Anarchy Online - 12 month free trial

[Yog]

If you never tried a MMORPG before or dont want to spend money on monthly subscriptions, here is your chance. Anarchy Online gives you a full 12 month trial and no credit card is needed to register, just your name, email etc no strings attached. Free MMORPG software and 12 months subscription, for $0... how about that.

So whats the catch? Why are they giving 12 months away for free. Are they crazy? How do they get the money to maintain the servers and develop the game? Well, the thing is, this is the vanilla basic game without the expansion packs, so theire hoping a percentage of the trial accounts will enjoy the game so much, they continue playing and eventually activate the expansion packs (doing so also activates monthly subscription).

You are however more than welcome to play for 12 months without paying anything.

Anyway, here is the link :)

http://www.anarchy-online.com/free/ad_campaigns/freecampaign

Here is a decent guide for finding out what character class you like: http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=161858

.. and here are some info for beginners:
http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php?t=274593

If you do sign up, create your character on Rubi-Ka 1 and let me know in this thread your character name. Im an adventurer and my name is "Valandil". I probably wont play too much today (its christmas eve), but thought I should let you guys know. Its a nice way to kick some time in the hollidays, and you cant beat free.

[Dasquian Belargic]

Oh wow. A whole year free? Niiiiice. I bet the lag is going to be awful though, with so many people taking advantage of the offer.

[Zyon Rouge]

Sweeeeet, I will have to do that on sunday.

[Sarr Koon]

yeah...cause everyone knows how good this game is. :rolleyes

[Zyon Rouge]

Eh, I will take what I can get. I don't have money to spend every month.

[Dasquian Belargic]

Originally posted by Sarr Koon
yeah...cause everyone knows how good this game is. :rolleyes

Regardless, it's good that people can have the oppertunity to try out the game to see if it does appeal to their tastes, without the hassle of credit cards etc :)

[Shawn]

Actually, I hear AO is quite decent now. Several years of patching can do that.

I'll be sure to try this out at some point, but not right now. :)

[Yog]

Well, whatever you do, just make sure to register an account (it takes like 2 minutes to sign up) before 15 of january, because that is how long campaign last. You can download the client afterwards or whatever, just make sure you register ASAP, because funcom is constantly monitoring server traffic, and if it becomes too much lag, they might shut off new free account signups.


yeah...cause everyone knows how good this game is

Everyone is entitled to an opinion of course. Let me tell you though, even though it had one of the worst launches in MMORPG history, funcom really listened to their customers and improved their game exponentially through years of patching. Look for some recent reviews of the game (2 last years or so), and you will find its actually has become quite critical acclaimed.

I find it to be rock stable and run very smooth. And at least IMO, it provides a better and long lasting play experience than other sci fi mmorpgs like EVE or SWG. At noobie level, you will at the start probably find the whole interface confusing and it all feels a little dated. But there is a lot to see and do, and at later levels the game is going to feel much better.

Im in a bit of a hurry for the moment, so I will just quote a post from another forum what makes the game interesting. I will post more later when I have the time.


* AO has lots and lots of content, there are tons of unique quests and a load of dungeons. Not just for high-levels either, there are dungeons and quests for all level ranges and you're never limited to leveling in just one field or dungeon, there's always dozens and dozens of places you can go and dozens of dozens of things to kill no matter what your level is.

* Mission system, AO was the first MMOG to incorporate the whole dynamic mission system and it still has the best one. A lot of you may have played the original missions which had too little variation, it was revamped a few months back making missions a lot more varied and unique. The Alien Invasion we call forward when we lower our cloaking shield is probably the most fun version of this system.

* Outdoors, a really under-appreciated thing about AO is the ability to just run in the great outdoors and do whatever you want. There's always plenty of wandering mobs, interesting static spawns and dynacamp bosses around.

* The music, atmosphere and story in AO is amazing, better than most single-player games. Fallout and Planescape: Torment are the only two games I feel that rivals it. Due to public demand Funcom actually released a CD soundtrack and I have most of it permamently on my playlist

* None of the 1 char per server crap that most hate from SW:G, the character per server limit is no less than 8.

* There's no gay item decay or miles and miles of running to get to your corpse. When you die, you spawn at the insurance terminal you last insured your clone at and get your items from the reclaim booth. In fact, there's no item loss at all, nor any real XP loss! Upon death the XP you've earned since you last insured gets placed in a pool and each kill from then on you get a percentage of that pool added unto the regular XP until you've earned it all back. This way, death is still a setback but not the heart-wrenching ordeal of losing 3 hours of xping because you were too lazy to run back and save.

* Flying ships, I think my best online experience ever must be the first time I got my yalm and could just take-off and fly. I think I've spent more time flying my ship than I've spent doing anything else in AO. The latest expansion added more yalmaha's who are just and easily equipable unlike the stiletto's. There are also at least 3 more yalms coming.

* A very large and active RPG community supported by Funcom, there's writers at Funcom who's job is creating a fake newswire and advancing the storyline. The reports come from various outlets like Omni-Tek Press Corp, Independent Reporters of Rubi-Ka and Free Journalists of Rubi-Ka, all with their own slant and bias. It's fun and interesting even if you're not a roleplayer. The articles come often, sometimes multiple different ones in a day and you get alerted in-game if you've subscribed to the wire/channel. In addition Funcom often does quests, and they're not gigantic once a month quests for higher levels exclusively, or pre-announced. I've often stumbled upon a guy with a green name (Colour of event team) by accident and he has led me on a quest

I will get back to this post a bit later. Just make sure when you create a character its on Rubi-Ka 1 and your on Omni Tech side :)

For those who want to try the full package with expansions packs included, there is also this offer. Those include the award winning notum wars, shadowlands and alien invasions. Try it out for 14 days, and get the clients (game + expansions for free). Just the monthly subscription after the trial ended (for that one, you need a creditcard however):

http://www.mmorpg.com/ao_trial.cfm?sw=1024&sh=768&fp=1024,768,4156748500

[Khendon Sevon]

I played Anarchy Online for a month when it came out. At the end of the free trial I canceled my subscription because I didn't enjoy the game.

My reasons were simple: not enough people played the game, the gameplay was extremely repetative, and I didn't feel like my character had any value.

However, AO has changed since I played, so... it might be better? As was said, several years of patching help.

[Peter McCoy]

When I first saw this game I really liked the look of it. However I wasn't working then and had no way of paying the monthly fee so I ignored it. But this is really cool.

[Peter McCoy]

I got it and I'm all set up. Andf I'm really enjoying it so far. Only level 6 - I'm Gallareo, an Atrox Enforcer wielding a big hammer to smash things up and kill things with. I'm on Omni-Tek's side on the Rubi-Ka 1 server.