There.com was a visionary free online MMORPG that looked great and made its money by allowing players to buy new clothes or in-game items with real dollars. Regardless of its imaginative and beautiful realized settings, however, there really wasn’t much excitement beyond hoverboard races and gossip in the cafes.
Jump to five years later.
If you are also a fan of Second Life, World of Warcraft, Bejeweled, Fable II and Magic: The Gathering then Free Realms might just be your dream come true.
From Sony Games, Free Realms, which opens to the public today – April 29th, 2009 is a free download with a super snappy account creation process that caters to anyone who wants to disappear into an incredibly colorful and strangely familiar world of fantasy that encompasses a lot of the best elements of the best massively multi-player online games out there.
Within the world of Free Realms, you can play mini games that resemble Bejeweled, race and crash cars, create a party and quest in a manner that feels a lot like WoW, and fly from location to location like in Second Life.
Character classes include everything from a Ninja, Medic, Explorer, Wizard, Miner, Brawler, Postman and more whom you can take through a massive variety of locales like Pixiewood or snow-covered mountain crags. It has the look and feel of WoW, but the great thing is you can change classes on the fly.
Drawing on the impact of Second Life, Free Realms even has Stages where you can perform and even have live streaming performances.
You can collect and likely purchase cards in the vein of Magic: The Gathering to do combat and upgrade you character. None of the mini games or otherwise are required. Even combat is optional – as the game partitions off combat areas, (creating instanced combat zones) so that you can choose whether or not to participate in that style of gameplay. Essentially, this is the first MMO which is combat-optional. Amazing.
You can even have a pet with its own AI like in Peter Molyneaux’s hugely successful Fable II!
Someone has been paying close attention to what works.
To see the video visit the Free Realms site and download it free today. You might just love it more than bacon.
