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Thursday, 10:41 am in Gaming

So I got an email the other day from the good folks over at Saga of Ryzom letting me know they’d reactivated my account.  Ryzom, which you’ve probably never heard of, is an obscure little European MMORPG whose Beta I played while waiting for WoW to be released.  It’s quite pretty but fairly basic, and I never really found the HUD particularly inspiring or intuative (not to mention the default movement keybindings are left-right-up-down as opposed to WASD; what is this, 1995?).  The character progression is interesting in that it’s pretty much totally freeform.  Essentially, there are four ‘actions’; Fight, Magic, Harvest and Craft.  Performing each of those actions give you XP for that particular group; so casting spells will give you Magic XP, foraging or gathering will give you Harvest XP and so on.  Each ‘level’ per action gives you 10 training points for that group with which you can buy different action component (different spells, craftable patterns and so forth).  Each basic action tree have 20 levels, after which it branches down to become more and more granular; so after Craft you get Jewelcrafting, Armorcrafting and so forth, and the XP also becomes more granular (crafting Jewels, give you Jewelcrafting XP but the training points can be used to buy any Craft action).  It’s a really interesting free-form system but, quite frankly, I’m not sure if it really ‘works’.  Not that I’ve ever had a character over level 40 in any action, so I’m not sure how it progresses into the mid- and end-games.

Ryzom is also unique in MMORPGs in the fact that it has introduced a thing called ‘Ryzom Ring’, which is essentially a toolset/level editor players can use in-game to create custom in-game content.  As far as I can tell, levelling and exploring about in the ‘real’ Ryzom world unlocks content that becomes usable in the editor, and actions taken in ‘custom’ maps give no XP and you can’t keep the items you gain in them.  It’s an interesting idea, but again I’m not sure it works.  The Ring system reminds me a lot of Dreamweaving in Furcadia, except that Furc is non-stat based.  The other comparison is the multiplayer component of Neverwinter Nights… but NWN isn’t persistant-world so there aren’t so many issues of game balance (if you want to make a scenario where you instantly get the Super Sword of Pwn at level 1, that’s your business).

Mostly I just ended up using the editor to look at the different race-gender armor sets and mob models.

Unfortunatley, they only re-activated my account for 15 days.  This is unfortunate since we got the keys to our new place yesterday, and it’s probably going to be a few weeks before the ADSL gets hooked up.  Damn ADSL.

Speaking of the new place, for some reason when we went there last night we noticed that there was no water.  Need to ring the agent and ask about that, thanks for reminding me.

• Tags » gaming, mmorpg, saga of ryzom, the flat