Is anyone currently playing this with their young 'uns? I know it has been discussed briefly in other threads about gaming with kids.
My 10 year old daughter and I have leveled to the max you can do in the F2P portion of Wizard 101. Level 9 I think it is completing all of the available quests. This is our second foray. The other when she was 8 or 9 and she did not have quite as good a grasp on the concept or was not as interested. This time she made it to max without any help from me and completed every available quest she could access in the F2P areas before I did. The combat is turn-based with minor deck building as your way to build a library of spells, which I find to be a fun feature. The only problem is my need for instant gratification from bludgeoning enemies is not served as well due to the spell animations, which you have to wait through each turn you take. Some of the repetition in going back and forth between a quest giver and the same area for 3 successive stages of a quest line can also get tedious.
It is still $9.95 per month, but only an additional $3 for each other family member on your plan. You can purchase “Crowns” to buy different gear, but you can also use that to open additional sections of content rather than the monthly fee. So you can basically get a bite at a time rather than paying for the whole thing on a monthly basis. If you are going to actually play fairly regularly, the monthly fee is probably a better deal. You can get a full year for only $60, but I am not sure how that works with the family plan. We would certainly try a single month first to see if it had any staying power.
My daughter is 8 (going on 30), and is still fixated with Pixie Hollow, which has a pay option, but I haven’t seen a limit on the F2P areas, yet. We sometimes play together, but mostly she flutters around from location to location, running through the puzzles as much as she can.
Yeah, mine has asked about that as well. I would prefer this as we can do it together and I am cheap and only want too pay for something I actually want to do. :)
Both my kids subscribed to this, and my son is level 20 now and I just cut them lose and don’t play with them any longer (ages 10 and 8), since the chat isn’t free form they can’t be bothered by strangers or asshats or anything. They are loving it, and I get a kick out of my daughter being really excited every time she gets a cool new piece of gear or a new spell or gains a level. LOL. My wife is pissed that I’ve subverted BOTH our children into being gaming geeks! :)
My wife heard from ‘another mother’ that “I heard you have too pay something in that game.”. I explained the free portion and that you could pay for more, but have not. I am not sure she knows that I was paying a subscription for WoW. Calling her NOT a gamer would be generous.
My 5 year old is digging running around in it, too. Once she gets the quest, while she cannot read, she can follow arrows around. She likes just killing things, too. That one is different. At the beach, we let her pick whatever she wanted airbrushed on a T-shirt from the 100 samples they had. As soon as she saw it, she picked a skull with a bow tie on it. She is normally horrible long in decisions.
I played this for awhile, then let me son (very soon going to be 9) have his way with it and he enjoyed it. It was especially appropriate at the time since all of the writing was verbalized.
I just created an account for him on ToonTown a couple of days ago now that he is a much stronger reader, and while it is too soon for a definitive conclusion, he is really enjoying it. The one thing I see myself doing by day’s end though is upgrading to a paid account so that he can take part in the go cart racing on there.
My son plays fairly often and he and some friends at school have level 50+ Characters. At first we just bought zones with crowns since once you unlock a zone you always have it. Eventually we decided to go with a nice subscription deal they had where you paid a good bit less for subbing for a year at once. My other two kids, along with my wife and I have free to play accounts and mess around every once and a while.
For a kid centered free to play game its surprisingly well done. They have a neat housing system, mounts, crafting and all sorts of stuff that you can fiddle with for your character.
Our daughter (11) really liked it when we tried it out, but once we got to the point of either having to pay a monthly fee or grabbing some crowns she wasn’t sure if it was worth the money.
To be honest I found the areas rather expensive to buy in the cash shop, and I think you miss out on some features like the pet races IIRC which my daughter wasn’t happy about.
While the monthly fee wasn’t that much I know she gets easily distracted and might not play a game for weeks if something else takes her fancy. In the end we left it, and she hasn’t really asked for it since.
I really liked the combat system though, the card based game is a lot of fun and the casual grouping is nice too. I also liked the housing system, pet system and the mounts, and they even have an Auction house.
We might look at it again in a little while.
I think I am going to pull the trigger for a month. I think a lot of kids that age get distracted an move on or forget about things as you said Miriam. It is better than the damn Disney channel. :)
Yes, not for any of us. Its less MMO-ish and more browser social mini-game stuff. There’s a dress up/fashion show thing that she and her friends are hooked on. Any cost (she’s a premium member) comes out of her allowance/birthday money.
