Why only four characters ? Where does Sony get off telling me I can only play such a tiny number of combinations ?
First, they give us 24 distinct classes. With 16 playable races (including frogloks). Then with 9 different types of artisans. Folks, that is an awful lot of combinations possible. Except that you will only get to experience a tiny portion of that unless you play a character, then delete it. No going back if you decide that paladin was actually fun after all.
To add insult to injury - they link the number of characters you get, to the monthly fee you pay for the game. $15 for four....... or $22 for eight. And yet from where I sit, their only additional cost is extra folders on their servers. A megabyte or so of data, if that. I'm trying real hard not to assume they're just squeezing their playerbase, despite what it looks like.
EQ1, you could have literally 100 or more characters, and your only limit was your playtime. EQ2 they put in a hidden and arbitrary roadblock to you discovering just what is fun or not about the game. Never was this mentioned in any of the pre-game chat, marketing and whatnot. I mean, why would you even ask? Most offline RPG games I've played have had no such limit, and the online ones are typically 8 per server, not per account.
I had the game box in my hand, and before installing wrote out an alt path to get to 24 different characters of various races. And then I install it and find that I've been suckered. Want to have 24 different characters ? Get ready to fork out $150 for three licenses, and $66 per month for fees.
I suppose I will play out my free month, and see what happens, but at this point I don't think I'll pay a monthly fee to see such a small portion of the game.
My character journal - updated daily
EDIT :
<take a deep breath & calm down>
Well apparently I just missed the discussion on this, Alla's forums have nothing but there are monster threads on Sony's site about this. Yes, they're simply squeezing us for more money.
Sony Board thread on the subject
Edited, Wed Jan 5 18:27:37 2005 by MRRX