Our good friends at Massively have
written up a post just for you WoW players about the new hotness in MMOs lately, a game called
Free Realms. I haven't gotten a chance to play it, but it's all the team over there can talk about, and the game itself just
hit a whopping three million players. It's a free-to-play game (with more premium memberships getting more features -- the minimum is about $5 a month) put out by
Sony Online Entertainment that aims towards a more casual audience, with extra content placed in for more hardcore gamers. The questing and leveling itself is very forgiving -- you have a dotted green line leading you to quest targets, and combat only takes place in instanced areas. But the crafting and other various minigames (in order to do mining, you actually play a
Bejewelled-style matching game, and there's even
a "Kart Driver" profession) can get pretty hard. Just like
WoW, those who want to collect pets or build skills can do that, while those who are more interested in dungeon crawling have that option as well.
I've been meaning to pick up the game and check it out (on the free level, of course -- with my
WoW subscription running, I'm not made of MMO money), and Massively's guide is an excellent first overview to how the game relates to our favorite MMO. If you're getting a little bored in Azeroth waiting for the next expansion announcement and are looking for something else to try,
Free Realms might just be it.
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Fan stuff, Instances, Quests, Leveling, Classes