I'm off to London today to catch up with the home base, but in my 40m of peace at LAX after two hours of hellish checkin, these pics pop up in my flickr rss from young crecente.
I've missed much on Dungeon Runners so far - but these screenshots got me digging. It's a free-to-play RPG from NCSoft; free, that is, for basic level play. You need a registration with NCSoft, and a guest code, but the game itself is free to download too. Amazing looking for a freebie, eh?
Choose to play as Fighter, Mage or Ranger in a realm of terror, magic and adventure. Unlock powerful new skills as you gain experience on your journey into the unknown.
Whether fighting evil hordes as a lone warrior or teaming up with online friends to carve a path of destruction through your foe, Dungeon Runners will quench your deepest dungeon-crawling thirst.
Ahuh. So, only three player-types. That's unusual, too. They're obviously aiming for a more casual audience out there, going with this quite simplified setup.
Some dungeons can be completed quickly, rewarding those who can only invest 15 minutes a play session. Greater dungeons, however, will provide a deep, rich, questing experience for those who want to go on longer runs or multi-part quests.
The dungeons themselves have a random-layout generator, by all accounts, making each run slightly different from the last.
I'd like to have a go at this - I love the budget look of the website, and the free-to-play element; the top tier gear in the game requires a pay subscription, so no epix unless you buy into the more serious levels of the game. The question is, how many folks will cough up?
I'm curious that NCSoft didn't go for a more contemporary game setting - City Runners, say; that way they could have supplemented the freebie game with in-game ads. I wonder why they didn't.
There was a generic fantasy MMO thing whose name I've entirely forgotten, but got canceled shortly after it was announced, and NC decided to take all the assets created for that and throw them at this, hoping an original business model would succeed where the genericness of the previous game failed...
...argh, what was it called? There was a post about it in the beta forums... which I've obviously lot access to now...
Posted by: Aquarion | May 29, 2007 at 22:43
I love the art style. That heavy-jawed/tiny-waisted, caricatured, cartoony style (as seen in The Incredibles and Team Fortress 2) is going to get a lot of play in the next couple of years, I predict.
Posted by: Hugh "Nomad" Hancock | May 29, 2007 at 22:51
Its interestion to see how similar the UI is in this, and other new MMOs to WOW. Im wondering if thats to make for an easy transistion, or if World of Warcraft just got it right. Which is doubtful seeing as I always made my UI unrecognizable to the orignal.
Posted by: Derek | May 29, 2007 at 23:02
I loved the choices in the way my character looked. "oooooh male AND female!? ncsoft you're too good to me"
i was too disappointed at that point to move past it and find out more about the game. I'm sure that was just the free version but, bleh.
Posted by: bigwig | May 30, 2007 at 06:03
I was on the beta for this and it has come a long way, but in essence it remains a hack-and-slasher with very little depth.
The quests that are available are fairly pointless and exist only to direct you to your next destination. I think I wrote about it once on my old blog, but that's gone now - sorry!
Membership, while cheap, only enables use of special items in-game that are of much better quality than what is available to free players.
If anyone would like a guest pass to try it out, fire me an email and I'll get you one.
Posted by: Ben Harris | May 30, 2007 at 06:05
no guest pass necessary. they've recently updated the game to be open for everyone.
and, about the classes, they recently "de-classed" it too. broke things out into 6 "skills" that can be combined to make the mage, fighter and ranger and mixes there of.
it is frenetic pickup-putdown, reminiscent of old-school diablo click-fests. totally fun.
don't go in it looking for the depth that is world of warcraft. the flip-side, however, you don't have to play for 4 hours just to see your first real mob that's not a wolf either.
and the price is perfect. the subscription rate for all the "membership only" phat lewt is just $5 a month. only pennies a day!
i've written up a few more of the "designy" things i like here:
http://m3mnoch.wordpress.com/2007/05/25/dungeon-runners-now-public/
m3mnoch.
Posted by: m3mnoch | May 30, 2007 at 09:52
you can pause at Thelsamar and get the flight point. Go all the way north with the road...
Posted by: | November 22, 2009 at 14:25