Wahey! Super lightning bonus Cheapseat here! Well, kind of. Basically, I was sat staring at the PlayNC online store thingey, brooding with indecision about which flavour of City of Heroes to actually go for; US or EU, and got a bit distracted, as I do. I'm still none the wiser in the regard by the way. All the cool people I met during my free trial CoH stint seem to actually play on US servers, despite most of them being on the Olde Worlde side of the Pond, like me. On the otherhand, it's always helpful to be playing on a server that's physically located nearer to me than further away, and in any event, I'm not entirely sure if a UK credit card billing address is even allowed to buy a US subscription. Then there's peak playing hours to think of too, and trying to keep up with folks in California is probably quite detrimental to my sleeping patterns and health in general.
All quite confusing, but somewhat moot, as it turns out my credit card had expired without me noticing it, and I've still to get a new one sent to me, so I guess any kind of subscription at all is going to have to be put on hold for the time being.
Anyway, looking idly through NCSoft's current portfolio, the word 'FREE' leapt out of the page at me, and magpie MMO collector that I am, I clicked on it without really thinking, and now have Dungeon Runners installed.
It's a quirky little game, and although I've only given it a few hours so far, it seems to be an almost completely 'borrowed' version of Diablo, only in 3D, with a Neverwinter Nights-ish tileset. This being the case, it's almost instantly familiar and takes very little learning to get going and play. There's three classes, Fighter, Ranger and Mage, a bunch of simple quests, mana and health potions, town portal scrolls, various coloured rarities of magical equipment and a very familiar looking paperdoll/inventory screen.
As far as I can tell, it's largely instanced, with lobby town areas, and only massively multiplayer in the sense that you can take some pother people out into an instance with you, and of course stand around in the towns showing others how fiery one's sword is. All very Battlenet. The gameplay and action itself is almost identical to Diablo/Dungeon Siege/etc, with lots of clicking for the basic attack, along with a variety of talent-like skills and special powers you can drop into the fray, at the cost of mana.
Being a free-to-play game, with associated low barriers to entry, the seemingly mandatory world-chat can be a bit wearying. I didn't manage to find a way to turn that off, which is a shame, because the two hour Considered Ethical Debate on "Eye-Rack: Motives, Means and Moral Standpoints", was nothing I hadn't seen a thousand times before on a hundred messageboards or chatrooms, and not particularly helpful in my crossbow-driven rat-slaying frenzy, out in the starting forest areas. I did manage to work out how to ignore individual players, but there were just so many of them that needed to Be Quiet Now and Get On And Play For A Bit.
Besides all that, it seems quite well done as far as it goes, and has a very sarcastic sense of humour to it, mercilessly mocking the more regular Diablo variants, but I must admit to not being particularly captivated by it all, and it definitely seems to be one of those online games that could just as easily be played offline, much like the original Diablo. It's the sort of 'game-lite' I tend to play while waiting for big patches or clients to download, for proper MMOs, only this one uses bandwidth at the same time! Given the amount of general chat going on about World of Warcraft, rather than the game these people were actually playing at that moment, I doubt I'm alone in that thinking.
The numbers, shown on the server connect screen, showed about 200 people, spread across four or five servers, around midday (UK) on a Sunday, making this one perhaps less of a success than might have been hoped. Perhaps it merely exists to bulk out the PlayNC portfolio a bit, which presently only really contains Guild Wars, City of Heroes and Lineage as serious mainstream MMO games of note. Still, it's a harmless bit of Something Else, and indeed, free to play indefinitely.
They would quite like some money though, I'd imagine, and signing up as a Member, (£3.49/month, $4.99/month) allows you to use healing and mana potions that stack in inventory, and heal for more, and also to equip items of yellow 'rarity' and up, which those of us on the cheap seats have to get by without. I expect there are some more subtle perks in there too, but the game certainly seems playable enough without all that, at least well beyond the point I'm likely to lose interest at anyway. No 'Three Good' or 'Three Bad' for this one...simply haven't played it enough for that, and it's not a free trial anyway.
Still, it's there now, on my desktop, and it's often easier to fire up a game you already have, than go through the registration for a new one. All in all, not likely to become an obsession, or knock anyone's socks off, but then you do get what you pay for, and it may entertain in small doses when your regular soma is down for maintenance.
Dungeon Runners is available here, weighs in at a modest 450MB or so, and as mentioned, doesn't need to see your money before letting you in, although a free PlayNC account is probably necessary to get hold of it in the first place.
I'm turning into such an NCSoft minion these days. Hurry up with The Pirate Game, will ya, or it'll be yet another NCSoft game next; Tabula Rasa!
(Some good interview stuff with The Pirate People on Virgin Worlds Podcast #82, by the way, including all sorts of clever ideas about 'End Game'. Sounds good so far!)