Runes of Magic (now in Open Beta)

[jakonovski]

I tried this game. 18 levels in so far and I'm loving it! 

There's still life left in the old EQ/diku MMO, just as long as it's smooth and polished. Which this is, kind of like WoW but with new content. The dual class system is also totally sweet.

[Falconeer]

There's still life left in the old EQ/diku MMO, just as long as it's smooth and polished.

Groan!

[jakonovski]

Groan!

I'm genetically vulnerable to addictions.

[jakonovski]

I gotta talk a bit more about the dual class system. Basically, you get another class at level 10. The catch is that the new class starts at level one, and you can only level one class at a time. So you ding 10 and switch your primary class, and boom you're back to newbie with a pile of loot too high for your level and a log full of red quests. At this point the game offers a teleport to a new starting area, and off you go again.

It's double the grind, but also double the variety. Skills in the game are divided so that some are exclusive to the primary class, while the rest can be used as long as your level is high enough on both classes. It's fairly confusing at first, but I kind of like the feeling of depth it gives to character development.

[jakonovski]

Ultimately, all MMO's are really facile and lame.

Ultimately, we all die and it doesn't matter, so I'm gonna play anyway.

[Kitsune]

Final Fantasy XI does the dual-class system rather a bit better, in that only a very small assortment of abilities are excluded when you're using a job as a secondary, while Runes seems to lock out a class's better abilities when it's not the primary class.  In addition, Runes locks a character into their class choices, and gives no hints as to the viability of one's class build.  So if you decide it would be great to be, say, a ranger/warrior, then learn that ranged combat and close combat are sort of mutually exclusive, it's time to make a new character.

FFXI lets you swap and pick jobs at will, as long as they aren't the 'advanced' jobs, which have annoying quest prerequisites to unlock.  So if you decide one day that you're tired of being the healer and want to shoot people in the face with a pistol, you can just swap classes lickety-split.  It also has a much broader variety of jobs, but that's after three expansions and several years of development, so that's an unfair comparison.

Runes, on the other hand, is free.  'Free' being 'free as long as you never pay them for stuff like mounts or storage space or the best weapon upgrades', but it is at least theoretically possible to play for free.  It also doesn't have FFXI's craptastic console-crippled control scheme, having ripped off WoW's much better UI and controls.  I still consider FFXI to be a vastly superior game, but if you're poor or just miserly, Runes is a decent enough MMOG for the (non)price.

[DLRiley]

Guild Wars class system makes you guys look like noobs.