Runes of Magic impressions

With still no serious continuous game to delve into when I should be studying my mind has often drifted to the free-to-play MMORPG market. From a couple of places I have been hearing reports of the game Runes of Magic (ROM) so like any good conformist I decided to check out what the fuss was about.

ROM has been branded as a WoW clone, but it looks like they embrace that fact rather then try to deny it. Probably good thing they do because its hard not to feel that you are wandering around in Elwynn Forest at the started zone of ROM. There are a number of different classes to choose from, nearly all clones of WoW's characters. ROM however only has the race of humans to choose from so I'm wondering what they are going to do with PvP.

Most of the stuff in ROM is quite generic and even the early levels of the game are quite grindy. But it strikes me that this is a game you play after a long day of work, where you don't have to think...just grind. Mind you, I haven't got particularly far in the game yet so cannot speak for the later levels.

One of the special 'features' of ROM is their dual class system which is pretty basic. You are able to have a primary class and a secondary class. You can use all the abilities of your primary class but only a few of your secondary. The two classes can be swapped around but you must be willing to level for both of them. So far, what I have seen this system just makes you play the game twice, with twice as much grinding.

So its not brilliant, but it isn't awful. I'm going to keep on playing for a time and we'll see where it goes from there. Oh, and ROM is still in the beta stage yet there will be no wipe when it is released in March, so you can level to your heart's content in beta which I think anyone can join. I took some screenshots in the game for this post just to show you how similar it looked to WoW but for some reason they all ended up as black images. Sop instead I'll give you a link to the video I made just running around the early levels of ROM.