MMOstly Good: Family Guy Online Beta First Impressions, or “This isn’t quite Guild Wars 2, is it?”
You may remember a previous post in which I expressed disbelief that ‘Family Guy Online’ was actually a real thing that’s actually happening, like, for real. Shortly after publishing, I felt the best course of action would be for me to register for the beta. I got in.
So while everyone else has been enjoying Blizzard’s free open beta weekend for ‘Diablo III’, I’ve been… playing this.
‘Family Guy Online’ is a browser-based MMORPG based in the Family Guy universe. It runs on Unity Web Player and as with most 3D browser-based games, it doesn’t run absolutely perfectly all the time.
You begin the game by creating your character, naturally. The classes in this game are, well, the family members from the show. The Peter class is a tank who can generate threat and unleash AOEs, Lois acts as healer and DPS, and as far as I can tell, playing as a Stewie class is DPS (looks like rogue) and Chris/Meg looks like tank/DPS. You only get two free character slots, and everything is the same no matter what class you play, so I couldn’t bring myself – or find the time – to role several different characters. Customisation is there but it’s pretty bare (I guess that’s where the store comes into play), if you play as a Peter class, you’re a fat man or woman, and if you play as a Stewie class, you’re a little babby person.
I picked the Peter class – I had assumed picking your class would also dictate which character would be your primary quest-giver, or mentor a la ‘DC Universe Online’. I was hoping Peter would send me private little tidbits and such, and that we’d become best buddies. Turns out I assumed incorrectly, and instead all classes begin in the same starting zone and take on all the same quests. About a month ago I got into a ‘Tera’ closed beta weekend, and I was pretty annoyed at how the tedious questing worked in that game. However, whereas ‘Tera’ offered interesting end-game content to look forward to, quite cool looking combat and good graphics thanks to the Unreal engine on top of its archaic, tedious question, ‘Family Guy Online’ doesn’t really have anything else to offer to make the endless slew of fetch quests any less mind-numbingly boring. It’s a very old form of MMO which is thankfully dying off now.
These are the 'classes'. You don't get Brian. You gotta pay 20 bucks for that.
The Peter class is a warrior/tank, so by default my character came with one attack that builds rage (taking damage does that, too) and one or two which required rage for me to use. It’s standard MMO fare. There’s actually not much combat in the game, so you won’t have to worry about it all that much – most of the time you’ll be doing tedious fetch quests, in which you’ll collect items from the show and take them back to whichever character set you to get them, all so you can hear or read a recycled joke from the show.
When playing ‘Family Guy Online’, I just felt like I was playing one big advertisement – not only an advertisement for the show itself, but also for the game’s store and outside advertising from sponsors. Obviously, free-to-play games have to make their money somewhere, but the extent to which ‘Family Guy Online’ forces advertising and ‘suggestions’ to visit its store is just downright aggressive. When you log in, you’re shown what is a basically a Family Guy-themed pop-up ad, and Mort Goldman will regularly remind you that, hey, there’s a store where you have to spend real money, fancy a look? Oh look, you ran out of consumables and items to regain health with because the combat is designed for you to take far too much damage so this happens a lot, you want more? You gots to put down the cash for that.
I don’t mind the free-to-play model. If it’s done right I might even dip into the store and purchase some cool stuff – ‘Star Trek Online’ really made a sucker out of me with its cool costumes and ships after it went free-to-play, and ‘Champions Online: Free for All’ offered me a pair of freaking rocket boots for some loose change, so of course I parted with some cash. But ‘Star Trek Online’ or ‘Champions Online’ never just shoved its store right in my face – sure, it was there, but it didn’t constantly remind me. ‘Family Guy Online’, however, wants your money. It wants your money so goddamn much it’s willing to do whatever it takes to get it. ‘Family Guy Online’ will honestly just straight-up mug you.
This is what we're dealing with here, people. (That's not the real Totalbiscuit, by the way; he told me so).
There you have it, on top of desperately lusting after your wallet at any given chance, ‘Family Guy Online’ is just an incredibly generic, anachronistic MMO full of tedious fetch-quests with a Family Guy skin thrown on top of it. It may get a laugh from you once in a while, but you just walked up and down Spooner Street collecting several different, pointless items for Quagmire or Joe or someone for the past hour – an hour in which you could have just watched a few episodes of Family Guy instead.
It’s an MMO based on Family Guy, what were you expecting?
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