Ever since I first heard about Dungeon Runners I was intrigued, it’s a free to download, and free to play MMORPG that doesn’t quite take itself seriously. I was a little apprehensive at first, though, because 9 Dragons was also free to download and free to play, but was a complete train wreck.
I also had kind of forgotten all about it for a long time until I went to Best Buy one day and saw that they had a retail box of the game for sale. A box that showed one of the characters running around wielding a giant pizza cutter for a weapon. But I still didn’t get it because I was real busy at the time… probably something Internet related, I kind of forget. But I passed on it, and didn’t really give it a thought for a while until I went to a different Best Buy and saw that the game was $10, and it included six months’ worth of the premium content (which I’ll get into in a minute). And that’s when I decided to take the plunge.
Also, my free month of LOTRO ends tomorrow.
The game is kind of like a silly cross between World of Warcraft and Diablo II. Except for towns, everything is instanced, and you take your character and run around the various dungeons killing swarms of monsters. Monsters that drop phat lewt (like the Sweet Acid-Wash Boots of the Hardy Unicorn that my character currently has equipped). Probably the strangest item I’ve gotten so far is a gun that shoots fowl as ammo.
Quests are pretty standard stuff, go somewhere and deliver something to someone, go in the dungeon and kill X amount of Y, collect Z trinkets, etc. So there’s nothing too crazy there, and there’s been a little bit of a story to link them together, but nothing terribly complicated.
There are three classes to choose from, Warrior, Mage, and Ranger. But it doesn’t really matter what class you pick because as soon as you leave the n00b area (and they call it the n00b area in the game, there’s a lot of fourth-wall-breaking stuff in there) you can visit the class trainers and learn skills from whatever class you want. The class just determines what class bonuses you get.
Now, as a member (which costs a cool $5/month once the trial is up) gets you certain benefits. You can stack potions in your inventory (very handy), you can equip stuff that’s higher quality than Green (the progression goes: grey, green, blue, yellow, purple, and rainbow), no ads, extra bank space, and (probably my personal favorite) access to a Members Only Server. Most of the Free Players will be playing on the Free Server (duh), so it has the highest population (even though the highest I’ve seen the population climb was about 225), but it also has the highest population of people spamming the server with , “I TRAIN 4 YOU. REEZNIBLE R8S.” (which I only saw two people doing) But on the Members Only Server there haven’t been any in the times I’ve been on, which is super-nice. Of course, you can’t trade gold anyway, so that is probably also part of it.
Also, if you buy a boxed copy, you get access to a ‘Bling Gnome’. These things will follow you around and pick up any gold that the enemies drop so you don’t have to worry about it, and they can also pick up and Blue or lower items on the ground, eat them, and then crap out some gold, saving you a trip to town to empty out your inventory, which was always a tedious part of these kinds of games.
So far I like it. But I’ve read on a couple of forums where folks complain that they also liked it a lot at first, but that they got burned out on really quickly, so we’ll see.