[shifuimam]

Boyfriend and his BIF have been big online gamers for a long time - they met each other through a MUD about ten years ago and have done most MMOs that are out there. Anyhow, the BIF found a new pay-for-perks MMO called Runes of Magic that is surprisingly good. It only went into beta earlier this year, so it's still pretty new. You can download and play for free; real cash dollars will get you extra perks like mounts (so you can move faster) and better weapons, armor, and supplies.

The only MMO I have any experience with prior to this is Guild Wars, so that's only thing I can compare it against. Play isn't instanced, so you occasionally have to deal with other players stealing stuff from your kills, or gathering items from the same stuff you're gathering from. The graphics and ambient sound effects are excellent (on par with GW, for sure). There's some background music, but it's not constant. Your character gets a house early on in the game, where you can buy furniture and store stuff you don't need right at hand. Unlike GW, you can go inside some buildings, and there's no "invisible wall" that keeps you from going certain places, so you can climb stuff, swim, etc. I'm especially partial to the water sounds and effects when you dive under water and swim around.

Making a guild costs 100,000 gold (which is gathered in-game, so it doesn't cost any real money to do so), and there are loads of third-party addons for the game client through http://rom.curse.com. Unlike Guild Wars, your various characters don't all have to be in the same guild, which is nice IMO. It's easier in RoM to make a pack mule character for unloading items onto, since you can mail stuff to characters (whereas in GW you have to have someone else to stand there and accept your items in order to log back in as your mule character and retrieve them from your friend, provided they haven't run off with your stuff).

If you haven't heard of it and you like medieval-style MMOs, I highly recommend that you check this one out. It's pretty cool. Unfortunately, the installer is like 3GB, so it'll take awhile to download. You can find it at www.runesofmagic.com.

[boy8cookie]

Its for windows only :|

[shifuimam]

It's still a good game, for those with Boot Camp, other machines, etc.

Of course, it still has some bugs, like when the freaking bridge to one of the cities doesn't render:

[Chuckit]

Whoa, is it just me or is the look of that game completely Xeroxed from WOW?

[shifuimam]

Looking at WoW screenshots, I suppose it's similar - then again, why reinvent the wheel? If existing MMO interfaces work well, there's no reason to come up with something completely new.

I do prefer the Guild Wars interface in several ways (particularly that various floating windows are semi-transparent, and the UI font sizes are considerably smaller), but RoM isn't too bad.

I've only played WoW a little bit, and I was thoroughly unimpressed with it. Runes of Magic has been a lot of fun so far. I can't really adequately compare the two, but boyfriend and his BIF have both said several times since starting this one that it's better than WoW, and they've both played that game extensively.

[boy8cookie]

Mind asking your BF why he prefers it to WoW?

[shifuimam]

According to him: Fights against enemies don't take very long, and you can level up pretty quickly compared to WoW. The drop rate of quest items is nearly 100%, even if you're not doing a quest, whereas it's not as reliable in WoW. That's pretty cool, so that you can pick up a quest later even if you already have the items for that quest.

[Chuckit]

His complaint is that leveling in WoW is too hard? Wow for real.

[boy8cookie]

Originally Posted by Chuckit 

His complaint is that leveling in WoW is too hard? Wow for real.

Hard and tedious are different, and WoW is definitely tedious, especially if its your 5th toon.

[shifuimam]

Originally Posted by Chuckit 

His complaint is that leveling in WoW is too hard? Wow for real.

Not hard, just time-consuming.