Free Realms – Up and Running

Posted by Stropp on April 30, 2009

Free Realms ended up launching on the day it said it would, but got there by the skin of its teeth. I followed the Twitter FR conversation during the day to keep an eye on how things were going (in between builds of course.) Fortunately that didn’t effect me too much, the game was well and truely underway by the time I’d got home and had dinner.

I did have a couple of problems getting Free Realms working. I loaded up the web page and signed into my Station Access account, and then downloaded the client installer. I was then unable to access the character creation page, I kept being returned to the download page until I realized that I should be running on Firefox rather than Google’s Chrome browser.

After this little hurdle, and frankly since the uptake of Chrome hasn’t been that high yet, it won’t affect most folks, I created my character, gave him the temporary name of Seth Flamingwig and selected Stropp as my desired permanent name. I was then able to log into the game.

BTW, this won’t be much of a report, so far I’ve only spent a couple of hours in the game, and haven’t really done much yet. Having said that, my memory of last nights session is one of a lot of activity.

There are a lot of quests, or perhaps I should say missions, very early on. So far I’ve been asked to do some delivery quests, participate in a race and a demolition derby, scare and then beat up on some Robgoblins, enter a dungeon with a bunch of crazy lobster people, and cook a dish while the meat doesn’t keep still.

In that couple of hours, my professions, all except brawler which I took to level 2, stayed at level 1. I’m primarily a bartle explorer don’t forget, so I spent a lot of time just checking stuff out.

There have been a couple of reports from various bloggers that Free Realms feels a little grindy, and I’d concur with that description at this point (as early as it is), but there are some things that are really fun. I thoroughly enjoyed the kart race and demolition derby. (Even if it occurred to me that I being 43 yo was trying to demolish karts that likely belonged to pre-teen players… I must be a big meanie.) Those mini-games had a good sense of pacing and were over far to soon.

The only other issue of the session: After I logged off, I was unable to access the Free Realms website. The site just timed out and repeated attempts at various times before I went to bed ended in a error screen. My guess is that the site was suffering the Free Realms equivalent of the Slashdot/Digg effect.

Other than that, I didn’t experience any appreciable lag, and no bugs (that I could tell) or crashes. The game ran smoothly all the time I was playing it. That’s a nice thing to see on a launch day.

It’s probably still way too early to give a yay or a nay about Free Realms, but so far it looks like SOE has done pretty well here. I doubt that it will become my game of choice, or even a second MMORPG, but I think it has a place in the stable of game worlds that I visit.

The fact that it’s essentially free in these budgetarilly constrained times helps too.

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