Rooting for the Little Guy

When I look at the anticipated MMOs coming up this year, while I will likely try a few of them out, to be honest I'm not overly excited about any of them. Or maybe my two-year anticipation of Vanguard has left me a bit jaded and wary. I had been hunting down some smaller names that rarely get mention to see what the little guys are up to. As often happens, many of these projects have been shut down and likely a good percentage of those remaining will also face a similar demise. But I would love to see one of these make it through and succeed. Here's one in particular I've been looking at:

Alganon - This one has been on my radar already for awhile. The gaming company behind this one was founded in 2006 by David Allen, the original designer of Horizons. While ultimately Horizons had many failings, I really liked some of the concepts behind it and think it could have been a great game with a few tweaks. Their four main areas of focus are community, immersion, interaction, and reward. This leads me to believe they are putting effort into the social aspects of the game, which is right up my alley. Solo and group play will be supported.

There are two organizations in this world, the Asheroth and Kujix, or basically your good and evil. Each organization has four races and five classes, with the healer class being the only that is the same among the two sides. So there are nine classes total. There will be PvE and PvP servers, with player-consented PvP on the PvE servers.

When you start a character, you are born into a unique family made up of many other players of the same race who are your siblings. The moment you log in your new character, your siblings will be informed. Just as in real life, you cannot choose your family members nor leave it, and there will be a cap at the number of members in each family. Families can work together to elevate their standing. This is also separate from guilds. So essentially you can belong to two community units.

Some other non-standard features include no level cap and your appearance can change as you gain power. Pure tradeskillers can rejoice, as they can do so without ever entering a battle. And supposedly they are addressing tradeskill issues found in other games such as costs to build up skills, difficulty earning profit, and difficulty finding resources. Also, something interesting they are incorporating is a system they claim to be more friendly to casual gamers. There are skills that can only be gained over time, so that a casual gamer who has been playing a year for 10 hours a week will have access to skills no power gamer can achieve without a year of play.

On paper, I see a lot of nice concepts and really hope they can pull it off. The only negative from my domestic viewpoint is lack of housing which they state doesn't fit in with their game. But if the gameplay is interesting enough, I likely wouldn't miss the housing all that much.

I wish these guys a lot of luck and success and look forward to playing this one.