FreeStyle Street Basketball MMO Rocks

Why is it that the few very awesome free to play MMOs out there don’t get the attention they deserve? Everytime I log onto FreeStyle Street Basketball on GameKiss, I’m upset to see so few people online. I’ve played a lot of sports MMOs from FIFA Online to Pangya. I’ve even played tons of racing MMOs like Need for Speed World and Heat Online, but none of these games are nearly as fun as FreeStyle Street Basketball. Why on Earth am I praising this game so much? Well, because it’s both simple and fun. I think the best MMORPGs out there aren’t the most graphically advanced or complicated. The most fun titles are DEFINITELY the easiest to pick up and play. Games like WonderKing and Runes of Magic for example are successful because they’re so easy to pick up and play. Other titles like NEO Online from PlayOMG and World of Tanks for example are a bit more difficult to learn. I never managed to “get into” Eve Online because it’s such a hard game to learn. I tried playing the MMO Free Trial FOUR times, and not once could I stick with the game. Black Prophecy from Gamigo does look fascinating though and aims to be more “fun” than Eve Online. While Eve is more tactical and strategy oriented, Black Prophecy aims to be more hands on actiony – something Eve Online severely lacks.

Anyway, I’m getting a bit distracted. FreeStyle is fun, because you can hop on, play one or two matches (5 minutes each) and be done with it. No large time commitment nothing. I guess one of the reasons I like most MMOFPS games is because of this same reason – small time commitment. The thing about FreeStyle is that I don’t even like Basketball. I never watch it on TV or know anything about it, but I can still launch the game and have a ton of fun. I do wish the game offered more variety in terms of gameplay modes, because as is there aren’t many ways to vary up the game. Unlike Zone4: Fight District or Lost Saga from OGPlanet, FreeStyle has like 3 game modes and that’s it. Either way, you can still play the game for fun here and there. The game’s story isn’t exactly updated often, but it’s still good enough for me.

What sucks is that the game has a low playerbase. And as we all know – games with low playerbases eventually end up in the MMO Graveyard. I think games like Runes of Magic and Perfect World will likely be around for a long while. As will other successful MMORPGs like The Lord of the Rings Online and Fiesta Online, but FreeStyle is a game that I suspect won’t last another full year, as the game never had a big playerbase, and the community isn’t growing either. Plus GameKiss announced that they would shut down Valkyrie Sky last week. When a company shuts one game down, it means the company is having financial problems. That could eventually spill over into GhostX (Another game by the same company. A scifi MMORPG) and eventually into FreeStyle Street Basketball. Time will tell though.

Grand Chase Needs More Variety

Grand Chase isn’t a bad MMO. It just needs a bit more variety. The game is currently being published by Ntreev, and is basically a cooperative dungeon crawler. Players work together with each other to complete stages and beat bosses. It actually plays more like a cooperative Mario game with RPG elements than anything else. The only thing Grand Chase is really lacking, in my opinion, is variety. As is there are a fixed amount of stages in the game. Once you clear them all, there’s little left to do. It’s almost like playing Lunia after beating all of the episodes. The most obvious remedy to this is for Ntreev to release more content, but that can take a while. I feel that next time Ntreev adds more content and levels to the game, they should make it much more difficult. Players shouldn’t be able to finish all of the late game stages with such ease. Players should need groups of top tier players and excellent cooperation to beat levels. This is an easy way to extend the game.

Another way for Ntreev to add more variety to the game would be by adding additional characters. As is the game has a good selection of classes, as they offer 8 playable characters, but more would always be better. Realistically speaking though, Ntreev could add more job advancements to the game. As is characters progress in an extremely linear way. Players should have more control over their character’s growth through more variety in terms of total skills and job advancement choices. Job advancements should branch out into 3 possibilities at each advancement, maybe try something like Ragnarok Online, rather than the current system where players advance in an incredibly linear way.

I’m not trying to say that Grand Chase is a bad game, because it’s not. Ntreev makes some of the better free to play MMOs out there in my opinion, as both Pangya and Trickster Online are great titles. I’m just suggesting that the game would benefit from more variety. Games like Lost Saga and League of Legends are amazing because they have so many different characters, so more variety is almost always better.