My First Foray Into Free Realms
Free Realms is one of the games that has been on my gaming radar for a while now. I did not know much about the game other than it was made by SOE, was free-to-play, had a cartoony graphical style ala Wizard 101, and was aimed at kids but enjoyable for adults as well. I got into the beta just yesterday and so I only got to play for a little more than an hour. I know a lot of people who are in beta are still really excited and are very much enjoying it, so I think there may have been something wrong with my experiences. My initial impression was cautious disappointment, but I feel it may be a problem on my side the most part.
I came into this game excited because I absolutely loved playing Wizard 101. The only thing that killed Wizard 101 for me was the lack of social networking tools. I had one experience in Wizard 101 that was spectacular until the lack of social networking tools completely ruined the experience and made me decide to stop playing and uninstall the game. If the game had an "Adult Mode" that allowed you to chat freely and form groups/guilds, it would probably have overtaken my life for a while.
Nonetheless, all the hype-talk about Free Realms made me hopeful that it would fill that hole left by Wizard 101. At this time, I am not quite sure if I will play it because of some problems that I think are mostly on my side.
First of all, I HATE HATE HATE having to launch the game from the website. I want to fully install the game onto my computer and have a nice little icon on my desktop that I can launch the game from. Having to open up a web browser and launch the game through the website annoys me to no end. Perhaps somewhere there is a full download of the game, but just from what I saw yesterday, it seems you have to launch it from the website.
The second problem, and to me the most important problem, is graphical lag and FPS drops. I do not know if it is because it is playing through the web browser or what, but the FPS on the game are trash for me. I am able to run WoW, WAR and Guild Wars at max settings and keep a steady 60FPS. Wizard 101 was so smooth graphically and never gave me trouble.
When I move my mouse, the cursor is not fast and responsive. It moves across the screen like it is trying to move through molasses. The same goes for character movement. When moving around and panning the camera around, I get significant FPS drops. All of these things combined really are significant barriers stopping me from enjoying the game. Maybe I cannot see the good of the game so much because of these walls in the way.
I did really enjoy the tutorial part, though I think it should be expanded. The tutorial was very interactive and had a voice over narrating most of the game instructions. In the tutorial, they go over moving the camera, moving your character, picking up and completing quests, using the minimap, getting into fights, and cooking. When you finish you are thrown out into the world and given inventory screens, SOE store screens, characters screens and many other things they do not explain in the tutorial. If this game is aimed at kids and not veteran MMO or RPG players, those areas need to be better covered.
I also liked the options to add a Fable 2-style bread crumb trail to the next quest as well as an arrow just pointing you in the direction of the quest.
I still want to try the game more and see if I can get deeper into the game but I need to fix my issues first. Can anyone help me with the graphical issues? Does the game run better in IE than Firefox? (I use Firefox currently.) Is there anywhere I can just download the entirety of the game and play it off my machine instead of having to launch it from the website?