Magic World Online

Upon entering the game, you're asked to choose a class and a name for your character. Yep, it's a short sentence, but that's honestly the amount of choice you have in your decision. There is no customization in any form at initial creation. No hair changes, no stat distribution, nothing. It's not game breaking, but it's a point of contention for me. I understand that a lot people playing these games have no issue looking exactly like everyone else, but it's something that annoys me. I’ll leave that tale for the forums.

On the surface, MWO reminds me a lot of Lineage due to its 2D top-down graphics and intensive grindfest mentality. Unlike Lineage though, the game does a good job of giving you some purpose for your quests. For this reason, it's easy to see why it's been on Ralsu's Top Ten Free to Play Games list. The story is interesting, if not groundbreaking, and it’s a refreshing change from being told to go kill five Whozits just because some NPC told you to. The quest objectives aren't much different in essence, but if you don't mind reading the text, you'll be pleasantly surprised at the depth and variety in the reasons you receive to go traipsing back and forth across the lands like a drunken gold digger from the Old West.

By the time it's all said and done, you'll be loaded down like just like one of those previously mentioned gold diggers, so here's hoping you've got a strong back. Mobs drop the normal loot fare we've all come to expect from every fantasy based MMOG since the genre began, but just like every other game out there, it also seems to cheat. It doesn't steal your loot, but I bet it giggled like a schoolgirl every time it dropped a piece of loot I couldn’t use. After playing for a while, I had enough Summoner, Archer, and Mage gear to twink out an alt like nobody’s business. Gods forbid the game drop a single piece of armor my dashing Warrior could have used though.

On the plus side, with all the loot you've gathered it's a simple process of selling it all to a local armor vendor in order to buy yourself a decent set of gear. Any player of these games will quickly be put at ease with the intuitive NPC vendor interaction. In fact, the user interface as a whole is exactly what I found most of the game to be - standard fantasy MMOG fare. This isn't necessarily a bad thing (especially when dealing with inventory, stats, UI, etc.) and some other F2P games could learn a lesson or two from Ingle Games, Ltd. When getting into a new game, I don't want to feel like a monkey looking at a math problem while I'm trying to figure out the basic mechanics. In this regard, MWO does a good job of getting you into the flow of things quickly.

Even though the majority of the game appears to be par for the course, there are a few things that make MWO stand out from its crowd of competitors. Characters have the ability to raise their own mount from an egg, "grow" (improve) weapons as they level, and begin branching into different class specializations starting at level 15. When your mage hits 65, you can be a Freezing Uranus. Yep, I said it. If you're going to name a class that, don’t blame me when I jump on it faster than Rosie O’Donnell  on a cupcake.

So far, so good (or at least not horrible), right? Yeah, hang onto that feeling because I'm about to put it through a meat grinder. I'll warn you now, the last aspect of the game I'm going to talk about is not pretty... not even that drunken haze, 2 AM at last call kind of pretty. There's not enough alcohol in the world to cover this much ugly.

The game has, and I swear it's not a sadistic joke, an in-game official BOT. This isn't some fancy new acronym the game has come up with; it literally means that with the push of a button, you can set the game to play itself. I'll go ahead and give you a minute to let that truly sink in.

The reason given by the development team is to allow players to get to the endgame PvP content while avoiding the endless grind of having to level like they must in other games.

I can't possibly express how flabbergasted I was when I saw this. I immediately went to the official site to see what the deal was, and discovered it wasn't just some cruel Easter egg hidden in there by a disgruntled employee. They did it on purpose. Maybe I'm crazy, but at this point, I have to ask, "What the hell were you thinking?" What point is there in playing a game if the game plays it for you? Oh yeah, that's right, so you can reach level 65 to participate in the weekly City Sieges. Just for the sake of argument, let's assume that's the real reason. No, no... hang on here. I said we'll assume.

If that's really the entire purpose of it, why not just start characters off at level 65? Give them a set of points to distribute between statistics, make their class path choices, and give them a certain amount of gold to go towards various pieces of armor, weapons, and mounts? At least that would add some kind of character customization to the game. "Well they won't know how to play their characters then," you say? How is anyone going to know anything about their characters if they simply BOT them to 65?

If you choose to play the game without using the BOT or available item mall (which rumor has you'll have to or be at a huge disadvantage by the end game), then there is a distinct feeling of enjoyment you can get from MWO in a nostalgic Diablo-esque kind of way. For a free game (that the main site states is in beta), it's not a bad way to kill an afternoon. The officially provided BOT in this game has me so disgusted though, it's hard to give MWO even the single hammer I did.