As I was working through DOMO-like* Florensia last night (expect a separate article about it tonight), I was thinking, and this goes back to my MMO DNA project, wouldn’t it be nice to take one of those F2P imports and really play the heck out of it, and blog about it, every day for a month? I think it woulld take that long to really get a thorough sense for a game. EVERY MMO is pretty similar at the start — pick up quests, go kill quick-spawning beasties, level up, etc. You can’t review a game based purely on the new player experience, as important a part as that might be.
So anyway, last night I was painfully entering quest text from Florensia into Babelfish, as the game is still largely in German (side benefit: players in the Florensia beta will be getting a good reading knowledge of German until they get the English localization patch done). And I was thinking, this game has twin talent trees for abilities in land and sea; the sea game itself runs in parallel and has its own grouping dynamic; there’s no way I am going to get a sense for this game in a couple of nights. All I could really tell was that this game shared a similar style with *Dream of Mirror Online. I’d just barely built my first ship.
So I’m thinking that, possibly starting September, I will be playing a different free-to-play every month, and try to really understand the game enough to know why they were popular enough to import in the first place. I’m thinking my first one will be Pi Story or Dream of Mirror Online, both games I have some experience with. If Florensia localizes before then, maybe Florensia.
More details as the time comes closer, but I think it would be fun to do this kind of thing with other people who are interested in checking out new games that don’t get the press of a WoW or a AOC or a WAR.
* note — if you want to be inundated with info about F2P games, sign up with Aeria Games, Outspark and Frogster — those are the majors (Frogster is EC/Asia only though they are running the Florensia beta for now).
3 thoughts on “Free-to-play game of the month?”
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Mostly in German? I’m up to level 6 land, level 3 sea and haven’t seen any german text yet at all. I can’t speak a word of german, so I’m pretty sure I’d notice . . .
Is it server specific maybe? I’m on the U.S. server. Or is it just higher level stuff?
Whoops, on topic, I’d be interested to see you do that. I never have time to give these games more than a quick try and whether I play it any further is based on the impressions of a single evening of play. So far, that’s generally meant most of these F2P games get uninstalled and never touched again. Or they languish on my hard drive untouched because they’re not bad enough to remove, but not fun enough to make me want to log in.
There was a menu at the login screen that was set to GERMAN on mine, after I a) noticed it and b) fixed it, it was fine, though some of the translations still seemed iffy. Still, very playable.
I have the same reaction to F2Ps. I play them a couple of hours, long enough to make a first impression, and then head back to P2P games. There’s a lot of people playing F2Ps, mostly kids, it seems, but there’s good game and good ideas. There just seems to be a reluctance to give Asian imports a chance, and I agree. I was far more eager to play Mythos than, say, Florensia, and it would be hard to deny that a big part of that was that these people were always talking about their game, active on their forums, making a big show of what they were doing. The import F2Ps are typically pretty much done when we see them and made for an audience that didn’t include many Westerners, so we never got a chance to influence the development.
That said, clearly Asian developers have to be looking at an eventual port to the West would just be more money for them, and I think it more modern F2Ps, we’re seeing a trend in that direction. Outspark’s Project Powder, for instance, could be a Western game. You can’t easily tell it isn’t.