Allods Online looks amazing.  To get such a deep and rich MMO experience that seems to offer just as much as any triple-A title does, and to have it be free-to-play is amazing.  It makes me wonder if the concept of paying a monthly fee for MMOs is going to become an outdated notion soon.  It used to be the case that free-to-play meant that you were getting a shallow MMO experience filled to the brim with instancing and grind.  However, Allods Online is essentially a WoW clone … but for free.  If you want to take down the WoW juggernaut, you have to convince people to move to new games in groups.  People tend to want to play what their friends are playing and there is no way to get people to try a new game like making it free.  Its not like Allods is a pioneer of the free-to-play model either.  You have Free Realms, The Chronicles of Spellbound, and recently Dungeons and Dragons Online all being top notch games that are free-to-play.  Lets not also forget that the impending Star Wars: The Old Republic will be free-to-play as well.  These are not shallow, throw away games, out to make a quick buck.  They are heavy development efforts who are fully embracing a new way of making money and overcoming the monthly fee barrier to entry.

How many more games would I play if I didn’t have to pay?  I absolutely adore Lord of the Rings Online, but I rarely play it since I am almost always subscribed to two other MMOs and that is my personal limit.  I love EVE Online, but I tend to play it in brief thrusts, followed by a lapse.  These days it seems that when a subscription based MMO begins to fail it enters a sort of death spiral were more and more people cancel their subscriptions and the population lowers, which makes the world feel empty, causing more cancellations, server merges, rinse and repeat.  It is downright depressing to step into Vanguard: Saga of Heroes these days.  Such a beautiful world, but one essentially devoid of life.

Nexon made a bajillion and two dollars with the free-to-play model and I suspect that if newcomers Allods Online and SWTOR can find their place, that people will begin to question the value in paying $15 for WoW, when they can get a very similar experience for free elsewhere?  I would love to see a future where I can pay my $50 for an MMO and only pay again when I want to, while still being able to play online.  With so many MMO titles out there all asking for $15 a month, it forces me to pick and choose.  Two of you get my money, the rest get zero.

P.S. – Tabula Rasa would make a perfect free-to-play game, NCSoft.