@Saylah — well, you’re right. Everything is instanced, but you don’t spend as much time in instances as in Guild Wars. Unlike GW, though, the overworld is not instanced. You always see people going here and there.

Wizard101 System Requirements

Processor: 1GHz Intel Processor
RAM Space: 512 Megabytes
Video Card: Best results with GeForce 2 or equivalent
(standard in most PCs)
Disk Space: 5 Gigabytes

Free Realms System Requirements

GeForce3 or better video card
Intel Pentium 4 or greater processor
Windows XP or Windows Vista operating system
Broadband internet connection
512 MB RAM

Free Realms System Recommended

GeForce6 or better video card
Intel Pentium 4 or greater processor
Windows XP or Windows Vista operating system
Broadband internet connection
1 Gig RAM

Can Sony really be this stupid?
Free Realms runs like crap on my 2003 Dell Windows ME. Wizard101 runs perfectly flawless.

The thing to bear in mind is that Free Realms is not like, say, WoW, where combat IS the entire game. In FR, you have a collection minigames and one of those happens to be combat.

Personally? I think the instances are part of the biggest reason I like it, but not for any sort of social reason. In most games, in order to support a healthy population, you end up with fields upon fields of mobs, crafting stations, and stuff that, really, adds nothing to the game on its own. With all the content in FR being instance, the game world has been shrunk quite a bit and that’s allowed the developers to just PACK it with little nooks and crannies to explore. There’s so many little places to just see and you can drop in on NPC conversations.. sometimes I run around just to see what I can find. You can’t do that if you need to consider that this game needs to have enough mobs for x people to kill at y level.