I went into Saga of Ryzom with a very positive attitude. I have played practically every mmorpg under the sun so far. In fact i think the only ones I havent played since UO were NeoCron (saw plenty on beta to avoid it) and Lineage 2 (read about 50 bad opinions to every 1 good opinion prior to its full release). I had been playing City of Heroes but finally got burnt out on the endless repition of the game and was ready to go back to the roots of mmorpg game playing with real loot, items, quests and perhaps even some crafting. Ryzom seemed to have this all in spades form the previews and things I read about it. The graphics looked good enough from screen shots and I decided to give it a go after thinking about it for 3 or 4 days. I will say at first the game gave me a pretty good impression. The graphics are pretty nice although I hated the interface of countless windows. The creatures in the game seemed to be somewhat creative and had nice ai that causes them to migrate to different areas and the more predatory animals actually attack the more docile ones. Nice touch. The skill based system seemed pretty nice at first but after you play a while it proves to be a bit to....limited in truth. The game has a nice harvesting sytem where you can actually go out and find spots to harvest amterials that you can then in turn use to craft items like weapons, armor and even jewlery. It's a bit tedious and buggy in some regards but it actually works pretty good overall. Too bad the crafting is not as good. Crafting is once again just a mindless sleep inducing system of clicking a thousand times to use ingredients on a chance system of them combining and making something. The actual crafting interface is nicely done and tells oyu what sort of items you need to make a certain object. But its still just a bit too click and repeat dependent for me to enjoy it much. The infamous "Stanza" system that seemed like such a cool feature when I first started playign acutally became too complicated and limiting once i really got into the game and figured it out. Combat is done ok but still is not anythign you havent seen before. Yeah it may seem cool to make your own attacks but in truth its not as freeform and the makers would lead you to believe. The game has some good points and for it coming from such a small developer it is in many ways quite remarkable. However....I think this game is yet one more that proves that perhaps small developers should not be creating games in this genre. MMORPG's are a complicated beast. The huge companies with endless resources cant get it even 80% right and the small companies that make games like Neocron, Horizons and Ryzom only get it about 50% right. Anyway....the game has some nice features like creature ai and some nice spell effects and an interesting harvesting setup. But there are just too many things that dont work right or that dont exisit (like vendors to sell player goods ala FFXI and they still dont even have music or promised mounts in the game yet) to really justify playing. Right now I still feel the best mmorpgs on the market are Anarchy Online and FFXI. Both of those I have grown tired of and quit while waiting for something new. I recommend you do the same.
I first looked at this game during the final beta before launch and it was sorely lacking. No tutorial, no help from the community. Didn't look that pretty. It was easy to get lost with no npc direction and it made yo... Read Full Review
A lot has changed in Ryzom in the last six months, heck a lot has changed in Ryzom since its launch in 2004, unfortunately not much else has changed in MMORPG's in the last 5 years. Why is it a good time to take another ... Read Full Review
