26 Jan, 2012
For the past few days, I’ve been playing the latest in browser-based gaming from Jagex, the developer most famous for the hugely successful browser MMO, Runescape. 8Realms, the company’s newest offering, is a far cry from the hustle and bustle of the world of Gielinor, however, offering strategy and metered progression to those who can endure the game’s pacing.
The pacing of 8Realms is methodical and slow; it’s made clear from the onset that this is the kind of game you’ll be logging into to check up on before queuing up some actions and logging out again.
You’re tasked with the cultural and technological advancement of your Kingdom, something achieved by way of training your uncouth civilisation in the arts of knowledge, agriculture and warfare, but also by completing tasks which reward you with the precious culture points you’ll need to advance to the next age.
It is also your duty to keep the great unwashed happy through careful management of the game’s core resources: food, wood, stone and iron must be collected to ensure the continued growth of your empire. Money is a big’n, too, and you must monitor taxation to prevent outrage and the decrease in productivity associated with taking money from your workforce.
This sounds like quite an involved game, but most of these activities are reduced to a few simple mouse clicks thanks to a ‘suggested action’ button included on the UI. While it’s nice to never be lost in confusion, it does remove a lot of thought from the process. I found myself simply clicking through without giving real consideration to the task at hand, only being stopped when my resources were sufficiently depleted.
On the topic of the game’s UI, though I feel it would be unfair to judge the game too harshly in its unfinished state, I think it’s worth mentioning that the game’s interface currently suffers from some unfortunate issues. Tested across all the popular browsers on a high end gaming machine, the menus and dialogue screens were sluggish, with elements of the interface being slow to pop in. There’s also no sound or music in the game as of yet. There were no obvious resizing options – the game sits in a centred browser with no full screen mode available.
These teething problems aside, most jarring about 8Realms is the fact that the game essentially decides for you when enough is enough. Resources are collected in a metered fashion over the course of an hour, which severely limits the scope of effect you can have in one sitting with the game.
This seems to be a recurrent theme in 8Realms; the game places a lot of obstacles in your path to progression, offering you either the choice of waiting an inordinately long period of time to carry on or to cough up some cash and buy some gems.
Gems are another of the game’s resources, this time acquired via real money, which allow you to greatly increase the pace of the game. With them, you can unlock time-savers such as additional building queues, though these are single use meaning you will have to buy more whenever you want to use more than the default two slots.
Perfect?
At the moment it costs £1.99 for 30 gems, though some of the purchasable items cost more gems than this. It scales all the way up to £99.99 for 1700 gems. That’s 99 pounds and 99 pence, for 1700 consumable gems which you can use to purchase consumable items. Consumable items and timed enhancements that cost real money but have no permanence in the game are a niggle to me (really? a single use build queue slot?), but I’ll leave the value judgement to you on that one. Worth mentioning is that a small amount of gems are sometimes the reward for completing tasks, so there are ways to obtain this resource without spending money.
Some excitement is added to the affair when it comes to the act of raiding other settlements. During my play, I could only find other NPC villages or ‘Barbarians’ to raid for resources and glory. This is what a raid looks like:
Do you get the idea yet?
8Realms feels like a game for people who don’t have the time or inclination to be playing games. More cynically, it feels like a game designed to feel so slow that the player will pull out their wallet just to make things playable. It’s well within Jagex’s right to want to make money off the games they develop, but the mechanics feel somewhat contrived and a little too transparent to sit comfortably with me.
That’s not to say this game isn’t worth your time — the quirky, referential Jagex humour finds its way into 8Realms and the game has a lot of charm. The aesthetic and animation are basic but pleasing. You could play this game — dipping in and out of it, setting off queues and returning to reap their rewards later in the day — and probably never spend a penny. While not personally a gratifying gaming experience for me, the popularity of Farmville and other games of this genre certainly speaks for itself. Of course, all this is subject to change as the game continues to develop. You can check it out for yourself by heading over to 8Realms.com
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