Thursday, February 18, 2010

Allods Online thoughts

Allods Online is in "open beta", but as there will be no character wipe between "open beta" and "release", you might as well say the game already launched. The reception is somewhat mixed, which is mostly due to Allods' strong resemblance to World of Warcraft. So people who hate WoW now hate Allods, while others launch the usual complaints about "WoW clones". On the other side the people who like Allods remark that having a game like WoW for free isn't such a bad deal, especially since WoW itself is running out of fresh content.

I played Allods Online a bit in the closed beta, and now deleted the US beta client to install the EU client instead. I created some Gibberlings, but am not in a hurry to play the game, as there are still a lot of other games I'd like to play first. What I liked about Allods was that in spite of a strong resemblance, the game isn't really a clone of WoW. The character classes are quite different, and have some unique combat mechanics: For example the scout has a spell to fill his quiver with a limited number of magical arrows, and as long as there are such arrows in his quiver he'll use those in combat instead of the normal ones. Mages can "pre-cast" spells to have them ready to be cast as instants.

Once the game officially launches, I'll have to have a look at the item shop to decide whether I like it or not. That is always a critical point for Free2Play games, some are well done, others are ripping their players off and destroy the game balance with their item shops. But in any case I don't think I will play Allods very long, because the endgame is one of free-for-all PvP, which is not the kind of game I like. But creating a couple of characters and playing around a bit with them for free, why not?

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