Magical in a runeish sorta way...

My recent forays into indie/cheap games has lead me to a lovely replacement for a terrible(y-addictive) game by the name of WoW.

Runes of Magic is a free to play, micro transaction, MMO. It is very similar to wow (as any MMO tends to be) But it is created completely from scratch and does not try to be like wow.

You start off as either a human or an elf (new races will get added with each new expansion they decide to release) and can choose a selection of classes.

These classes can be a very crucial choice as later on in the game you can choose a second class that you want to spec into. You will get specific skills depending on the class combination as well as the general skills of each class. This i think is a very very cool way of making classes unique. You could be a warrior/priest and be able to tank and heal yourself or a mage/warrior and be able to deal immense damage AS WELL as getting the unique class combination skills.

I decided to play as a Rogue/Scout as it allows me to do close combat stealthy style and very good long range attacks and the two classes both rely on one stat as the primary.

As you continue on into the game you find you need to learn professions such as mining, woodcutting and herbology.
You can learn every profession in the game but you can only max out a limited amount of them. Each profession will give you specific benefits at higher levels but you have to choose carefully which benefits you really want before you level them up.

I haven't played enough yet to get to the higher levels but i think i might possibly go with leather working (as i can wear leather) and some sort of magic oriented profession such as alchemy to offset being a purely physical class.

There are some really neat features in the game such as the dual-class system, pvp dungeons, pure solo play, temporary mount rewards very early (as soon as you complete the easy tutorial), a teleport system from pretty much any location but for me the most important feature is the fact that there are no queues. There are over 4 million players registered on the game (and rising) and they decided to provide enough free places for everyone to join without having to queue. This in itself is a fantastic reason to play as most server based games will not give you the instant join ability.

Aside from all this the game does have a few issues, quests can be a bit tedious and ask for a few too many items to be collected etc, some of the later game stuff is apparently not working correctly (yet), and there isn't any way (as far as ive found) to find a specific trainer/location/etc (such as in wow asking the town guards). These are all minor issues and so far can be worked around by the smallest amount of work. (I have suggested implementations on the forums that might help but who knows if they'll be taken into account)

However overall i have had no issues with this game (so far) and have found it very enjoyable, even playing by myself, there are alot of things to do and places to see (and more coming all the time), Having a few friends to play along with would make the experience even better as far as i can see.

I give this game 4 and a half dead Darryl's out of 5! (and sure its free so ya aint gonna lose out anything by trying it!)