With all its faults, Ryzom is incredibly intriguing. I have usually only found the time to play late at night, only planning to play for 15 minutes or so and not realising that more than an hour has passed.

With that being said, I am so far enjoying the game tremendously. The inventory interface is quite bad, there should be more ways to sort wares when shopping at a vendor, things could be made faster and more efficient. But perhaps the new owners of the game should consider updating the UI for easier use. Of course Ryzom has been out for a few years, so that was more or less the standard at the time. My newly crafted pants looks good and I know how I made them, but I have no clue if the stats are any good and what I can do to make them better.Īlso, the UI doesn't help - even though it is quite basic, it is not nearly as smooth as later MMOs. They get you started, but fail to actually explain what the hell you are doing. It's not that complicated to get started, but the tutorials (if you can even call them that) are quite cumbersome and not very intuitive. I can craft basic stuff right now, but to be honest I have no idea what I am doing or if the gear I make is better or worse than the stuff I am currently wearing.Īnd here's the problem that faced me as a new player in Ryzom. There is also a lot of different materials you can use to put your newly crafted gear together, even the smallest animals drop material that can be used even though the quality of those materials won't make a very good boot or sword. You can put together your own crafting abilities, that add certain bonuses to the things you then make (personally I can only make pants, boots and gloves with a small HP-bonus).

With a quite limited amount of stanzas available to me at this time I haven't been able to play around very much with this system, but it seems like a lot of fun. I've only started to get into this system, putting together an Accurate Attack that does increased damage at the cost of some HP and an icebolt that does more damage but has a lower range and costs more MP (known as Sap in Ryzom) compared to an ordinary one. But these new skills are made out of smaller parts called 'stanzas', which you in turn can mix and match to create your own abilities. For every level you gain you get 10 skill points which you can then spend at the trainer, buying new recipies to craft or attacks to use against your enemies. Finish a fight using only magic you recieve magical XP, mix it up with a bit of fighting and you get XP in both, for example. Leveling is spread out in four different fields - fighting, magic, harvesting and crafting - and you simply level them by using them. It's when you start crafting, harvesting and putting together your own abilities the game really starts to stand out. And to be honest, when doing the fighting- or magic-quests it kind of is. At first glance it is very similar to other MMOs and when you recieve your first quest to go kill 10 suckling yubos outside the Ranger Camp where the game starts it's easy to be decieved into believing that this is your standard diku-MMO. Ryzom is, in short, a very different game. So I am in no way an expert or an authority when it comes to Ryzom and I might very well have misunderstood a large part of the game's system. I haven't had the time to sit down and spend a whole day with it, like I would to do. So what I think of the game right now might change when I finally get to leave.Īlso, I haven't spent that much time with the game yet - about 5 hours or so in total. Silan is meant as a place to learn the ropes, and I've been told many times that the Mainland is very different experience to the island. I have not seen the Mainland yet, which - as far as I've understood it - the real Ryzom starts. I just thought I'd quickly sum up my first impressions of Ryzom (the artist formerly known as Saga of Ryzom), but first of all I must point out that I have not yet left the newbie area, known as the island of Silan.

Ryzom magic