The Rebel FM folks talked about a lot of free MMOs and how they're pulling in impressive numbers of users, etc. I decided it was time to take a look for myself.
I started with Fusion Fall, a kid friendly action MMO developed for Cartoon Network by Grigon Entertainment, a Korean MMO developer. Considering it runs in a browser and is for kids, it looks surprisingly good.
I'd say that's more impressive than Toontown Online, my only other point of reference in kid friendly MMOs. And who knows, maybe Toontown got some upgrades in the years since I played it last. Oh, and I also turned up the graphical settings to the max. Having the draw distance up really helps.
Flying Monkeys > Griffons
My gameplay assessment is less cheery, but bear in mind that I have not enjoyed any MMO I have played. They are designed to be slow and grindy to wring out more money.
That said, Fusion Fall isn't terrible. It's easy. You can die, but you have to be pretty incompetent / suicidally aggressive to do so. And the death penalty isn't that bad. You just teleport to the nearest spawn spot.
There's a little variety. It's mostly fetch quests and kill quests, but there are also obstacle courses to run.
The one thing that might make the game tactically interesting are little companions (called Nanos) that can be used to assist you in combat. If you're fighting a monster that can stun, you probably want to have a stun resist Nano equipped. And the nanos and monsters are color coded where every color has another color that beats it. For my part, I only really ever used the speed Nano to reduce travel time. If the Nanos ever make the gameplay rewarding, they might have wanted to show it off in the demo.
That was one thing I really appreciated about ToonTown. It provided actual choices. You needed lures to use traps. Sound attacks would break lures. You had to choose which gags to pick and level up. Coordinating attacks with the same gag boosted the total damage. Of course that's probably what made it too hard for most children in the later levels. But if you didn't want to fight your way up dozens of buildings to farm pieces for your cog suit to infiltrate Sellbot HQ, you could just play trolley games or go fishing or wail on random cogs walking the street.
Maybe that makes Fusion Fall better for the demographic they're shooting for. Personally, I'm still trying to figure out why John Davison (who enjoys many of the same types of games I do) called the game amazing. Maybe the amazing part comes much later.
Here's a list of the other MMOs discussed. I'll be downloading and trying them out over the next few days.
Perfect World
Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine
Wizard 101
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