Big Name Games Going Free
Has anyone tried any of these? Are any any good?
Bismarck: I’ve played three of those.
My friend (the guy in Tainan, incidentally) is massively into Team Fortress (not sure which version). I’ve played it a few times, but I’m not really into shooters and I’m especially uncoordinated when playing them online against other people and always get massively pwned. It’s fun enough if you’re into such games though. I can see the appeal.
AoE I didn’t like nearly as much as AoE2, which is awesome. AoE is a fairly standard RTS. No surprises there, so if you like RTS games, then it will be right up your alley.
D&D Online I played quite intensely for a few months before going on holiday and I’m really weighing up whether I should go back to playing it when I go back. It’s frickin’ awesome and will seriously take your life away from you as some of the quests are quite long and involved, so you’re going to need probably close to a couple of hours per sitting minimum by the time you organise a party, everyone gets their shit together and gathers at the start of the quest and you actually run the quest. There’s a ton of stuff you can do in that game and a ton of free content (though if I went back to playing even a fraction of what I was, I would probably subscribe because the p2p stuff is even more awesome). As I said though, probably a bad move starting playing a game like that unless you want to make it a serious undertaking. You don’t play those kind of games as a casual half an hour here, half an hour there kind of thing. The trouble with those kind of games is that they’re rather open-ended and there’s always awesome new content being added (and the graphics and so on are lush), plus there’s infinite room for replayability simply because of all the different character classes (and different ways you can customise each of those).
fallen earth is now play to free. it is a post apocalyptic universe close to fallout. really good
D&D online was the precursor to all the f2p games. They came out with the standard North American subscription model as yet another WOW clone and promptly plummeted. Going f2p was a hail mary pass and it worked out fabulously for them so much so they are now getting cannibalized by other f2p MMO’s.
Lego Universe was closed down. That one was really a shame too. Though I can understand wanting to keep children away from the normal people who play MMO’s. Think a schizophrenic with tourette’s syndrome.
Fallen Earth was quite nice and I played it when it came out, but it was unpolished.
Lord of the Rings online is suppose to be fabulous with a lot of other stuff you can do.
Age of Conan has mixed reviews. I tried to download and play it, but it didn’t want to work for me.
World of Tanks finally fixed match fixing so the matches are with tanks that you can actually damage rather than the KV/IS/Tiger lovefests. I like it, but I’m still not paying anything with my ping. It’s actually fun now most of the time rather than it was before.
Team Fortress is very popular and is commonly referred to as the hat game. League of Legends is another popular f2p strategy game.
I’m looking forward to Secret World(subscription based IIRC) and Dust 514 on the PS3. I mostly play EVE, but I earn enough in a month in game to play free by keeping up with the ever increasing cost of PLEX.
Lord of the Rings Online looks to be related to D&D Online. There’s a similar graphic style, and they both use Turbine for payment.
WoT is still really problematic. On the forums there is still a massive amount of bitching about how German tanks are underpowered because the developers keep screwing around with nerfing or buffing certain tanks, lines or nations every time they release a new update. Ping is still a huge issue, of course. The other thing is that the higher tier tanks actually aren’t fun at all a lot of the time. I have a couple of tier 7s and the grind to tier 8 is excrutiating. It seems pretty much every line has some really nice, fun tanks, and then you hit an absolute clunker that literally takes weeks to grind through. Even on the Panther, when I win and get a couple of kills (pretty good considering the shocking ping and my shcoking frame rate), I still lose money each battle! It’s ridiculous. I basically have to run my lower level tanks in order to balance it out. There’s something perverse about a weaker, smaller tank being a better tank. I still have something like 400 more battles in my Panther until I can unlock the Panther II, by which time, I won’t have the credits to buy the Panther II. That’s to get to tier 8. The grinds for tier 9 and 10 tanks are horrid on pretty much every line.
All of that said, I really like WoT, even if a lot of real morons (with no idea of tactics or strategy) play it. By the way, they’re currently testing the next update, which is when they will release the first British tanks. That should be exciting.
