Ladies and gentlemen of h t t p colon double backslash triple double U dot blistered thumbs dot net, I have a question for you. Is it wrong of me to think lowly of a review title, even though I’ve experienced an MMO extremely similar to the game in question? I believe it is. However, you’re not here to listen to me rant. You’re here read about Runes of Magic.

On that note, Runes of Magic is an MMORPG developed by the technowizards at Runewaker Entertainment in Taiwan, and brought to you by Frogster Interactive, by way of publishing it to Europe and the nations of the west. Almost at the 2 year mark worldwide, Runes of Magic is far past the four million playerbase mark, which is a great achievement on its own; along with that, it has on its side a slew of very positive reviews from MMO gaming sites.

But do I, a veteran MMO player for the last half decade, believe that Runes of Magic is worthy of such praise? Now’s where we get to the questions I asked in the first place.

Lets begin, yet again, with the story, which I must say is an interesting take on the traditional ‘Deity and his Children’ backstory.

The God Ayvenas was alone in existance, venturing through time and space, until he created a book. This book was named Taborea, a realm of the living, where our fair Runes of Magic takes place. Ayvenas created the earth, the sky, and the races of mortals, but upon closer inspection, saw that the mortals were frail, and shied away from hardship – something that would hamper their evolution. Then again, one would probably shy away if if it meant that becoming ill in any shape or form was an iminent death sentence.

The ancients of the past were in command of vast elemental power.

With this observation, Ayvenas create celestial envoys to teach the mortals how to defend themselves and how to overcome the hardships of mortal life. With the mortal race now steadied on the path to prominence, Ayvenas left the envoys in charge of mortal affairs and watched on from high above. Flash forward: it had been ages since that day, and man was able to stand on its feet and prosper. Ayvenas looked on happily, content with the constant evolution of the mortals, and happy that all things were in balance. But then he had a fleeting thought: What if the world was imbalanced?

Now for starters, the diatribe that I just spun you guys consists of about a fifth (possibly even less) of the total backstory. In my opinion, the entire thing is VERY well put together – though with that said, one thing that holds it back is when you become privy to the layered narrative. A player-character will have at least a good 5-10 hours of gametime behind them before they’re able to read it. Generally, though, the backstory borrows heavily from the “destroyed ancient civilization” motif and makes interesting tweaks to it, including man-made golems that eventually see mankind as unfit to exist on the mortal plane.