I’m pretty thrilled that Ryzom is on Steam. Mainly because I love that it’s all interconnected with all my Steam stuff anyhow, and my friends and such.
Ryzom is a really amazing game that has been around for some time with an established (yet evolving) storyline, awesome crafting system and is unique in that it is without classes. You can specialize in anything you want, or everything if you want.
The animals are so neat, the way the herds move and the seasons change. I love Ryzom’s world. I often find myself in Lord of the Rings Online, wandering about, enjoying scenery etc, and LotRO is a beautiful game with great community, for sure – but Ryzom is my #1.
Night has fallen in Fairhaven, in the Lake Lands
One reason I prefer Ryzom to Lord of the Rings Online, is because although in both there are things to do other than grinding (like sitting and watching the lightening flash or clouds lazily roll by) , Ryzom’s story is always in progress. This isn’t something that is already dictated and confined within a told story, it is a story in the making.
Also, the creatures. I’ve never felt bad about killing creatures before in a game. When the little yubo comes up to you that first time, sniffs you and then looks frightened and backs off, only to come a little bit closer, or when you find yourself in a herd of Bodoc that investigate you and then interact with each other, it feels like you are really inside of a living world. Some creatures don’t bother you unless you bother them, other’s like Javings will swarm you (and the javing will in fact actually disarm you as well) and some sorts of creatures are even backed up by other creatures that will come to assist them in destroying you.
I was in Fairhaven the other day, the place Tryker species (as I am ) are based in once finding their way there from Silan, and I was wandering Lakeisle. There was a herd (is that what it would be called?) of Yubos that were spooked it would seem by some Cloppers that suddenly moved down from the hill they were on to the beach area and the yubos ran like crazy, kicking up water as they crossed via shallow water to a safer area. It was a lot of noise and some would pause to look behind them, appearing quite terrified. Quite impressive.
There are no annoying ‘buy in store’ options that come up or constant reminders to visit the shop – and the game is free to play up til levels of 125 – free also does not allow you housing or increased storage, but is how I’ve been playing so far as I do not level up quickly, hah! Another thing you won’t find, is a lot of easy hand holding by the game. When you enter the beginning area of Silan, be sure to follow the advice of each npc you run into, complete all quests within each category of Fighting, Magic, Crafting and Harvesting and really read what the NPC is saying because you might find yourself scrambling to the WIKI with that info to try to find whatever the heck it is you’re asked to find.
Once I was finally done in Silan (I leveled to just over 20 in each skill first) and entered Fairhaven to join my people, I had a good understanding of how to do each thing – and this is one of the joys of Ryzom – being able to work on all skills without being a certain class. I started at the Fairhaven City Welcomer for missions (when i played this about a year ago I bypassed her and got rather confused by missions that didnt seem connected – see the city welcomer first for sure!) and at one point along the way I was told to get some Clopper excretions of minimum quality 46. I missed the suggested location as I scrolled past and that resulted in me swimming all over Jena’s creation looking for the correct Cloppers. I ended up finding the correct sorts and general location of the Cloppers by Wiki and other online resources. Because it isn’t as popular a game as LOTRO or GuildWars2 , it’s not like you can just enter a mission into google search and find a step-by-step. This feels much more real… figure it out or die trying.
I’m in a Guild in Ryzom, but at the moment feel like too much of a noob to properly participate so I’m still working on upping some of my skills in defensive Fighting and Magic – my offensive isn’t so bad.
There are lots of little things that one learns – how to create your own attacks by editing your skills (this is something explained by one of the NPC ‘s in Silan, as part of your step by step learning, it is definitely good to get a grasp of this) how to use the various keys to check various things, how to get from place to place when the ‘place’ is bloody far away.
Now that the game is on Steam we seem to have quite a few more players, and that’s pretty exciting, but for some people they notice some lag. I’ve not had a big problem with that myself. Also, when I installed from Steam there were some weird things with the graphics – all hair styles and armour were black. I read through the forums on Steam and saw that this was an issue for some people, so before playing the game chose ‘load configuration’ from the Steam menu, click on display and change it from Auto to Direct3D and that fixes it if it is a problem for you.
Some people find the UI horrible – the UI hasnt changed since the early days, but it’s the only UI I’ve ever used for it and played on that before WoW or any of the others so to me it seems fine, but others may have different opinions.
Anyhow, that’s my non professional review of Ryzom. Looking for a new game? Give it a shot!