Thursday 2 October 2003

Pic of the day: Promotional picture from the Rubies of Eventide web site.

Even(tide) better?

As I was routinely deleting my spam, I was this || far from deleting the mail from IGN RPG partners telling me about Rubies of Eventide. I am glad I did not, because now I have something to write about that is not about work or sickness or the girl whose undies showed. Well, about half ... Anyway, to the point! Rubies, eventide, I have no idea why they call it that. Until I know, I should probably not buy the game. But since when has that stopped any of us?

Rubies of Eventide is a MMORPG, a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, kinda like Dark Age of Camelot, EverQuest, Asheron's Call, Ultima Online or even Anarchy Online, only different. Of course, they are all different. DAoC is militaristic, with no civilian player skills and with 3 realms locked in eternal conflict with no way of communication. EverQuest is famous for its items and the relentless camping for monsters that drop them. Ultima Online is famous for its skill based character system and its rampant player killing (which, I have heard, has been toned down). Anarchy Online is futuristic with cyborgs instead of elves. Asheron's Call is not famous, to the best of my knowledge, but rumor has it that it's a friendly place.

Rubies is also medieval with elves and dwarves etc. Its distinctive feature is that it started out as a MUD ... those rather free-form text based role playing games you could play from a teletype terminal back before the Internet. OK, it may not be quite that old, but it has been around as a MUD and picked up the flavor (and the players) of the MUD age. Then it converted into a graphical user interface, but kept many of the old features. It has a combat system where each fight is automatically split off from the main world until it is resolved, so no one can help you or backstab you while you are fighting (except members of your group) and no one can grab your loot. (Actually no one can grab your loot in DAoC either, as it is flagged as belonging to you. But they can still grab your enemy before the fight is ended. Not so here.) It is supposed to be unique, but sounds every bit like the combat system in Sierra Online's "Realm", which I played for a while and burned a colossal lot of money on one summer. I hope its music is as good too.

The graphics seem unimpressive from the screenshots I have seen, but on the bright side you can customize your character. I will give more details if I try it, but there is said to be ca 100 hair colors.

Rubies has 7 races for players to choose from. This may look paltry compared to 15 in DAoC, but then again DAoC has different races for different realms so there is a lot of overlap. I understand that feminists appreciate the ability to play a fat female ogre. Then again, I understand that feminists prefer frog legs over princes. Anyway, evidently body types here are more realistic than usual (in so far as dwarves and orcs etc are realistic in the first place).

There are over 100 classes (or professions as they are called here), and not nearly all of them are combat related. In fact, there are lots that are focused on something else entirely, like "philosopher" or "peasant". Yes, you can play a peasant and specialize in harvesting and making common stuff. Not sure why you would, though.

Player vs player fighting is duel based and voluntary. That's kinda nice if you are a peasant, I guess. They should implement this in real life too, the sooner the better.

The game is slightly more pricey per month than the competition, even though it is (so far) smaller. On the other hand, you can download the game for free rather than buying an expensive box, so it will take some months before you have paid more. You can also get hefty discounts by signing up for a longer term, and you get a refund if you back out. Not just for the first 10 days which are free. If you sign up for a year and then decide to go elsewhere after three weeks, you get back the 11 months that you haven't opened yet. This makes year subscription much more appealing, I admit.

The website is organized really strangely, relying largely on the "tree of knowledge" which is actually a web of questions with answers. Questions are grouped together by similarity of interest, so you can hyperjump through the questions without knowing for sure whether you have read it all. Probably not, there is a lot in there.

In other news, gnome girls are cute. OK, that was related news. In really other news, the name of the game makes me think of the hymn "Abide with me, fast falls the eventide" which is popular in funerals. Even so, I may try the game. If so, you should hear more about it.

Oh yes. Their homepage.