What's everyone's take on Ryzom?

scaramoosh · January 2006

Didn't want to be flooded with Fanboys so post it here.

I gave it a try ages ago but never got off the Newb Island, which i hated. So i didn't bother playing, i heard it's soo much better on the main land.

Now Gamespot said "The Saga of Ryzom is another unfinished massively multiplayer role-playing game to be inflicted upon gamers"

Elnator · January 2006

Great graphics, interesting skill system... Gameplay is lacking.

scaramoosh · January 2006

What type of mmorpg is it though.

Fantasy,scifi? something different?

Sandbox? direction?

What do you do??

Elnator · January 2006

Originally posted by scaramoosh
What type of mmorpg is it though.
Fantasy,scifi? something different?
Sandbox? direction?
What do you do??

Fantasy with a touch of sci-fi. Level Grinder with a skill system layered in, a lot like AO there... different but similar.

Actually Ryzom reminded me of a cross between AO and AC. My best advice is to play the free trial and see for yourself. It's kind of an odd one to try to explain. You 'level' but you don't choose a class... your skills determine what you can do. Eventually at the highest levels everyone is pretty much the same. People just choose which role they want to play in a group but everyone is capable of doing anything if they train the skills for it. And by level 150 or so you have more than enough skill points to train in everything.

TheWarc · January 2006

Defitenely a good game, but not as good as SWG was..
Worth trying tho

Signe · January 2006

I beta tested it and found it okay. I didn't last more than a month after launch, however. Nice staff, nice community, looks pretty. It has some very clever bits to it but overall I didn't find it very interesting to play.

Kibs · January 2006

Well I could be considered a fanboy, but I have been playing near two years and still love it if thats anything to go by. As for content, a lot has come in recently, and you should read up on the Ryzom Ring Expansion too. New faction PvP has recently been implimented with guild controlled outposts and a new fame system.

tempo · January 2006

last time i played this game was in beta. At that point in the game you had to change some files from the updates since it was so buggy and ever since that i never really liked the game. Oh yeah i only got to play for like 15 before the server just stopped.

tu_uilwen · January 2006

I think Ryzom Sux to becompletely honest with you. I played it for an hour and I quit.....

GRIMACHU · January 2006

OK, lets try and get you a more balanced opinion.

Ryzom launched, as most MMORPGs do, with some problems. It was, however, better than Anarchy Online's launch.

They had a bad first patch that completely rejigged everyone's abilities and made everything much harder to do. This drove off a lot of the initial intake of subscribers, unfortunately, and appears to have been the root of most of Nevrax's further ills.

Without the subscriber base they had initially anticipated, it seems that development and the addition of promised content (outposts, rite missions etc) hit a snag and very little happened in game.

The positive side of this was that it lead to a wonderfully mature and creative playerbase who filled the void by 'sandboxing' - using what was already there, roleplaying and forming a very friendly and helpful community. That along with a lot of fixes made the game eminently playable as a primarily PvE game, very suited to roleplayers and the more mature/creative niche.

The massive positives of this game were, and to some degree still are, the community and the support staff who helped create that community feeling. This, and the game's creativity and individuality formed a very positive word of mouth that was succeeding in, slowly, building up the game's numbers and maintaining its very positive development.

Now, a lot of this is speculation on my part but I think that that initial hit after the infamous 'patch 1' caused the financial trouble that the game ran into, their adjudication by the courts and the hiring of Jessica Mulligan to turn things around.

To an extent the game has turned around, the patches seem to come more swfitly and with less problems. Communication WAS better but now where we used to have a more frank and regular back and forth the forums and other lines of communication between players and developers have been battened down and, lastly, in what feels like an attempt to popularise and dumb down the game, to help with the potential financial problems, PvP has been repeatedly hammered into the game to the exclusion of any other development for some time.

This wouldn't necessarily be so bad but it fits poorly with the previously established gamelore and has carved up the game, removing things that people had free access to before and empowering what used to be the marginalised and smaller part of the playerbase to run rampant. While we have had no additional rites missions (quests) and very little else we have PvP in droves. PvP flag, PvP over outposts (resource providers) PvP zones where rare materials are found, a very long winded PvP event and still to come a PvP thing called 'spires' which acts as a sort of area denial system against the opposing faction teleportation.

For those of you who like PvP this may well be a good thing but, with the possible exception of outposts, all of these take away from the game rather than adding to it, trying to force you into choosing a faction due to the problems you'll have playing to the fullest if you don't.

It also goes against the way the community had developed and has driven off a large section of the original playerbase who kept the game going all that time.

All of that sounds very negative I'm sure, but I still play the game for several good reasons.

1. Even with the destructiveness wrought by PvP (as per usual) the game community is STILL about the most mature, helpful and friendly you'll find anywhere. Even though it is much worse than it once was.
2. It's very RP friendly.
3. The styling and world is very different to any other MMO I can think of, which is worth its weight in gold amongst so many boring fantasy clones.
4. (So far) no instancing or traditiona 'quests', which means your character deeds and the fame you accrue amongst other players actually means something.
5. There isn't really anything else out there just now

With the (hopefully soon) release of R2 we _may_ see a resurgence of the spirit and community that made the game so great for so long, harnessing the community to produce great material to expand the game.

If they can rebalance the needs of the PvE community while giving enough to the PvP community, without allowing them to ride roughshod over the others and without continuing to link the only new content to PvP participation then they have a good chance to recapturing the wonderful spirit in which the game started.

I think it is still worth playing and will only be more so when R2 comes along.

Ecksphive1 · January 2006

lol, thats the exact way i was. I tried it out and felt the GUI was poor and the control was sorta weak. i never made it off the noob island either. the main thing i hated was that WASD wasnt used for navigation, and the skill system seemed a little too quirky for my tastes. The game itself looks beautiful for an MMO tho

Azzurri15 · January 2006

I to never made it off the Newb Island. I couldn't stand the controls either.

But the community was nice. Helped a lot.

GRIMACHU · January 2006

You really can't judge if you don't go off newbie island, its something they really need to fix, it doesn't give a feel for the game or encourage people at all.

cerebrix · January 2006

having played this game for a couple months i can say i dug it. but it was seriously lacking players. id still play it if it had a decent playerbase but it doesnt. on the upside everyone seems to know each other there lol.

beautiful game tho, cool skill system, tradeskilling is kinda cool too.

mcr525 · January 2006

I had no problem with noob island and agree that the community is very small but extremely helpful. When I landed on the mainland I was invited to a guild and instantly given some amazing armour and shown around the game. At that stage I was convinced the game was for me but managed to last 2 weeks max as a paid up player.

The crafting is excellent but im just not into that kind of thing so I spent my time hunting and this is why I didnt last very long. I was just unable to find anything else to do other than wonder around the contryside hunting and killing. Couldnt find any nice quests etc and the guild I joind rapidly folded not long after I joined without even a reason. So I cancelled. I surely must be missing something if people can stay with it for 2 years. I was just today thinking of taking another look but im just not sure.

chaz583 · January 2006

It's the most beautiful looking MMO game I've ever seen - stunning! I liked the concept, but I hate to say it's still very much a clone of all that MMO's have become.

nomadian · January 2006

just wasn't my type of game, didn't like the feel, the graphics, the UI.

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