The argument being, of course "are free to play browser games necessarily hateful to traditional gamers?" The Settlers Online is taking a beloved strategy name and affixing all manner of new business models to it, but is the ol' Blue Byte spirit safe and sound in there or has it entirely gone over to the microtransaction dark side? You can find out right now, as the open beta's just gone live. Miracle of miracles it doesn't require a Facebook account, though that is an option. Seems primarily bound to Ubisoft's UPlay system, which fortunately I was already signed up for or I might have screamed at the sight of yet another registration page. And lo, it loaded in my browser, and it looked quite nice.

As to Settlers Online's place on good-evil spectrum, it's too early to say. I've been at it about 20 minutes so far, and it's glacially slow, has quite a few resource types and micromanagent screens, a little overcomplicated and well.. like the Settlers in many respects. Which is good. But...

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