Don't be deluded that you can put a little money in the cash shop to be competitive, you either avoid the cash shop or use it profusely, there is pretty much no in between.  If you do use the cash shop, expect to spend far more than a regular subscription would cost.

As far as Free2Play goes, Forsaken World is one of the better ones, and that's not saying much. I think that a buyable currency for F2P is one of the worst ideas you can have, considering that, if your playing an F2P game, you must not have much money to throw around anyways. Once you get the "Im better than you" rich people in there, you begin to have minorities, and it takes all of the fun from the game. Basically, the PWI team screwed up bad when the implemented their cash shop. Otherwise, I like the game itself and the way dungeon raids are set up. 

I should like to say, I really enjoy the "does right" and week or so later "does wrong" Objective journalism for the win.

Thanks mate. This beats out the syndicate style articles by handfulls.

Haven't played this game but based on my experience with other F2P MMOs I have to disagree with point #5 in the review on general principle. They have to make their money somewhere, and gear upgrades at level cap is one of the least intrusive ways to do so. Sure, they can make some off fluff, but let's be honest; there's only so much to be made there, and it's probably not enough to fund the continued operation of game servers as well as continued game development.

For a truly awful money-grab system in a "F2P" game check out the energy system in Spiral Knights. What it boils down to is you basically get about an hour of free gameplay per 24 hours, and you can't save up more than a day's worth of energy either. Not surprisingly, the game only has a few hundred active players.

knowing pwe and their cash shops, the economy is  gonna fail like what happened in ether saga onine. yea, right now u can buy leaves with gold for cheap but its gonna get higher and higher. in eso, when it first came out in open beta  it was less than 5 gold, but a few months ago it went up to 80g+ . if pwe didnt make the cash shops so overpowering this stuff wouldnt happen. A and D to to rotate ur character mite be added in the future, its still in open beta so yea.... anyways, this is the 2nd best f2p ive evr played, cash shop is the only thing that ruins it. pwe should make their games more balanced. only reason i quit eso as a lvl 90 priest is cuz all the high lvls p2w and pvp is hell with their one hit ko's. if getting pk'd all the time outside of safe zones will make u ragequit, just play on the pve servers . all f2p games have their problems, but as it goes, this game has the better ones considering its only in open beta ¬_¬

I'm also a FW player at level 55 (of 60 s mentioned) and also got to agree with some of the other people here, that the article is pretty much bs.

As a person, who has player MMO's for a decade (F2P only), and never ever have spent a dime on a game (just my personal thing), I don't have any issues earning my money and getting my cash shop items. Of course, I can't easily afford getting myself a fully upgraded gear yet, but since there are just so many ways to earn money and gear (and gear upgrades), I don't see any issues for any non wallet warrior to QQ about the unfairness.

Obviously I don't like cash shop, but well you need to pay wages somehow, and a CS with only fashion items wouldn't earn you much. And for example, embeddable gems (that give extra stats, that you put on  gear) are now more affordable, when they were added to cash shop (earlier you had to do instances/quest and so only and they were alot more expensive).

The "world chat" items, are completly affordable aswell, somewhere around 2-4 gold for a stack of 100 (You can earn about 5-15g an hour by farming for example easily).

The game only has 2 negative parts for me, which I don't like that much.

1) Way too many daily quests & instances to do (since instances have a daily allowed number you can do). So that your own main/sub quests are way behind.

And since there's so many rewarding stuff to do, levelling is way too fast, and kind of makes endgame boring (no levelling, just more farming).

2) The dual monetary system (1 for "real" trading, 1 for npcs.).

Kind of makes things too complicated. I understand it was made to stop the income of illegal money from gold spammers and whatnot, but for the regular person it's a big turnoff (atleast from my POV).

In the end, I'd give this game around 7.5/10, and would recommend people trying it first, before taking this article too seriously (which on it's own was well done, but just not with enough gameplay done).

Hmm I think, that in my 15 years of using the internet and forum lurking, this has been my longest post ever... by far.

Regards,

PlatinumC.

i played  for 2 weeks and decied i had enough.te stupid carnival,if i want to play button games i be on my  ps3. the perfume quest  is stupid spent days trying to find people to do it. the qust lists is unreal, put what town the are in at least.i have yet to actually find anyne typing their name,have to search the whole list.

the life quest is a joke,you can get to 20 or so and never leave town.no clue why yu can do the daily pet quests 3 times or want to do it 3 times.i noticed like in pw theyhad the mana and health pots you had to buy as the one in game didnt work worth crap,main reason i quit pw,was the constant buying of charms.

and for hte guy who says pay to chat is okay,idiots will pay to chat too,my last day i watched as 5 ppl ranted and raved over someone calling someone else a loser.

Well you said you saw 5 people rant there. If it was free to chat, it would have been 50.

And although I have to agree, that Life in the harbor at the beginning is a bit OP, but after the 1st time in beginning it's not.

What FW does wrong: Fucking brown text on fucking sandy backgrounds!

Wow these reasons are so crappy..did you even play the game?

First of all the best reason not to play is the lack of variety for leveling. You do the same events every single day, at the same time. It's cool for the first couple days of playing, but after that it feels worse than grinding. The events that used to give you two levels at level 20 now give you 50% at level 35, and exponentially less as you continue to level.

You have to pay to use world chat..who cares? You can easily make money in game and buy them. I ask again, did you even play this game?

You have to buy your resets..wow who cares. It's a free to play game first off, and you obtain two respecs in game at level 20 and 60 i believe. Talents are easy to set, you shouldn't make mistakes.

Routing was a reason not to play FW? ROFL...Routing is in almost every mmo now a days. The game would be impossible to play without it.

Information overload..it's easily to learn the game with a guild. I only had around 3 questions my entire time playing. You can usually look them up. 

It's a free to play game..pvp buffs? You forgot to even mention statuettes. Upgrading can be done without cash.

The problem with this game isn't the reasons you listed, it's a whole lot more of lack of variety. Most of the events available are useless. Henry's daily, guild quests, and GT are the only ones worth doing. The rest can be done, but don't give much. You can easily play this game with no time on your hands, it only takes 1-2 hours a day. Playing more than that doesn't get you much farther unless you're 40+ and can do repeatable scroll quests. 

Originally posted by diablohalo

Wow these reasons are so crappy..did you even play the game?

First of all the best reason not to play is the lack of variety for leveling. You do the same events every single day, at the same time. It's cool for the first couple days of playing, but after that it feels worse than grinding. The events that used to give you two levels at level 20 now give you 50% at level 35, and exponentially less as you continue to level.

You have to pay to use world chat..who cares? You can easily make money in game and buy them. I ask again, did you even play this game?

You have to buy your resets..wow who cares. It's a free to play game first off, and you obtain two respecs in game at level 20 and 60 i believe. Talents are easy to set, you shouldn't make mistakes.

Routing was a reason not to play FW? ROFL...Routing is in almost every mmo now a days. The game would be impossible to play without it.

Information overload..it's easily to learn the game with a guild. I only had around 3 questions my entire time playing. You can usually look them up. 

It's a free to play game..pvp buffs? You forgot to even mention statuettes. Upgrading can be done without cash.

The problem with this game isn't the reasons you listed, it's a whole lot more of lack of variety. Most of the events available are useless. Henry's daily, guild quests, and GT are the only ones worth doing. The rest can be done, but don't give much. You can easily play this game with no time on your hands, it only takes 1-2 hours a day. Playing more than that doesn't get you much farther unless you're 40+ and can do repeatable scroll quests. 

I agree with everything here, I gave the game a shot and got to level 31 until the grind took over. Honestly when you have 20 quests to kill x boars it gets old fast. And henry GT etc dont even give half at 30.

I  never play this game but  "pay to chat" system makes me just going to play it. spamming screwed the game all the time....

Some people dont know that F2P means and they fail at making F2P game... True, there is no better way yet to earn money on F2P game exept micro transactions but i hope people find out something real soon...

Xsyon is the game I play most often and sub to, so FW is my 'I feel like mindlessly killing things right now' game, mainly because it's free.  I've spent quite a few brainless, mob slaughtering hours in FW, too, so it's been worth every cent I haven't spent.

I was disappointed that the character customization in PW doesn't exist in FW (that customization was the only thing about PW I actually enjoyed).  I have to say, FW is a lot better than PW other than character customization, however.  My biggest issue with it is mana management, and gathering ingredients for mana pots, and I'm sure not going to buy pots from the cash shop, that would get pricey real quick.!  I also get annoyed by the limited inventory and bank space per character. 

If mounts were bind on account and had some saddle bags for storage, PWI would have gotten $20 or so from me by now, but since they aren't, and since I roll alts constantly, the game will continue to be free for me until I don't feel like playing it anymore.  While PWI seems intent on trying to annoy players into using their cash shop, they somehow fail to offer items that will actually entice players into using it.  This player, anyway, will probably get annoyed enough by the mana issue alone to stop playing FW altogether quite soon.

Hopefully you read this Mr. Murphy, because several of your points are completely wrong. First of all you are not forced to buy a Talent Compass to re-spec like you claim, at level 30 you get one free of charge to re-spec. After that you can still buy them for gold from players, or exchange gold for leaves to buy it from the cash shop yourself. In fact, you can rather easily save up enough to buy one after you become more familiar with the game.

You're also wrong about "Pay to Chat" sir, the fact that the flutes to talk in world chat are harder to come by at earlier levels reduces the spam you would see from others, which is a good thing. The same thing applies here as above, you can buy them with gold from players or an in game vendor or you could even exchange your gold for leaves to buy them from the cash shop.

Last but not least is the PvP buffs, and I'm already sick of saying this but you can still obtain them without spending any real world currency, although I agree this should not be in game at all I felt it necessary to point out how wrong you actually are. You clearly did not spend enough time in this game to write the last several reviews you have written about it, I even ask myself if you played it at all or had someone play it for you and keep you updated. I often enjoy reading some of your columns but do us all a favor from now on and don't mislead your readers with lies or in your case I would assume, unintentional misunderstanding.

This game just as any other micro transaction game will always reward those that have more money to spend in one way or another, anyone playing such a game should know that. Those that try this game should also know that the casual players can still compete though, being one myself and reaching level 50, I can say this from experience in the game.

I haven't played FW but I did play 9Dragons for 6 months.

Information Overload : What little money they take in goes to paying for servers.

Points of Interest Routing : Often asked for and just as often considered by AAA games.

Pay to Chat : A viable anti-gold span system Now implemented by Blizzard in their 14 day free trial.

Re-specs & PvP Buffs in the Cash Shop : What part of your play style woudl you agree to be in the cash shop?  NONE?

F2P DOES NOT MEAN F2W.

When all those F2W QQ leave a game, do you know how much a publisher looses?  ZERO.  Know how much the playing / paying community gains when QQ leave?  Everything.

I have never paid more in a cash shop then I have in my 18 total years on subscriptions.

Actually, buying a WORLD/GLOBAL chat item is useful because it literally brings down spamming and when someone actually throws a GLOBAL CHAT item, people actually do listen because it DOES COST MONEY TO DO THIS. This is what happened in Runes of Magic, so I don't mind. 

PvP Buffs in the item shop? Maybe so, but who cares? If you want to play a PvP game that is skill oriented you can try guild wars....so most of the games I play are PvE and I care more abotu the quests. 

About the encyclopedia...I like those things...and it beats dealing with 100 page instruction manuals. Point of Interest Routing is never a bad thing and keeps people from getting lost. We live in a world people have to rush and subdivide their time and getting lost for 2 hours just sucks.

Your article makes me want to TRY playing this game and wonder about it....:) 

In my opinion this is the best free MMO available. That is not saying much as I still can't bring myself to play it for more than a few minutes at a time due to the crazy stupid controls. I also laugh a bit at myself that I am too spoiled to read quests anymore.

When is a great non-Asian ftp coming out?!?!?! ARGH!

Ok I don't know how much you actually played of FW, but your "Pay to Chat" point is completely wrong. If you spent more time actually doing some of the daily quests, you would know that completing a small number of a certain NPC's quests rewards you with an item to send a message across World Chat. Gives you incentive to explore and do that NPC's quests, know more about the main city and earn experience as well.

I thought the beginner's tutorials were easier to understand for me than most other F2P MMOs I've played. Fortifying, crafting and embedding isn't hard at all either. All players will be able to figure out all that stuff with a little time, but sure it doesn't hurt for someone to answer noob questions.

Also, not ALL quests give you the luxury of auto-route...some quests require you to find places on the map on your own, and remember them.