Video games are an investment on two fronts: money and time. While I value a game respecting my time more than my wallet, others prefer to have as little money involved while playing a game, and that’s why free-to-play titles have become a successful niche. The latest high profile title that doesn’t cost a dime to download is My.com’s MMO Skyforge, which I’ve been able to check out in beta form over the past week. While this meant that I couldn’t do much in terms of the game’s multiplayer (shockingly, it’s hard to test when so few are playing), I did get to better understand what makes this MMO different from the rest of the genre.
The one major thing that differentiates Skyforge from most other MMOs is how the game handles combat. Most games in the genre have players attacking automatically, thus letting the player focus on deploying skills and managing cooldown meters. Here it’s different, as the combat is modeled after a character action game. Upon choosing the powerful Paladin class (the other two classes available at the beginning are the highly damaging Cryomancer and the support role of Lightbinder), I was able to chain together attacks into different combos by mashing together square and triangle. This change is a smart one, as the active combat system made sure I always participated in battles. This is a far cry from other MMOs (and even JRPGs) where I barely paid attention during most fights. My character, the m...