Alganon Preview: Standing Out from Other Fantasy MMOs By Cecil Adkins Cecil Adkins is a fiction writer and covers MMORPGs for Examiner.com.  He is an active player of City of Heroes, World of Warcraft, and several other MMOs.  He can be found on the web at www.ceciladkins.com.

If you start looking into Alganon, the upcoming fantasy MMO from QuestOnline, it doesn't take long before you discover that there are a lot of things that make it unique among games of its kind.  I touched on a couple of these aspects over at Examiner.com last week, but that was only the tip of the iceberg.  Alganon doesn't just have a few unique features; the entire game was designed from the ground up to be a unique experience in a genre where merely improving upon what others have done before is the usual name of the game.

Alganon - Trailer 4

Alganon does feature all the familiar trappings of fantasy MMOs.  There is magic.  There are monsters to fight. There are epic quests in which to take part.  There are warriors and healers and mages.  There is an auction house (with a consignment feature).  But, given that World of Warcraft already dominates the genre and that if you don't like WoW there are already several other good alternatives to it, a new fantasy MMO will really have to contain features that set it apart from all those others in order to make a splash at all.  Just putting a new skin on existing concepts isn't going to cut it.

The creators of Alganon must realize this, too.  The following is a non-exhaustive list of Alganon's ground-breaking features.

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Families.  When you create a character in Alganon, you start out as part of a family.  Families are groups of like-minded players and are based on "themes" that attract different kinds of players.  These five themes are:

Players can change families once they're in the game, either for a fee or by completing a quest, and aren't locked into any aspect of the family dynamic.  But it's pretty cool to have an automatic link to other players who like to play the same way you do.  Families also have access to family-specific items, like fun clothing or pets.

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