By Gabriele Giorgi, Onrpg writer

Taborea, a realm filled with magic, is looking for heroes. Although this world has a long history, adventurers have begun to appear only a couple of months ago… when Frogster opened his servers for the Open Beta of Runes of Magic. The game is due to be released in March, and all the players taking part in the Beta will retain their character at launch, giving them a considerable head start. But let’s have a look at the features (some of them quite innovative) of this new Free to Play MMORPG.

One character, two classes
Probably the most important feature introduced by Runes of Magic  is the dual-class system. This is not something completely new for MMORPGs (think about Guild Wars), but here it’s quite peculiar. Every character starts with one of the six available classes (knight, warrior, scout, rogue, priest, wizard… all pretty standard and self-explanatory) and, as soon as he reaches level 10, you can choose another one. From that Runes of Magic Gold, you will be able to set one of them as primary and the other as secondary… but this is not something to be taken lightly. The primary class determines what armour you can wear and what weapons you can wield, and some skills can only be used if a class is set to primary. Last but not least, the level of the secondary class cannot exceed the level of the primary. As a result, when you’ve just acquired your new class and you ‘switch’, for example, from a knight 10/wizard 1 clad in full plate mail, you will find you are now a meagre wizard1/knight1, with just a few hit points and practically naked, since your new primary class cannot wear that kind of armour and, on the character screen, it will be highlighted in red.

Of course the developers thought about this ‘little problem’ and, as soon as you’ve obtained your second class, you will be given a convenient teleport skill allowing you to go back to the low-level areas in but a click. There a whole new set of quests will appear, helping you to level up your character once again, in order to put him up to date with the previous class.

Leveling to 10/10 takes around four hours of gameplay. If you are Runes of Magic Goldsatisfied with your combination, you have to start anew with and try a different character. Indeed the drawback of this system is that you cannot change a class once you’ve chosen it. On the other hand, you’ve got 36 possible combinations (including solo characters and the fact that, for exasumple, a warriogue is not the same as a rogue/warrior).

Take me home
If you feel ready to explore Taborea, just speak with the various  in the starting area and beyond. The first quests will explain all the major features of the game, like the dual-class system, crafting, housing, PvP and so on. The real missions will involve killing mobs, gathering certain items, exploring sites and finding people. Some particularly dangerous tasks and mobs will require, of course, to team up with other players. On the other hand there are some quests where all you have to do is literally just cross the road. Anyway in the quest log all the important information are highlighted andthere you will also find the option to set a way-point or auto-move toward a certain NPC, much like it happens with the map.

In fact, the world map will be a very useful tool. Not only it shows you all the available quest givers in the region, but you can also click on the marker of one of them (or any other spot, for that matter), select the option ‘move to’ and your character will go there on his own. Of course you need to Runes of Magic Gold out if you are crossing dangerous areas, and the scrolling might not be very smooth when the character changes direction, but all in all you will not bother to keep an eye on the screen all the time while you are just delivering a quest. The radar map in the game interface also helps you track the mobs needed for your current quests.

Speaking of the environment, the maps are nicely drawn, but the graphics in the game are quite big and made of polygons, with a style somewhere in between WoW and manga. Visually the game resembles a sort of fairytale, at a cost of looking a bit naïve as well.