Nexon europe has announced the closed beta for the free-to-play title Mabinogi. European players can enjoy this game in the near future, and the release date is set for early 2010.
We’ve not seen many games like this – Mabinogi surely is unique. The first thing you’ll notice is the graphical style – cartoonish, but still pretty detailed. The other thing you’ll notice is the poor-looking UI, but come on – that’s not mission critical. First of all, you aren’t bound to any classes, instead you spend skill points in what way you want. You earn skill points by completing quests, or simply aging, since every week is a year to Mabinogi. You can receive quests not by the usual quest giver, but by owls that drop them from the sky.
In combat, you win a battle by carefully countering your foes attacks, and placing your attacks well. Soloing stuff is rather hard to do, but because of it’s great party system, battling dungeon bosses becomes easy. Unfortunately, Mabinogi has point-and-click controls, and combined with flawed pathfinding, it becomes a pain. Also, the chores you have to do are rather boring – sheering sheep and harvesting grain.
Even though the game is not entirely free-to-play (it stops being free-to-play when you want continue on the story line, or rebirth your character, which means that you start at level 1 but keeping your skills), it’s still fun to play and a good choice if you want to try something new. Find it here.
EA has gotten a large part of their user base for the free-to-play shooter Battlefield Heroes rather angry. EA has, for example, made the price of items you buy with in-game currency, higher. The so called BattleFunds (which you acquire with real money) have been lowered in price. What this essentially means is that players now either have to play for much longer, or use real money to use the weapons they have already been using for a long time.
First, players earned the so called Valor Points by just playing, and then buying themselves new stuff. You had a choice to give yourself a boost by spending some money in the item store. Many players did it like this, never spending any money on the game, and were obviously perfectly content with that.
Since the cost of all items (which you buy with Valor Points) have been significantly increased, you need to play alot longer to get the items you used to get for less. Of course you can use your existing weapons and such to keep playing, but to be competetive, you’ll most probably have to spend some money. Real money, for that matter.
A player elaborates:
Now it’s impossible for me to play the game for free. I can’t even afford the long ranged pistol anymore, let alone bandages. Let me make this clear: now it takes 22 wins for us to earn enough VPs to rent a weapon for a day. If each match is 10 minutes long, that means I’ll have to play for 3 hours and a half with a stellar team just to afford the weapon. This is not a casual game. I can’t even be a knife + pistol commando anymore.
Apparently Battlefield Heroes wasn’t making enough money. Come on, EA – change it back. I have a feeling they’ll lose a big part of their user base with this change.
Rumble Fighter is a free-to-play game by OGPlanet and obviously this game has everything to do with fighting.
Your goal is to simply beat other people up in All-vs-All or Team-vs-Team matches. All-vs-All has some submodes which you can choose from. You get to choose from four classes, all with different initial stats; Striker, Soul Fighter, Elementalist, and Alchemist. Each of these classes have 3 techniques in common, and each class transforms differently, unlocking new powerful skills.
As you progress, you can use Sacred Scrolls to change your fighting technique/style, changing your skills. A few other styles can also be bought from the item store. As you can only create one character (which you can not customize), you have to buy your second slot from the item store, which kind of sucks since it isn’t that cheap either. You can also buy new weapons and clothes there.
The graphics aren’t as good, but the characters have atleast a bit more detail. All in all I think it’s an okay game, probably great to kill time with – like most others. You can find it here.
Florensia Online is a free-to-play MMORPG which gives a whole new twist to the MMORPG world – sea battles! You level up separately on land and on sea.
The battle system that Florensia Online uses is pretty impressive, two types are available: Land and Naval. Obviously you have a ship to fight your naval battles and a character to fight your land battles. The land battles are pretty straightforward, but the naval battles are pretty unique.
You build your ship out of parts you buy or get from quests. Once you get your ship up and running, it’s time to blow up some enem- no wait – let’s first master the controls, since they are a bit complicated. You have to press the spacebar to get into battle mode, and from then on you’ll be helped if you actually follow the manual. Now you can fire your cannons, and use your skills to slow the enemy or shoot cannonballs faster.
The graphics are great, and the UI is fluid and well-designed. Props to the developers for that. You can find the game here.
As you might’ve noticed I wrote the post on Rose Online. It was the first one I wrote, but since I did an okay job I can keep posting here! I aim to get to know the games before I write about them, so I might not post often, but my posts will be long.
I quite like playing games, especially (MMO)RPGS. Morrowind, Oblivion (both from the Elder Scrolls series) are a few of my favourites, and I’m looking forward to Guild Wars 2. One of the very few games I don’t mind paying for As you’ll notice, I have a soft spot for cutesy games.
When I’m done with school I hope to find a job as a Concept Artist, and I’ll be doing a few odd jobs around ZeroGamer as well. So when I have the time, I hope to surprise all of you with a logo
As you’ll notice, I have a soft spot for cutesy games.