Alganon

[Mania]

After being caught up in the fascinating world of Derek Smart vs. David Allen for a bit, I decided to give Alganon the game a try. After all, if it's supposed to be incredibly WoW-like, and I like WoW, then I should like Alganon, right?

So I signed up a trial account and gave it a go. Download, install, patch, install, patch, install, patch, install, patch, install and ... login!

I made a ranger because the description hinted strongly at a pet-oriented talent tree. The trial only allows you to play to level 3, which took about as much time as getting to level 3 in WoW does, and exposes you to about as much of the game. It was reasonably fun, though -- very directed, not too much running, and I didn't die. (Yes, those are the factors I look at in levels 1-3 of a new game. Surprising how many games fail me there.)

And as an added bonus, one of the quests I had at level 2 involved killing some really lovely cougar-like 'warcats'. I was impressed at the quality of the animations, given the general art quality of the rest of the game I'd seen at that point, and I was looking forward to taming a warcat.

At level 3 I went to see my trainer in the nearest town. On the way, I passed several NPCs with armored boars by their sides. A good sign!

Unfortunately my trainer said nothing about taming pets -- or pets at all, in fact. And one of the NPCs near him sold those armored boars ... as mounts. So I logged out and went searching the net for a definitive answer about combat pets in Alganon.

I found a lot of older interviews saying that Alganon characters 'will' be able to tame pets, but nothing recent saying that they 'do' have the ability to tame pets. I finally ended up on the Alganon Community Forums, where my question was answered more or less with certainty: no classes can currently tame pets, but either rangers or some other unannounced class will get that ability sometime in the future.

Except, having read the various diatribes of Derek Smart, I suspect that that future is now further away than ever. And thus ends my adventure in the world of Alganon.

[Ryai]

Seems like they took The Cake is a Lie to a whole new level.

Sorry to see you so disappointed Mania, cause it sounds like it'd be a good game, and I might have been interested in it. But not gonna waste time with something that makes blizzard look like rockets for fixing and implimenting things >_>