Realm of the Mad God does something that many games have not done, as far as many game consumers would be able to recall. Yet, it also does what many players of "free-to-play" games would expect from a typical, self-proclaimed "free-to-play", which can be a disappointment.
The premise of this game is little more than an excuse for justifying the variety in the designs of enemies, as well as some of the zaniness in this game. Oryx, the titular Mad God, is certainly one heck of a megalomaniac, but an aspect of the story that is even more eye-raising than this is that the player characters are not natives of the Mad God's Realm, but rather seem to be invaders from another plane of existence known as the Nexus (which is apparently an enclosed garden of sorts surrounded by sheep meandering about in meadows), though there is the premise of the Mad God having somehow imported the player character as fresh meat for his minions (more on this later).
However, if the player can look past the throw-away story and play the game proper, he/she may find that the game has a lot of charm in its presentation and that for an MMO, it is very easy to play; the acquisition of gear and fame (more on this later) can also be rather addictive. Unfortunately, the player's fascination may come to a disappointing end when he/she realizes how the premium schemes of the game and other issues bite into the gameplay.
Anyway, a new player starts by selecting the only character class available initially, the Wizard. The player character starts in a tutorial zone, which teaches the player the basics of the game and also gives target practice in the form of "evil chickens". It eventually culminates in the player character's capture by the minions of the Mad God and a reference to Blizzard Entertainment's Diablo.
The zany writing of this game should be apparent to the player by now. There will be more to be had when the player fights more denizens of the Mad God's realms, namely from those that utter speech bubbles when they attack the player character.
After the tutorial, the player character will be transported to the Nexus, which is a hub to all would-be heroes looking to invade and pillage the Mad God's territories. The Nexus is actually an instance, one of many created for various regions of the real world. It is also at the Nexus that the player will also notice that the game does not put much pressure on its online infrastructure, the reason for which would be quite obvious: the game is practically no more sophisticated than an (otherwise rather complex) Flash application.
There will be dozens of player characters milling about in the Nexus, trading items, waiting for their friends or simply waiting for something to happen. The Nexus also has healing springs that allow player characters that have escaped to the Nexus to quickly replenish their hitpoints before returning to the Mad God's realms. The Nexus also has vendors selling mostly cosmetic items in return for Realm Gold and Fame (more on both of these later), but mostly for Realm Gold. It also has portals leading to the player's guild (if any) and the vault for his/her player account. The Nexus also contains the (cave-like) portals that will lead to the Mad God's realms.
Unfortunately, the Nexus is also where the player would realize the limitations of the game that are brought about by its premium schemes. There will be more elaboration on this in a more appropriate section of this review.
The graphics can be best appreciated when the player enters one of the realms of the Mad God. Realm of the Mad God opts for heavily pixelated sprites of super-deformed creatures and characters, all of whom appear to have disproportionately huge heads and no necks, if they can even be considered vaguely humanoid. The environments also consist of mostly sprites, if not a flat plane with block-like objects depicting walls. Textures are also very simple.
All these leads to a very low hardware requirement; this contributes to its appeal as a "free-to-play" game. The very primitive graphics may put off those looking for visual sophistication, especially when they realize that the graphics are little more than digital cardboards sliding across very simple 3-D environments. Otherwise, they are appropriate when paired with the very simple gameplay. It is worth noting here that few games have such visual designs nowadays, so Realm of the Mad God may appeal to those looking for visual designs that are different from the usual crop of games.
If there is a serious complaint about the graphics of the game, it is that blocks can block the view of sprites behind them, with next-to-no visual cues to tell the player that this is so other than the fringes of the sprites sticking out from behind the blocks. Fortunately, the player is given full control of the camera, so the game world can be rotated as much as he/she likes. However, because all sprites will always face the camera, this solution only works for the 3-D blocks; large sprites will continue to obscure player characters. The worst of these occurrences is when there are a lot of player characters around spamming their projectiles and mingling together for cover; if not for the fact that the player character is always centered in the middle of the screen, the player would probably not have much of an idea of where his/her player character is.
Speaking of screens, Realm of the Mad God's seemingly simple programming allows for the player to resize the screen any way that he/she likes in windowed mode, and the game will accommodate by stretching the view. Few games, even in windowed mode, allow the player to do this without causing instability.
The main attraction of the game will only be apparent after the player has explored the Mad God's realms for a while, as it takes some time to build its appeal due to the game's implementation of some environments tailored for the fledgling player character.
The tutorial would have teased about the combination of shoot-'em-up gameplay with RPG elements in this game, but it is intended to teach the very basics so the challenges in it are negligible. On the other hand, the designs of the Mad God's realms are intended for an easy and manageable difficulty curve: the realms are practically islands, the beaches being populated by enemies that are push-overs. The media's description of the game as having bullet-hell elements only becomes clearer to the player as he/she brings his/her player character closer to the center of any of the Mad God's realms, where the more difficult but more rewarding monsters and minions of Oryx spawn.
The game will notify the player of these designs of the realms, so only inattentive players would find themselves getting into trouble by heading too deep into the realm when their player characters are not powerful enough for the challenge. However, the game could have had some scripts to measure the power of the player character against that of the local region's denizens and warn the player if he/she is in danger of over-extending.
Anyway, virtually all characters – player-controlled or AI-driven – fight with ranged attacks, though a few native creatures use dash attacks to collide their hitboxes with those of player characters. It can be odd watching conventional high-fantasy characters that are better known for their close-combat prowess fire off projectiles instead of getting up close and personal, but implementing melee attacks would not have been a good idea as many powerful enemies fire off waves of projectiles that originate from themselves (meaning that getting too close means taking the risk of being hit by overlapping layers of projectiles).
However, this does not mean that player classes and enemies are not differentiated well from each other; yet, there are also similarities among some of them, so that the player can use familiar strategies when they spot these characters on-screen. More importantly, the similarities among the classes of player characters allow them to share and use commonly prescribed gear.
The player starts with only the Wizard initially. The Wizard is one of the easiest classes to play with, largely due to the range of his projectiles and his magical burst attack. Unfortunately, these designs also give the Wizard a seemingly insurmountable advantage over shorter-ranged classes when fighting powerful, high-damage enemies, like the Mountain Gods who reside at the centers of the realms. The other variants of the Wizard class also have similar advantages, as they coincidentally share the Wizard's innate long-range and rapid attacks.
That is not to say that the other classes are permanently underpowered compared to the Wizard. All of the classes have statistics such as Max Hitpoints, Defense, Dexterity and Speed. In turn, each class has different ceiling values for these. The aforementioned Wizard and long-ranged classes happen to fare poorly in terms of ceiling HP and Defense, whereas the shorter-ranged classes either fare better in all or some of these or are far faster at moving and attacking.
However, it still has to be mentioned here that the Wizard has up to five statistics that can be maxed out to levels higher than some of the other classes, as opposed to just two or three statistics for any other class. It is therefore little surprise that at this time of writing, Wizards dominate the top rungs of the leaderboards, due to the long-term advantages that they have, if players are wise and skilled enough to keep them alive (more on keeping alive and dying later).
To increase these statistics from their initial values over to the maxima, the player needs to level up his/her player character, upon which the player character gains advancements in random mixtures of statistics. The player can also hunt for stat potions, which permanently increase specific statistics. However, there are limitations in place to prevent easy grinding: the player character can only reach a maximum character level of 20, with no other way to increase it (not even premium schemes), and the potions can only be obtained as loot from the Mountain Gods, who are very tough and dangerous, even to buffed-up player characters.
While trios of character classes share the same innate capabilities, e.g. their default attacks, initial statistics and gear restrictions, each of the classes – there are currently 13 in total at this time of writing - has a special attack that can only be triggered after having equipped special gear that only his/her class can equip.
Returning to the example of the Wizard, his Spellbook allows him to cast a fast-moving bolt of magic that explodes into a burst that fires smaller bolts in twenty directions in a circular orientation. Another example is the Priest's power of area-effect healing, the potency of which depends on the quality of the Tome that he carries.
Unlike the mundane abilities at the classes' disposal, these special abilities are not affected by their statistics: this means that a buffed-out player character can still have his/her special ability at pathetic levels by having low-level equipment, and that a fledgling can have area-clearing powers if he/she happens to have access to high-tier gear, of which there are no statistical restrictions to keep them out of the inventories of rookies at all.
However, to prevent gameplay imbalance, special abilities require Magic Points (MPs) to trigger, and it so happens that the higher-tiered special equipment requires more MPs to use. A rookie's starting reservoir of MPs is pitiful when compared to that of a buffed-up veteran, so the former may not abuse high-tier special abilities too much.
Nevertheless, the use of these special abilities can mean a lot of difference when fighting some of the tougher monsters, and can also compensate for some deficiencies. For example, the Warrior, who is the first of the short-ranged classes to be unlocked, has a disadvantage at fighting enemies who have long-ranged attacks and therefore cannot be of much help if he is forced to stick close to other player characters, usually when he is badly damaged; however, his Inspire ability grants increased attack rates to nearby allies, which make up for his slack.
The most notably crucial of these is the Priest's area-effect healing, which can theoretically affect an unlimited number of player characters as their sprites can overlap without any restrictions. This special ability allows players to survive against enemies that can spam a lot of attacks in a short while. However, a handful of coordinated Priests that spend their MPs carefully can seem to turn every fight into a battle of attrition that the players are sure to win as long as they can remember to return to the Priests when injured, thus sapping some of the challenge of the game. Of course, this is assuming that players can coordinate their efforts, as they should when the game is touted as a "co-op bullet hell RPG".
The game promises very easy levelling, and while this promise is true, the game does not give many hints on how to gain levels quickly. Still, the ways to do so are there, and an observant player would eventually discover them.
The first of these is that the player gets quests that direct the player towards specific bosses, which can be eliminated for additional experience. At low character levels, these targets tend to be mini-bosses, such as the Scorpion Queen, though they are often surrounded by minions that either screen the boss from attacks or hunt down the player. The mini-bosses themselves may either perform hit-and-runs, or hound the player non-stop. These packs of monsters tend to be randomly scattered throughout the regions that they are native to.
The later targets are bosses that are more sophisticated in design and personality, and are often located in unique locales; they happen to be one of the plus points of the game. There are many, but a few examples should suffice to portray their sophistication.
One example is the Ent Ancient, which resides in a glade surrounded by trees. It is asleep by default, and will return to its slumber if there are no player characters around to threaten its life. When there are though, it awakes and begins a slow build-up in its patterns of attacks as it takes more damage. It starts with easily dodged attacks and confident taunts, eventually becoming angrier as it begins to use more powerful attacks and spawn little Ents and other creatures as screens. It also becomes visually bigger - and theoretically easier to hit – but also much faster.
Another example that is very different from the Ent Ancient is the Ghost King, who is an undead monarch that is stuck in the ruined castle that he haunts, and which caused him to be given the unpleasant nickname of "princess". He is a slow-moving creature that would be very vulnerable and easy to defeat if not for his ghostly bodyguards, who render him invulnerable as long as they live and who shuffle around to create dangerous zones that they fill with projectiles.
However, these special bosses are limited in number and do not respawn. They give lucrative rewards when they are defeated, so they are often hunted down by players, who are usually well aware of the visual features of the locales that they reside in. Yet, despite their presiding at unique locales, the special bosses are not at set locations in realm to realm. Each realm has its own layout and they are presumably constant in geographical designs, but there has yet to be proper mapping efforts by fans of the game. The developers themselves were not forthcoming in providing maps for the realms.
Speaking of maps, the player enters a realm with only the immediate region illuminated in the mini-map. More of the mini-map is revealed as the player explores the realm; the amount of region explored will contribute to a counter, the significance of which will be elaborated on later. Unfortunately, the mini-map is simply reset if the player character leaves to the Nexus and return to the same realm. This flaw does not make tracking down quest targets easier. While the game has indicator icons on both the main screen and the mini-map to inform the player of the locations of the targets and general directions to them, they do not show the regions that the player can traverse across, those that he/she cannot and those that are simply too dangerous to move through.
Back to the matter of special bosses, killing them causes more powerful ones to be spawned into the realm; they will also be tagged as quest targets, often superseding default quest monsters. These bosses, called "Event Bosses" (fittingly enough), have even more complicated attack patterns, and if not that, are super-fast at moving around. These often require mobs of player characters to be defeated. However, they are optional bosses to defeat, if players prefer to simply force the end-game (more on this later). Nevertheless, they offer a lot of rewards to everyone who contributes significantly to their defeat (there will be more elaboration on the mechanic for rewards later). Fighting and defeating them also elicits hilarious taunts and quips from either these bosses or their master, the Mad God.
However, there are complaints to be had with them though: they do not stick to the locations that they spawn, and they make the locations that they spawn in even harder to traverse through. They spawn in the Highlands and Mountain regions, which are places for the most powerful monsters in the game; this can compound on the difficulty of these regions, and if they happen to spawn close to each other, fighting them becomes even harder, perhaps murderously so. Some of these bosses are mobile, and they may end up straying into other regions as they lack any scripts that have them lingering where they spawn. They may even end up in regions for low-level player characters, which is a disaster.
Returning to the matter of methods for power-levelling, another option is to use the road networks of the realms. Every realm has roads, which are special terrain that speeds up movement (as opposed to bodies of shallow water, which slow down players instead). If the player's priorities are merely concerned with levelling up as quickly as possible, then he/she can have his/her player character join entourages of players (called "trains" in the game's community of players, amusingly enough) that may or may not be traversing along the roads at the moment. The mob of players provide great cover, as well as efficient use of any participating Priests' (and Paladins') healing powers, as long as the players continue moving forward.
These "trains" are made possible due to some of the game's designs that encourage cooperative play. Chief of these is that player characters who are close to each other gain duplicated amounts of experience when monsters are slain near them, regardless of who landed the killing blow.
A player character can gain a lot of levels, but without the necessary gear, he/she cannot venture into the more dangerous regions of the realms. If the player is adamant on gaining levels anyway, he/she can resort to another method of levelling up: there are regions within the realms where mid- to low-level monsters are deliberately given greater spawn rates, allowing them to achieve densities that may even slow down computers. However, a relatively more powerful character but one that has yet to achieve level 20 can annihilate swathes of them over and over until reaching that level.
If the player is looking to gather loot instead, then he/she would find that Realm of the Mad God has convenient and somewhat fair mechanics for looting, though players that use short-ranged classes will hit a disappointing snag, which will be elaborated on later. These mechanics are also ultimately luck-dependent, which, while understandable for such designs are typically prevalent in MMOs, will annoy players who despise factors of luck.
Defeating creatures simply cause their sprites to shatter; upon this occurrence, there may be a chance that a bag of loot will drop where they perished, to the audio cue of what sounded like glass shattering or coins jingling (it is not clear which). The kinds of loot inside the bag depends on the kinds of enemies that had been defeated, e.g. the more powerful ones yield better loot, but otherwise the exact contents are dependent on luck as well.
Fortunately, to reduce the uncertainties in looting, there are different types of loot bags that denote the value of their contents and whether anyone else other than the player can nick them or not. The most common of the loot bags are the brown "Regular" kind, which anyone can interact with and which usually contain low-level loot.
The loot bags containing gear of any higher level are not viewable to any player. Instead, each of these loot bags is generated according to the amount of contribution that a player has given to the battle against a creature that drops loot. As to date, this contribution depends on how much damage that the player character has dealt on the creature before its death.
It has to be noted here that this system somewhat favours classes that have the ability to attack at long range, where it is easier to dodge enemy projectiles than at short range. Shorter-ranged classes can always attempt to get in some hits by dashing in and out periodically, but this is always riskier than sniping at range. Of course, players who contributed in other ways such as using their special abilities when convenient can always request for any loot that the others gained but are not immediately useful to them, but this is dependent on the generosity of other players.
Other than this issue with the current version of the contribution system, players that had played their part in the battle would get loot drops that only they can perceive. In other words, if a bunch of coordinated players can plan the distribution of damage dealt, all of them can profit from maximizing the number of loot drops; this may seem like an exploit, but it is well within the spirit of this cooperative game. However, this is held back by a flaw in the premium schemes, as will be elaborated on later.
It is worth noting here that unless emptied, loot bags can contain anything that players place inside. Considering that player characters do not have large inventories – there are only up to eight slots for a player character's backpack – players often resort to swapping out items. This can result in a lot of loot bags containing underpowered trash, especially for the publicly viewable Regular bags. The loot bags will eventually disappear, but until then, they will stay where they are, luring curious players over to check their contents and more than likely realize that they have wasted time.
Another complaint with loot bags concerns how player characters interact with them. To date, they merely need to move up to them to see what's inside. However, if there are a lot of loot bags close by, it can be rather daunting to walk up to each one and check them. The game does implement a system to have monsters that simultaneously perished close to each other all drop their loot into the same bag and monsters that perished close to an existing loot bag simply dumping their drops into it; in the case of special loot that warrants player-specific bags, the game simply creates another bag nearby. However, these do not compensate much for the tedium of having to walk up to each loot bag to check what's inside.
Getting loot can also be achieved through plundering locales known as "Dungeons". When certain boss monsters, including the low-level ones, perish, there is a chance that they "drop" the entrances to instances of Dungeons. These locales include the Pirate Cave and Spider Den at low-difficulty regions of the realm, while the denizens of deadlier regions may drop entrances to more difficult dungeons like the Sprite World and Forbidden Jungle.
The Pirate Cave is the easiest of these, though it mainly serves to introduce to the player the designs of dungeons. It is populated by doles of enemies, which do not respawn (a general trait of dungeon denizens), and have hazards in the form of creeks, which slow the player character down but not the pirate inhabitants; the other Dungeons have worse hazards. Finally, there is Dreadstump, the Pirate King that serves as the boss of the Pirate Cave. As befitting a boss, he has more attack patterns than his underlings and much higher statistics. Defeating him yields loot that is usually at the upper ends of the loot that can be obtained from the regions that usually spawn the Pirate Cave portal; the same design concept is also extrapolated to the other dungeons.
If there is a complaint to be had with the Pirate Cave dungeon, it is that it is far, far easier than any other Dungeon. Even the dungeon that is one step above in difficulty, the Spider Den, can be a handful to all but veteran players. The Pirate Cave does not prepare rookies for the other Dungeons, which often have hazards that cannot be destroyed by merely shooting away at them. Their bosses are also a lot more troublesome than Dreadstump.
It is worth noting here that while loot is categorized into tiers that signify which regions of the realm that they can be found in, there is a tiny chance that Dungeon bosses, with the exception of those for the "easy" Pirate Cave and Spider Den, may drop so-called "untiered" gear; these drop in player-specific loot bags that have unique sprites of their own, much like the aforementioned high-tiered equipment and loot.
Untiered gear appears similar to high-tier gear, what with their offering of great statistical bonuses. They are generally class-specific pieces of gear, but unlike the usual pieces of gear, they often have entirely different effects. For example, the tiered Holy Seals that Paladins can wear are usually meant to buff allies with increased regeneration rates and other bonuses, but the untiered seal that is the Seal of Blasphemous Prayer has powers that are of much less selfless nature; instead of bolstering allies, it grants very temporary invulnerability solely to the Paladin, thus changing the Paladin's style of play a lot. Another example is the Tome of Holy Protection, which grants extra hitpoints to the Priest that uses it and also buffs him with the Armored status, greatly reducing the damage that he takes.
The "end-game" sequences, or more precisely, the ultimate battles in the game, occur when all of the aforementioned special bosses of a realm have been slain. When this happens, the game will prevent players from entering that realm by removing the portal to it in the Nexus. Within 2 minutes, the remaining players in the realm will be transported to Oryx's vast castle for the final confrontations.
The player will be warned of this occurrence, so players who get cold feet (usually from knowing that their characters cannot survive the event) can still warp back to the Nexus, though he/she can never return to the realm until it has been reset (more on this later).
Once within the castle of the self-proclaimed God, players will face some of the toughest and fastest monsters in the game with the fiercest attack patterns and even cheap moves, like very fast regeneration. If there are few remaining high-level characters to make up the core of the mob of player characters that entered the castle, they are more than likely to face annihilation. However, the Castle also counts as a Dungeon, which means that enemies do not respawn. Furthermore, the realm does not stay sealed if Oryx cannot be defeated; eventually, it will be reset, regardless of whether Oryx has met his doom or not.
Oryx himself is understandably devastating, capable of eliminating swathes of player characters whose players are not too familiar with how he fights or what they should be doing. To describe his designs any further would probably constitute as spoilers, so it should suffice to say that only coordinated efforts by experienced players can defeat Oryx and maximize his loot drops, which are inevitably some of the best in the game. Upon defeat, the realm will reset after some time.
Yet, it should be mentioned here that if the mob of player characters has a lot of experienced players that had defeated Oryx many times, the siege would end rather quickly, and more importantly leave inexperienced players with not much in the way of rewards, due to the system of contribution mentioned earlier.
Perhaps the most intriguing feature that this game has is its mechanic of Fame and character death, both one and the same.
While there are shops in the Nexus, the currencies needed to purchase the goods do not drop as loot from defeated monsters. Instead, these currencies are obtained either through premium schemes (as expected of a "free-to-play" game) or through having player characters die.
The first of these, called "Realm Gold", would be familiar to those who frequent "free-to-play" games with virtual currencies that can only be replenished through purchasing them with real money. Realm Gold and its designs will be explained later.
The other is called "Fame", which can only be obtained by having a player character kill a lot of enemies to gather "Base" Fame (though the mechanics to gain Base Fame is still not entirely clear, other than simply killing a lot of monsters), perform heroic acts (of which there are many) to get bonuses whose amounts depend on Base Fame. The player can gain these bonuses by achieving special feats, such as having explored a significant number of tiles in the realms throughout the life of the now-deceased player character and having equipped high-tier gear that contributes bonuses of their own.
When the player believes that enough Fame has been gained, he/she "cashes" it into a counter attached to his/her account by having the player character die. Of course, if the player is not careful with his/her player character and causes him/her to die, any Fame that he/she has gained will be cashed in anyway.
However, cashing in Fame is no simple decision, because the deaths of player characters are permanent. Indeed, this MMORPG is influenced by a sub-genre of RPGs that MMOs tend to avoid: the rogue-like. Furthermore, any gear and loot that the dying player character had is also permanently erased. To mitigate this drawback, all player characters can escape to the Nexus instantly, with no lag issues, by simply pressing a button.
Some items are only available for purchase after the player has completed some "Class Quests" and thereby increasing his/her player rank. These quests are very simple; they often require the player to achieve a level of fame with a single player character of a certain class. These items are mainly items of convenience, such as keys that open up Dungeons without having to wait for defeated enemies to drop them.
The mechanic of Fame would have been very refreshing, if not for updates to gameplay that were implemented after launch, presumably to balance the efficacy of items that can be purchased with Fame.
As of this time of writing, items that can be purchased with Fame include Drake Eggs and the Amulet of Resurrection. The Amulet of Resurrection, which allows player characters to escape permanent death at the cost of it being destroyed, was once quite affordable, but was later made a lot more expensive to prevent players from using it too much. Drake Eggs, when hatched, release Drakes, which are akin to familiars that help the player character defeat enemies (not unlike the satellites that player characters have in bullet-hell shoot-'em-ups); however, the more useful of the Drakes had their costs re-priced a lot higher.
These increases in Fame prices do not just balance the affected items, but also tremendously reduce their usage and put them beyond what most players can afford. One would wonder why they simply were not removed, if Wild Shadow intends to reduce their usage tremendously.
As to be expected of a game with very simple visuals, the audio designs are simple too. Most sound effects in the game are 8-bit sound clips, and even these are few. Most of the sounds on-screen are associated with the player character and any decisions (or mishaps) on the part of the player. Other sounds are mainly utterances that monsters make when they are harmed, and the groans, croaks, or hollers that they make when they are slain.
These minimalist audio designs work in favour of the game. There can be a lot happening on-screen, so having a sound effect assigned to each occurrence would have been aurally overwhelming.
The same cannot be said about the music though. While the main theme track is a catchy tune that fits the more hectic portions of the gameplay, it is the only one in the game, which can lead to boredom brought about by its repetition.
More often than not, the ways that premium schemes are implemented in "free-to-play" games simply discourage many sceptical players from playing them any further, giving them the impression that they are exploitative. Unfortunately, Realm of the Mad God does not appear to be a convincing exception.
Some items can only be purchased with Realm Gold, such as cosmetic items that change the appearance of the player character. These cosmetic changes are not permanent, however; if the player character whose appearance had been changed dies, the changes die along with him/her. In other words, the player's Realm Gold can be wasted in a single misstep.
Most health- and magic-replenishing potions in the game can only be used once before they are exhausted. Realm Gold allows the player to purchase special potions called "Elixirs" that have multiple doses, allowing them to be used multiple times before they are removed from the player character's inventory; these Elixirs cannot be obtained any other way. These would fall under the "pay-to-win" scheme, which is vilified by many sceptical players.
Temporary stat-boosting potions come in two types: Tinctures, which can be purchased using Fame, and Effusions, which can only be obtained with Realm Gold. Effusions are the more potent of the two, and can affect more than one player character when used. Such designs are, again, "pay-to-win", territory.
Even spendthrift players would not find Elixirs and Effusions worth the money spent. They are exhaustible after all, so either bad luck or mistakes can cause them to be wasted.
As said earlier, Realm of the Mad God has been touted as a "cooperative bull-hell MMORPG". To this end, Wild Shadow has implemented the aforementioned gameplay limitations like limited character levels and randomized loot drops in order to encourage sharing and cooperation, and discourage lone-wolf grinding.
Unfortunately, Wild Shadow crimps the activity of sharing gear by limiting the amount of space available in a player's Vault. There are only eight measly slots of space for each player initially, and to get more, he/she has to purchase Realm Gold to be spent on unlocking the other slots. Of course, this can be justified as coverage for the expenses that Wild Shadow incurs from handling the storage of players' data, but this need for revenue runs contrary to the spirit of the game.
Eager players will eventually find more gear than they can store; considering that there are so many classes and that the permanent deaths in this game also destroy equipped gear, they will have to hoard spare gear. The limited storage space in the Vault does not help.
If the player is willing to put up with these restrictions on the storage space in the Vault anyway, likely through aggressively trading with other players or simply dumping excess gear nearby unsuspecting players that can best use them, he/she will run into another barrier set in place to hamper the free-loading player: limitations on the number of player characters that players can have.
Again, of course, the same reason/excuse of server-hosting costs can be used to justify this charge. Yet, limiting free-loading players to only one player character to choose from 13 classes (at this time of writing) can seem very stifling to those who are unwilling to spend on a "free-to-play" game.
There are other issues that damage the gameplay as of this time of writing. For example, the Drakes summoned by Drake Eggs do not follow the player from the Nexus into the realms and vice versa, which can be a major disappointment for those players who are expecting value from the Fame that they had spent purchasing the Eggs. In contrast, the pet that the player purchases with Realm God follows him/her wherever the player character goes – at least until he/she dies.
In conclusion, Realm of the Mad God could have had a broad appeal with its retrospective aesthetics and interesting blend of MMO, rogue-like and bullet-hell gameplay. However, the implementation of its premium schemes restrict the fun that could be had, as do other more minor issues that dash the value of the time and money that the player has invested in this game.