I will update this as I go but figured as I'm going back to see some of these MMOs either new to steam or ones I've been in before briefly. As someone who's been playing games & some interest in the structure of these games to see what works & what doesn't work, this is a bit of an experiment to see which ones might appeal to others on GiantBomb & which ones might just not be worth the time.

Wizardry Online

I'm not a big fan of Japanese RPGs as they all seem to funnel down the same narrow path of what characters might look like or some of the specific mechanical issues but figured this might be interesting with the idea of permadeath in an MMO format called Wizardry Online.

For me the permadeath happened not in the game but with how unwelcoming this MMO is. It seems to have the same format as something thrown together like Phantasy Star Online where it's hub areas will deal with selling goods, repairs, meeting up with a party then going to the dungeon. Once out of the tutorial area I'm glad this was a free game because of the following: the music in the game was about to put me to sleep, the dialogue text speed (as there's no speech on npcs) is slower than watching ice melt in a freezer underwater somewhere in a Siberian lake and the freezer has a nuclear reactor powering it.

The game is free on steam so might grab other people but for me it was an MMO without much fun presented to want to see more. Mage combat gives you a fire arrow & poison cloud to start which is okay to start until things run at you or low on mana then you just have to start stabbing with your weapon. I went with the mage as most MMOs I've seen the fighters are usually the most simple to use & went with the mage to see how it might be more complex classes go but the camping/inn to recover some of your health/mana will take this to a crawl of a pacing that other fantasy MMOs will at least have more progress to it or at least what I like in other MMOs where you are going to see other people in the same maps so if you suddenly need help you can ask or try to do things on your own. Taskbar is quite an odd one as it has a few actions in it like the fire arrow or poison cloud, attack but the the whole upper section of the taskbar is nothing but emotes which is just showing how odd this one feels to me in the design of it.

Granted there were some amusing moments, hitting f12 to take a screenshot because my steam is set to that & really don't use f12, in Wizardry Online this hides the UI & for me also takes screenshots. So it was amusing to take a screenshot & have everything vanish & not find a way back with escape or any other button. Best though is watching one of the painfully written & slow cinematic bits of the npcs explaining the wanted system (where a player stealing or doing bad things in town can be hunted by other players) but during the cinematic one npc said to another to hold down the left shift button. That was priceless but aside from being able to change classes in town giving you a little flexibility, think this is one to avoid unless you want to see some JRPG other than Final Fantasy to see what they do.

While my time in Wizardry Online was rather short to get much of a look at it, between what I saw & one of the two reviews out there on this game ( gamespot review of Wizardry Online ), where it goes into some of the later game stuff of where you might run into criminal happy players killing off other new players or just the rotten idea of paying real money to try to maybe revive your character once you've been defeated just turns me off of this.

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Fallen Earth

Unlike Wizardry Online, this I've played a bit more of Fallen Earth a while back & now that it's up on steam, dived back in over the weekend to see a little more of it. With the new pc & the game running on fairly high settings, it looks pretty good & lot better than some other MMOs with the lighting/texture quality.

Now a fallout themed world where the players are clones & you just have use all your wits to survive sounds good, and for Fallen Earth it's not bad start. While you can go into first person mode & use a scoped rifle, this helps some with the combat but what doesn't help much at all is the idea that you can crouch or go prone with firearms. Once you take one shot at someone that does damage, they most often run to you so best to leave the scoped view & keep firing. There is a melee combat ability but once you press middle mouse button or tab to go to the combat mode, it's a little more tricky to get accurate hits but it's possible.

With this being a complete wasteland, you have to go through crafting trainers to figure out how to build most of your gear which leads to a bit of a carrying nightmare. Once you get all the tool kits for almost a dozen crafting skills (replacing physical crafting stations in the world you have to visit to make things), and just about everything you find tends to be labeled with crafting material, it just adds up as you are not only dealing with a backpack with a certain number of slots but also a weight limit. Good thing that your bank has unlimited weight limits but certain slot issues. There is some variety in what all you can make from melee weapons, guns, armor, medicine, food/drink so you are left with a lot of choices to go through. The main issue for me with it is that fairly early on you do get a horse so you're not having to walk everywhere, problem is that without the available knowledge on feeding the horse, you will find the horse effectively stalls out leaving you to walk for most of the way so the horse aside from running from town to town is not all that great. There are cars & atvs later but I just didn't get to them yet but it'd seem better repairing some tech or refueling it over the horse. Overall for a free MMO, this one isn't bad once you go through the tutorial & get used to some of the controls.