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To play Allegiance, you first need an account on Microsoft’s Gaming Zone. From there, you go to the Allegiance Zone, where you get a one-month free trial, after which you need to pay the $10 monthly fee to continue playing on the AZ. With the monthly fee, you get more comprehensive game stats, including your own personal rank, and you are able to join squads and take part in a more unified and perpetual type of community. Microsoft Research is also promising new factions, ships, and weapons, to be made available through future downloads. If paying $120 per year sounds a bit steep for a game you’ve already purchased, you can opt for the free games offered on the Microsoft servers. However, there are no rankings on the free servers, and there won’t be tournaments and updates like the ones being offered to paying members. As a wise move by the folks at MS Research, they have provided gamers with a free downloadable server code, so that anyone who has an Internet connection and a capable computer can host their own Allegiance games.

Getting Started

Before you get suited up in your leather flight gear for the first time, you should check out the tutorial provided with the game. The tutorial will take you through the basics of flying your ship, locating and attacking targets, and understanding the game interface. It’s also a good idea to read the Allegiance Handbook in its brief entirety, and to carefully study the keyboard commands found in the Survival Guide. Allegiance is deceivingly complex, so skipping over the tutorial will make it much more difficult when joining your first game. Unfortunately, the tutorial only covers about 10% of the material you need to know in order to be successful in Allegiance. The other 90% will have to be painstakingly yanked from the mouths of the Allegiance veterans. As is typical of online gaming, anyone perceived as a newbie is initially relegated to subordinate and insignificant roles. Just be prepared to get in, sit down, shut up, and hang on, until it hits you as to what you’re supposed to be doing in the game.