Free Realms managed to launch last night at sometime around 2:30-2:40-ish EST. (around 11:30-ish PST, so I guess it can still technically say it launched on the correct date) With it came the opening of the game’s cash shop and membership — the two primary forms of revenue. I’ve done a bit with both — the membership being the most familiar to the average western gamer since it’s just a 5 dollar a month subscription.

The cash shop has various items including equipment for the different classes and your pets. Pets also need to be purchased — the priced range between 250 points and 400 points. Points themselves are basically worth a penny each, with the minimum purchase of 5 dollars worth. (500 points) Wanting to try it out, and purchase a few things I liked, I gave it a try. You an purchase membership and points from within the game so there’s no need to quit or alt-tab. Sony made it quite easy to spend money. For my first purchases I chose a pet cat similar to the one I had in beta and an outfit for him — a complete tuxedo suit.

Baron von Whiskers

Apart from my pet I also opted for membership, so far I haven’t had a chance to try a lot of it though — just the wizard class. (I’ll have more on that later)

Maze

Now for a bit on Free Realms and what I believe its importance is to the industry and MMOs.

Kid friendly and casual friendly MMOs are few and far between these days. We need more MMOs to touch these two audiences, not only because they are large, but because they are different from the typical MMO audience. There really has only been one type of audience for MMOs so far and that has led to the steady stagnation of material and design within the genre. Reaching out to new audiences will bring new challenges to the developers and call for new designs and mechanics. This will create new types of MMO and new game play variations. We need these new ideas to influence all of MMO design to help spark further creativity and originality.

Kid friendly MMOs are especially needed I think. It is not only the kids that need to be interested and appeased by the MMO, but their parents who are paying for it as well. Creating games where parents Introducing a new generation to the genre in a way that is easy to pick up and fun for them will help them grow into the genre further — producing future hardcore MMO players.

Brawler Combat

Combat is something done in most, if not all MMOs. The lack of combat, or optional combat, is pretty rare. Free Realms has this. You do not have to fight anything, ever, if you do not wish to. This will cut down on the content a bit as there are several combat jobs, but there is still plenty of content to enjoy and explore.

Collecting...

Speaking of exploration, you can do that quite well too. Within the game’s world are numerous collection quests that will have you running all over looking for bits and pieces of stuff or locations. Also, there are numerous quests scattered throughout the world — many off the beaten path. Add in the numerous mini-games and hours can easily be burned away.

Leader Board

Lastly, the meta-game. Free Realms does have a form of it in their leader boards and the sort of social networking bit of their site. Here you can see stats about your character or others, check on friends, read messages, and link your character to other social networking sites. Add in forums and you’re set. I’m typically not someone to really care about my status in the world, but even I find the leader boards to be fun.

More on this game in the future.

The main site is still down for maintenance right now; however, it seems they will be bringing it up at some point this afternoon or evening. I hope.

If you did not get a chance to try it out during the closed beta, I suggest giving it a shot. The game is free to play — with the exception of the members content — and downloads while you create your character. I’ll see about juggling my time a bit to get some more Free Realms posts in with the Lord of the Rings Online, City of Heroes, and maybe even some pen and paper posts.

Oh, and changed the theme; I liked the style of the last, but I believe this theme will be more functional. The RSS feed is nice too. (I don’t believe the last one had it… of course having to scroll to the bottom for everything was not too nice)

Since the NDA has been lifted I’ll touch a bit on my experiences in Free Realms. In case you haven’t heard, Free Realms is the next MMO coming from SOE. It’s kid and casual friendly, free to play and will have optional membership that opens up more content.

Free Realms is not like a traditional MMO in the ‘grind levels and gear till your eyes bleed’ sense. There are levels, there is gear, but obtaining them has not been hard for me — this is kid and casual friendly, after all.

Job Window

The ‘classes’ are called jobs and open to anyone, even after character creation. There are 15 jobs in total, 5 of which are members only. For jobs that you can obtain but are missing, hovering over them reveals a clue about where you can get them. Levels-wise, it seems each job has 20 levels. I can’t confirm this as I’ve only maxed out the pet trainer, but it seems to be the case. The pet trainer job only took me an evening to max so don’t worry about any real grind.

My Pet Cat -- Jester

As far as pets go — they’re my favorite part of the game so far. Pets in Free Realms have their own status bars — representing (from top to bottom): happiness, hunger, cleanliness, and play. Happiness is dependent on the three other states. Hunger can be taken care of with a bowl and food. Cleaning your pet is done with shampoo, a brush and optional conditioner — when used you ‘scrub’ your pet with your cursor. And you play with your pet by having them do tricks, or petting them. Happy pets can provide a special boost when they’re out and near your character — giving you a run speed increase. Other features are clothing — my cat here has a sweater and spiked collar on. There’s a wide variety of clothing for pets.

Tower Defense Mini-game

Mini-games are a major part of Free Realms. Nearly every job involves some form of mini-game, but there are some mini-games that exist just for fun. I’ve encountered chess, checkers and a few tower defense games. The different tower defense games have their own settings, maps, enemies and towers — so they don’t quite all play the same, though they do share many similarities.

Combat

Combat in Free Realms is optional, you don’t really have to do any if you don’t want. The actual combat mechanics are pretty simple. You have a couple attacks, they have cool downs — you target mobs and use them till they get knocked out.

Travel

Travel in Free Realms is easy. There are stones throughout the world that you can teleport to just by clicking teleport on the map — anywhere in the world. You register these locations by running to them once.

Free Realms TCG

Free Realms has its own in-game (and out of game) trading card game. If you’ve played the Everquest TCG then you should be somewhat familiar with the interface. From anywhere in the world you can access the game. Once inside you can choose to build a deck, check out your collection, open boosters, trade cards with other players, play against the computer/tutorial (like shown), or play against other players. The TCG is pretty fun, it adds a nice bit of depth and more content to the game. How it plays out: each player has to reach 12 points. Points are scored by your monsters ‘hunting’ (when a monster has no opposition, and you tap it, it ‘hunts’ scoring you a point) or defeating other monsters. When you hunt the top card of your deck goes under the monster that hunted. (more on that in a second) Looking at the cards, you see a red and green number next to the artwork — the red is the offense, the green defense. In combat the highest score wins. In a round of combat the monsters are selected — even if a monster has been tapped it can still defend itself — the base offense/defense numbers are applied. Tricks (basically spell cards) can be played after initiating combat. Then top card below the monsters is flipped over — the gems you see at the bottom of the card (the ones above have single green gems) apply to the monsters (so, one gem would add one to offense or defense, two would add two…) and some creatures have special effects/abilities that are triggered when certain gems are flipped. The second card (on the bottom) gains +3 attack if the card flipped during combat has a blue gem. So, even if your monster looks like it’s going to lose a combat on base skills, tricks and luck make all the difference. This is kind of bad to me, since skill takes a bit of a backseat it seems. But, the game is still fun. And the random element works both ways — in what would seem an impossible fight for you can soon be a victory with a single draw and well played trick.

There are tons and tons of quests throughout the world. Pretty much all of em are available to you — there are quests just for members though. Doing quests is simple, usually involving some mini-games or collection/delivery. These are quests that you can complete in, at most, an hour. Usually half an hour or less. So, even if you have only fifteen minutes to burn on playing — you can still accomplish something. Or, for parents, if you want to let your children play for a bit before they do homework/sleep — they can get something done too.

Another feature in Free Realms that I’ve tried messing around with is the in-game video capture. It seems like they have it (or will have it) be able to upload video to YouTube. The feature is easy to use, there’s a few options for resolution (low, medium, high) and file names. Just hit the record button and you’re good. The files seem fairly big, a high quality video of roughly a minute and a half to two minutes was nearly one and a half gigs, so I dunno how well it’ll work. I would add in a minute clip of pets, done on medium, but that was still roughly 500 megs and I don’t feel like uploading that… Low resolution seemed like it would fit YouTube the best, but was also hard to really see anything.

As an overall: Free Realms is fun. Kid friendly. Casual friendly. It’s not hardcore. There’s plenty of content to go through and enjoy, especially as a family. If you are a parent looking for a first MMO for your kids, this might be a good one. If you’re a parent concerned about chat/names in-game, Free Realms also has you covered with filters — if you’ve played Wizard101 they basically use the same one. If you don’t like combat, Free Realms does offer many non-combat related activities. You won’t have to worry about running around the world and stumbling upon monsters and getting killed either — all combat is instanced, no kill stealing, no AFK deaths in the wilds, no critters chasing after you as you run by.

Free Realms is not completely free. If you want access to all the content in the game you will need to get the membership — which will run around 5 bucks a month. (they have to make money some way) It also seems there is a item shop of sorts and I’m betting the in-game trading card game will have purchasable boosters and decks. Now, before you get in a huff, there is TONS of content for free. Most of the classes (10 out of 15) are free, most of the quests are free, most of the mini-games are free — you can get a lot out of the game for free. So don’t let money become an excuse not to give this game a try, since you don’t have to spend a penny on it.