General Discussion

At last week's E3, Carolyn Koh sat down with the folks from Sony Online Entertainment to talk about their upcoming children's MMORPG Free Realms.

Free Realms is SoE's entry into the children's MMORPG market. It has a whimsical, modern look that hearkens back to Anime style graphics and is a unique look created by SoE artists, and based on numerous focus tests with age appropriate children. The title reflects the design philosophy behind the game, that children will be free to play the game any way they like. Every game play style is valid and you do not need to level your character in any prescribed way.

So what is there to do in Free Realms? There is combat, mini-games, simulation, such as pets and housing - similar to Animal Crossing play, and social play which involves community participation via a website with an interface similar to Facebook's look.

Check out the article here.

You know Jon, there's this thing called sleep...

cant find this game on the list...

I did just hit my head and feel quite ill tho lol.

Sounds like a nifty little diversion even if your not a kid but where have I heard that word "focus group" before?

Hmm, SOE, I see a fail comming.........

Great, I can get my kid addicted on MMOs as he is entering kindergarten. Not exactly a goal I have for my son.

Sadly, I'm sure there will be a ton of parents who will let their kids become zombies in front of the computer at a tender age of 6.

<p>I like the look and the minigames and diversity. Might be an interesting thing besides my "mature" mmorpgs. :)</p>

Originally posted by chop3593

Hmm, SOE, I see a fail comming.........

lol....i totally agree! I sense failure coming with the $OE tag. $OE now wants to take money from parents cause they know they cant make a decent mainstream mmo.

Originally posted by chop3593

Hmm, SOE, I see a fail comming.........

Actually it sounds like it'll be their best game.  Hell, it sounds better than a lot of other new MMO's coming out.  All this time spent demanding a sandbox and the one we're getting is aimed at children.  How nice.

If they market this thing right I smell a WoW Killer.

Some honest questions:

I played a SOE game where pets were very important.  Out of the blue, all pets in the game were rendered completely inaccesible by SOE because they decided to change the game mid-stream to appeal to a different target audience.  Adults were devastated as they looked at virtual pets they raised and trained over a two year period.  They could still see them in their datapads, but could no longer call or interact with them.  Imagine if this was a bunch of little kids.  Some of them were, in fact, but the player demographic was generally older.  Since John Smedley did this to us adults, in all honesty why would we allow our kids to play one of his games with virtual pets?

I also played a SOE game that advertised an unlockable profession.  People got very excited about this, and spent a lot of time and energy achieving this unlock.  Then SOE removed most of the exiciting features for this unlockable profession, and made it available to everyone without having to do the unlock quests etc..  If John Smedley did that to us adults, why would I allow my children to play one of his games?

In this SOE game that I played, people felt that they were fed information that led them to pay additional subscription fees for advertised features.  After the money was received, these features were removed from the game.  If John Smedly did this to us adults, why would we trust that he would not manipulate our children to have them bothering us to give SOE money for the additional content and trading cards?  Even after we might pay for the additional content, how could we trust that SOE wouldn't change it out from under our kids, after receiving our cash? 

Before my experience with Mr. Smedley and SOE, I would never have thought to ask these questions.  Now that I've see how they operate though, I feel they need to be asked.