'s internet infrastructure, another news outlet shutting down its Second Life bureau and more Jack Thompson news. In talking about Shadowbane, Jon came up with the term "PvP tourist" to describe one of the possible reasons for the games closure.

For the every-other-show topic, the hosts discussed regional servers and why regional servers are needed in on-line games. The discussion delves deeper into the subject than ping times and probably will introduce American listeners to topics that those in the European Union take for granted.

The twitter question of the week was about seasonal holiday's in games and which ones are the best.

Massively Speaking #49 (Host: Shawn Schuester) - Kyle Horner makes his second appearance on Massively Speaking. Shawn and Kyle discuss the MMO market in China, Darkfall, D&D Online, Fallen Earth, and the City of Heroes mission architect. Kyle was extremely excited about using the mission architect and if it is everything Kyle says, may keep CoH/CoV a viable game in the face of the upcoming games like Champions Online and DC Universe.

The Instance #142 (Hosts: Scott Johnson & Randy Jordan) - Would you believe the dog ate my notes? Okay, I was tired and just sat back on the train and listened to the premier World of Warcraft on the Interwebs. I do remember a discussion about Patch 3.1 and how Curse and WoWInterface are fighting back against WoWMatrix. Oh, and did I forget to mention that Turpster was on? Please guys, let's just call them fanny packs. The conversation was definitely not workplace safe.

Epic Dolls #64 (Hosts: Leala Turkey and Katerina) - Leala and Kat give their take on WoW's Patch 3.1 and I discovered that, among other things, planning raids for the first two days after the patch went live was not a good idea. The pair answered listener mail about fashion and fishing before Leala began a discussion about a blog post by Ralph Kostner about the way people play games. In episodes 62 & 63 Leala and Kat's discussion about WoW guilds transcended the game. In this episode the Dolls show they can discuss general concepts and relate them to WoW.

EQ2's-day broadcast from April 14 (Hosts: Dellmon and Zanadi) - Once again Dellmon titles a show "Death and Taxes" just because the broadcast day falls around the time everyone's taxes are due in the U.S. Besides talking about how death and taxes are implemented in EverQuest 2, the pair discuss the Lavastorm revamp.

Free Realms - Racing & Harvesting

I spent a little more time in Free Realms today, this time harvesting and racing. Anytime you do something in Free Realms, you wind up playing a mini-game. So for harvesting, you don't just wander around looking for resource nodes that you then stand around while your avatar makes harvesting motions. Oh no! You play a game sort of like Tetris, except instead of the matches automatically making the blocks disappear, you have to trace the matches. I was on a harvesting quest and I wound up playing the mini-game 3 times to complete the quest. The discouraging thing was I got a big red "You Lose!" after each game. Aargh!

The racing game is pretty fun. In a traditional MMORPG, it would be called an instance. In Free Realms, you are just at the track. You can create an instance and invite your friends and once they are all at the track you can start the race. I think I played for 30 minutes straight before I realized I hadn't done the tutorial. Maybe after doing the tutorial I'll be able to finish higher than 5th place.

While some people will complain about having to pay for content for a "free" game, if you get into the mini-games I don't think you'll have to worry about leveling your skills. Of course, I've only played the beta for 3 hours now. From what I've seen the game is very polished. There are bugs that need to be fixed, but the game is still in closed beta, so that is only to be expected.

Confessions of a Grey Shard Runner: Epilogue

In my previous posts, I have explored the world of those players (like myself) who used the mentoring mechanic in EverQuest 2 to complete the void shard missions in The Shadow Odyssey instances with mobs set 13 – 29 levels lower than themselves. I have provided my justification and motivation for doing grey shard runs. I also explained how the execution of performing shard runs took me a bit more effort than a lot of critics of the practice will credit. But the big question still remains: was it worth it?

If the purpose was just to get the void shard gear, the answer is yes. That said, I really don’t like the fact that SOE came out and basically announced to non-raiders that you must get this gear in The Shadow Odyssey or you are a n00b. In the Rise of Kunark expansion, I liked the fact that there were a couple of good pieces of gear for each slot I could shoot for and people would run around in different gear. In fact, people could debate which pieces you should wear based on other pieces of gear you can wear. Not in TSO. All I can say is I am glad that EverQuest 2 has appearance slots or I would get sick of looking at everyone running around in tier 2 gear. In RoK, I enjoyed the journey looking for and acquiring gear. In TSO, you are a rat in a maze trying to find the lever to get a piece of cheese.

Are doing grey shard runs fun? At first, yes. I found doing the missions interesting as we tried to figure out all the tricks the devs put into the content. But after the 10th time running doing a mission, I got bored. I enjoyed the company, but besides that, grey shard runs really are not fun.
Would I recommend to a player that they should do grey shard runs? No, because SOE has announced they are an exploit. But even if they were not an exploit, I would answer no. I have another path I recommend you follow.

If you are just reaching the Kylong Plains in the Rise of Kunark expansion, I would highly recommend doing all of the non-raid content you can, concentrating on earning as much alternate achievement experience you can. When you get to level 76, start doing the Moors of Ykesha content at the same time for a little variety. As you level, pay attention to anything that you will need to do your epic weapon quest. If you get the chance to join a group going into someplace like Deep Forge every once in a while once you hit level 75, do it. Just having a piece or two of shard gear waiting for you will make things so much sweeter when you hit 79 or 80. Aim to get the best gear you can. Some of the class forums have sticky posts that help a lot. This is advice I followed when I leveled from 64 to 80.

(Note: Yes, I started the Kylong Plains content at level 64. I was already a master alchemist, so no level restriction. Remember I wrote earlier about going to places a few levels lower than I should be? Plus, Kylong Plains really was made for rangers and my main is a wood elf ranger.)

Once you’ve hit level 80, start trying to acquire your class’ fabled weapon. You don’t have to make it your main focus. Just be ready for when a chance to do another step comes along. And then do the easy TSO shard missions. The librarian quest in Deep Forge is the easiest, although it looks like our guild is going to do whatever shard quest is in that instance. Yes, we are still going to do the TSO instances. We have guildies to equip and we took a new level 75 necromancer in for his first 2 shards Monday night. Taking on the mobs with the instance set at level 80 is much more fun. We were gimped by only having 5 members and no plate tank, but like my grey shard run partner said, “we’re going to do the run the big boy way.”

Update: On July 9, 2009, Kiara posted the following on the EQ2 forums...

Whilst grey shard runs are technically an exploit (in that we did not intend for the content to be used in this way) it's been part of gameplay for long enough that changing things now would simply be punishing to our players and a major buzz kill.

Going forward we're going to do our best to ensure that we prevent stuff like this, but we won't be "breaking" the current dynamic.

* puts the topic to bed *

Thanks all!

Previous post: Confessions of a Grey Shard Runner: Implimentation

NDA Lifted for Free Realms Closed Beta

Pex announced today that the NDA has been lifted for Free Realms today. I only got my beta invite Sunday morning, so I've only put in 2 hours of play so far. I like the number of jobs. It looks like a lot of game play for anyone who gets into the game once it goes live. I've been looking for bugs and submitted one bug report and put a couple of suggestions on the forums.

I'm glad I don't have to worry about what I say anymore. I worked in army intelligence back in the day, so I've got lots of practice saying things like "I can neither confirm nor deny" and "If I tell you, I'll have to kill you." It will be nice to be able to write about my experiences.

Confessions of a Grey Shard Runner: Implementation

One of the more amusing memes that circulated through the official EverQuest 2 forums is that players doing grey shard runs are expending no effort and taking no risk to get their tier 1 and tier 2 shard armor. I will grant that players with good gear and have kept up their combat arts and spells will experience little risk in doing the missions with the zones set so the mobs are grey (level 69 and below if you’re party consists of level 80 toons). During the time I was gearing up, I only died in combat 5 times. But no effort?

I performed 3 major tasks to get my shard gear. The first task involved getting all 4 of the Far Seas Strategic Pricing Guides to get the recipes I wanted. The recipe books are only found as chest drops when completing a trade skill instance. My guild found through experimentation that 3 member parties are the optimum size to do the instances, when comparing drop rates vs. time spent in the instances. The instances can also be soloed, although you really need to be good or you’ll be in the instances for hours. My first time soloing a trade skill instance took me over 3 hours. My fastest time to solo a trade skill instance is 2 hours 6 minutes while two members of the guild were able to do the instances under 1 hour 45 minutes. I’m estimating that I spent 15-20 hours doing the trade skill instances.

The next step in the process was to run the shard missions with the instances set to level 50-66. To do this requires what my guild calls a mentor bot. A mentor bot is a character that stays in either The Commonlands or Everfrost and is available to join a group to set the zone to a low level and is usually an alt of someone in the party doing the grey shard run. The mechanics of using the mentor bot run something like this. The party goes to the quest giver and gets the shard missions. The player with the mentor bot logs onto the mentor bot while the other party members go to the entrance of the instance. The mentor bot is then invited to the group, mentored and the party then enters the zone, setting the zone to the level of the mentor bot. The player with the mentor bot then logs into the adventuring character and the shard run can begin. We only had one problem: no level 50 mentor bots.

Do you remember in an earlier post that I mentioned that I am in a crafting guild? Well, when players were allowed into the beta for The Shadow Odyssey, all of our attention was on all the cool crafting content coming out. So the guild didn’t have a level 50 alt we could mentor to. I did have a level 31 character that we discovered could set the Befallen instances to level 50, but the instances in Everfrost required characters that actually were 50. For a while we mentored someone who was nice enough to stay logged in with his level 60-something character, but that ended once he turned 66 or 67. So while most people were fighting level 52-53 mobs, a good portion of the time my guildie and I were duo’ing level 63-67 level mobs. Let me tell you, those mobs were severely under conned! We finally stopped when we fought the named beholder in Anathema when it was green. We beat it after only wiping once (and neither of us with a full set of tier one gear or epic weapons!), but that was the end of mentoring our kind-hearted tier 7 guildie.

So that led to the third task: creating a level 50 alt. Remember how we were using a level 31 character to set the zones in Befallen? He was my paladin, and I wasn’t about to try leveling him without betraying him to Freeport to become a shadowknight. So I started to work on a level 22 necromancer that I liked. Notice I said I liked the character. That meant not power-leveling my necromancer and trying to get a good amount of alternate achievement experience. After 28 days and probably 30 - 35 hours played I finally had a level 50 mentor bot. Once we had our mentor bot, we were able to do 2-4 shard runs a night instead of 1-2 shard runs. Also, the shard runs went a lot faster, since we were fighting toons 12-15 levels lower than before. Believe it or not, even though the mobs were still grey, it mattered, and we noticed the difference.

So how much effort did I put into obtaining my shard gear? Well, first I spent 15-20 hours of the effort obtaining the recipes to make the shard armor. And I spent 30-35 hours leveling a mentor bot. The big question is how long did it take to do an average shard mission? Well, right before Kiara made the announcement of grey shard runs being an exploit, our group had grown to 5 people and with two of us with fabled epics and three of us in tier 2 armor we averaged 10 minutes a mission. That time includes travel between the instances and doing the mentor bot dance. I’ll use that average for the period when I was duo’ing (and occasionally trio’ing near the end) the content to get my void shards for the gear. So let’s see. To craft all 6 pieces of the tier 2 armor took 150 shards. 150 x 10 minutes = 25 hours. Add in the full set of Trueshot jewelry, the Gem of Farseeing, and a minor piece of jewelry I made and that time goes up to 35 hours. So what was my total time acquiring my shard gear? I’m estimating 80-90 hours. Did someone say I spent no effort obtaining my gear? I’m not claiming to have faced a lot of risk, but I expended no effort? I supposed you have some ocean-front property in Arizona you’d like to sell me too.

Previous posts:
Confessions of a Grey Shard Runner: Justification
Confessions of a Grey Shard Runner: Motivation

Next post:
Confessions of a Grey Shard Runner: Epilogue

What I've Been Listening To: April 12-18, 2009

I've been interjecting parts of my life into my Sunday posts the last couple of weeks. I got the QQ out of my system yesterday, so on with what I listened to over the last week. I just have to add one thing I noticed. I listen to a lot of podcasts with hosts that have an Eve Online background.

Van Hemlock #47 (Hosts: Tim Dale and Jon Shute) - The Van Hemlock podcast has a unique format in which a major topic is discussed every other week. This week's podcast is the news/what we're playing podcast format. So the conversation ranged from Frank Herbert's estate taking legal action against Second Life to the mission architect features in City of Heroes/City of Villians. The hosts also had a look at the PETA protest in WoW and a list of games more popular than World of Warcraft. The Twitter question of the week was what technology innovation would be good for on-line games.

Shut Up We're Talking #45 (Hosts: Darren Love and Karen) - Darren & Karen were joined by Van Hemlock and Jon the Ancient Gaming Noob. As Kirith Kodachi (who Darren referred to) noted in the discussion thread on Virgin Worlds, 3 Eve players and none of them sure of how the wormhole mechanic works. But since I don't play, I liked the discussion.

The two topics for the show were blogger privacy and how companies dish out advanced information on upcoming games. I was rather relieved at Van Hemlock's reply on blogger privacy ("And yes, my name is Tim. Hello!" ) since I have been using his name in these reviews. And Karen actually went on a rant! It is a G-rated rant, but when Van Hemlock had to follow, his reaction was "Crikey!".

The other topic I liked and deserves a mention is talk about Karen's, Darren's and Jon's kids playing on-line games. I thought it was cute.

I'm not going to say I liked the episode, but I'm giving this podcast another listen while I'm writing this post.

Free Play Podcast #18 (Hosts: Riknas & Andras) - The hosts were joined in this episode by Darren from Shut Up We're Talking. And yes, Riknas and I think Andras play Eve. But for this podcast, the focus was on Maple Story. Andras showed up late and Darren left early, but I don't think that impacted the show, as I got to hear Riknas and Darren talk about the news, Riknas and Andras talk about playing a game Darren couldn't install, and then Riknas and Andras answer listener mail.

Through the Aftermath #7 (Hosts: Shawn Schuester and Jonathan Morris) - In episode 7 the hosts did a listener mail show. Back when I first reviewed Through the Aftermath, I wrote:

They also replied to the emails and posts they received. If the quality of
feedback the pair receives continues at the quality the podcast received
after episode 3, then this podcast will become a hit.

This episode demonstated the podcast's following is still present and growing. Can forums be far behind?

On the podcasters who've played Eve theme, I know Jonathan is playing the game now.

Spouse Aggro #72 (Hosts: Beau and Leala Turkey) - If Beau Turkey is involved in something, you just know he is going to want to do something cutting edge. So this episode was recorded in a diner over breakfast. That's cool, especially since they made it work! I did have a bit of a problem hearing Beau, but that's because I was trying to listen to the episode on a train.

To all the people who are going to copy this concept, just remember one thing. Gimmicks will get attention, but you better have some solid content to go with it. This episode had that. And now Beau has his diner podcasting achivement (/chuckle).

Channel Massive #85 (Hosts: Noah, Jason & Mark) - Real life is creeping into the life of the M team as Mark recounts driving his wife to the hospital in the middle of a blizzard and Jason gets the credit card he uses to pay for his games hacked. Other than that the M team take a look at the news in a bit of a subdued fashion in this episode. The podcast will be undergoing a format change, so I'll be wondering what the future holds for the Channel Massive podcast.

EQ2's-day broadcast on April 7 (Hosts: Dellmon & Zanadi) - In this episode, we find out about Dell's sad troubadour's failure to reach level 80 by the opening day of the baseball season. That's an oversimplification of the show, but the devs should put in some code so that Dellmon can never play a scout-class again. I'd hate to see what he'd do with a ranger.

What A Saturday

This hasn't been the greatest week for me. Working hard is leading to drinking hard. But that part creates good memories and recalls others as long as I'm drinking with my co-workers and not by myself. The bad part was having part of my garage ceiling collapse because the unit over the garage had leaky bathroom pipes. I own my own place, but the rest of the folks who live in my building rent, and I got to deal with the landlords of the place with the leak. Seem to be nice people and the husband is a pastor. They are going to have their sons come over next Saturday and fix my garage. I'm pretty sure they will since that unit will get cold next winter if the insulation doesn't get replaced.

With that done, I had to log in from home and work for the next 5 hours. Ruined my whole afternoon for gaming, but it was worth $200. The question I have is, is $200 enough to keep you from being ticked off about not being to play your favorite game at a time you wanted to?