Crowns of Power – Free to Play MMORPG
561 words eaten alive on November 21, 2008 - Filed Under computers, Entertainment, Fun, gadgets, gaming, shopping -
I’ve been looking for a new online game to play during my spare time and prefer to find something that’s free. It’s not that I mind paying $15 a month for something polished like EverQuest 2 or Warcraft, but if I’m playing less than an hour a day I don’t feel I’m getting my money’s worth.
So, Crowns of Power enters the fray after 4 years in development. Sign up is free and takes only a couple of minutes. The game is also free to download, currently ringing in at around 670mb which took less than an hour on a high speed connection. Character creation is pretty basic, you get to choose from a few hair styles and distribute 10 points among the standard Strength, Stamina, Intelligence, etc. options. You also get to decide which school of magic you want to start with, I assume you get to dabble in more than one as you progress through the game.
The game itself looks a little outdated, especially considering the 4 year development cycle. I’d say it looks like the original EverQuest did when it came out, a dozen or so years ago. But keep in mind, this game is free! The biggest thing I have to point out at this point is that THEY GOT THE CONTROLS RIGHT! Certain games I’ve tried lately just don’t do it right. Run around and turn with the keyboard, hold the right mouse button for mouse look, and if you mouse look while running it becomes a strafe instead of turning. Perfect!
The game is currently rather lacking when it comes to targeting though, there’s no hotkey to press to target nearest enemy, and no toggle for attacking. Right click an enemy to attack it, or use your action bar, but personally I like being able to map the W key to attack/stop attacking.
The quest system closely follows that of World of Warcraft. You can have up to 20 at a time, quest givers have an ! above their heads, and quests can be shared with group members to save time waiting for them to go find and get the quests while you’re out in the field. Quests so far are typically trivial for a level 1 toon, ‘kill some of these’ or ‘go talk to that guy’.
The more I play it the more I see that overall the game is fairly polished. Nice tooltips pop up to let you know what an item or spell is, there’s a Kill stats page you can see at any time and you even earn achievements for doing various things in game which is similar to how the XBox 360 does things. So far I’m rather impressed with this free game. Like most free games though, you can choose to pay for premium features if you want to. Game points can be purchased at a rate of $10 for 200 points. The points can be used to buy items and character enhancements that regular players don’t have access to.
Now if you’ll excuse me, my 5 tigers are dead and I must go find the dude who wanted them dead. Which brings up the biggest downfall of this game so far, by modern standards at least, there’s no built in map!
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Hi All
If you are interested i have abrand new MMORPG started September 2010.
Slowly getting there with 140 joined so far.