E308: An overview of Free Realms

At E3 we had a chance to sit down with Laralyn McWilliams, Lead Designer for SOE's upcoming Free Realms game, who gave us a demo of the game and talked about how it's changed since we saw it earlier this year at CES. For those of you who don't know what we're talking about (and since SOE doesn't yet have a web page for Free Realms, the game isn't exactly shouting itself from the rooftops), it's SOE's answer to the success of casual, free-to-play games targeted at kids, like Club Penguin, RuneScape, Webkinz. The result of their efforts? A game that provides players with endless possibilities: allowing them to level up without ever killing a monster (if that's what they want to do!), allows them to switch classes at any time with the click of a button, and provides players with an unprescidented amount of web integration, including mini-games that can be played in the game world or on the web.

Of the MMOs we've seen at E3 this year, Free Realms is the closest to launch, with a beta scheduled for September and a launch scheduled for early 2009. (For those of you wanting in on the beta, attending Fan Faire this year will be a sure way to get in to closed beta.) Curious yet? Let's take a look at the world of Free Realms.

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Character creation mostly involves customizing your character's look. Right now you have two choices: human or pixie (the latter seen above) in both male and female versions. These will be the only options available at launch, but SOE already has designs for three more character types to add in the future: elves, dwarves, and beasts.

For each character type, players will be able to choose from three different head shapes, a variety of skin tones, and a variety of hair styles. The look of the characters has changed significantly since CES, when the game's characters had a more cartoony look. Says McWilliams, "This is the look now. We're intentionally making it more open and friendly and modern and a little less stylized." Instead of forcing players into a single stylized look, there are more options. Again, McWilliams explains, "If you want to be a pointy-hatted Merlin-looking wizard you can be, but if you don't think that's cool, you can be a Harry Potter wizard."

Once you have a Free Realms character, you also get a profile page for your character that's something like Facebook. It will list all of your in-game friends and have a newsfeed about what's going on with your character. For any friends listed, you could click on their link to launch your game client right at their location.

When you launch the game, you start at a welcome screen which gives you information about what's new in the game that you could be doing right now. It includes a bit of the Facebook kind of information from your profile page with your friends mini-feed, but it also has quests that you're working on, new mini-games that you can click on and go directly to, and information about how your pet is doing. When asked how much direction Free Realms would give its players, McWilliams told us, "We don't want you to have to go find your fun. It's not fun to wander around and not know what to do." The welcome screen will provide players with immediate options of fun things to do, with links to take the player directly there -- with no travel time or stumbling around, not knowing where to go next.

You may have noticed in the spiel about character creation above, we didn't mention class selection. That's because you have all classes all the time. (At least once you've unlocked them through gameplay -- a concept we didn't hear much about.) Once you're in game, the heart of the UI is the character clothing option, which shows all the classes available to you. You can go from class to class by changing your outfit -- and there will be hundreds of different articles of clothing to chose from in the game at launch. Above, we see a character switching from one class to another with a quick spin and costume change.

Because of this unusual system that allows you to change classes at any time and level up each class independently, none of the gameplay elements in Free Realms is required. You can level up your character without ever touching combat. You can level up purely by exploring the world without ever being attacked by a monster - a first in an MMO.

As you increase in level, you gain access to more advanced clothing -- a visual reward for having leveled up. Above, you see the outfit you get as a level five ninja, looking much more impressive than the outfit worn by the level one ninja in the previous screenshot. One of SOE's focuses on Free Realms is giving you ways to socially kind of show off your accomplishments, turning your character into a walking leaderboard.

Of course, there's much more to the game than ninjas and the combat mini-game. Players will be able to have their own pets, houses (though housing on launch will likely just be a room, they plan to expand to full housing with yards later), and plenty of mini-games, from simple Bejeweled-like puzzle games to in-game demolition derbies. We have more Free Realms info from E3 coming your way -- keep checking back throughout the day for additional details!

	Interested in Free Realms? Then check out all of our E3 coverage of SOE's latest free-to-play online game!