The Great Underground Empire has recently fallen and the land is in disarray. The stock market has collapsed, leading even mighty FrobozzCo International to fire employees from throughout its subsidiaries. A craze of treasure-hunting has swept through the remnants of the Great Underground Empire. It’s a dangerous time to be a newly-unemployed traveling salesman, but it’s also a great time to try a bit of adventuring.
Weird. I don’t think any aspect other than setting could really transfer over from the text adventure genre to the MMO genre, and the setting was not Zork’s strong suit.
Zork has a pretty fleshed out universe already, so there is potential in making an MMO out of it, although it’d have to be something similar to Uru: Ages of Myst to really work. It would also need to be much more successful than Uru to survive.
I’m excited about this, since I’m a big fan of the Zork games.
This appears to be more Kingdom of Loathing than WoW.
And Zork definitely has an interesting setting. I’m cautiously optimistic; I think this could be a lot of fun if they do a good job on it. And they mention Double Fanucci, so their hearts are definitely in the right place.
They went live today. Performance was pretty poor (at least initially, during registration and character setup) and I haven’t looked at much of the actual game yet. Also, there is a Double Fanucci Card Guide.
It reminds me a lot of a Facebook game. I’m not really sure there’s much to it: The options during play seem to consist of 1. Fight something 2. Go home. There are stats you can increase, but it doesn’t seem that they change the way you actually play the game at all.
It’s less ‘Zork’ than I had hoped. I mean, there’s some mentions like G.R.U., Frobozz and the White House, but it feels more like they just attached a license to the game in order to attract players that otherwise wouldn’t give it a second thought.
Couldn’t they have arranged the interface a bit better horizontally so I don’t need to constantly scroll up and down all the time?
The game goes out of its way to offer you bonuses in exchange for real money: Up to 200 extra action points for $5 (you’re limited to 30 per day) and 200% enhanced carrying capacity or a handful of Fanucci cards for $10. Prices vary depending on how many coconuts (bonus tokens) you buy in on bulk. The worst thing about this system is that people who abuse it are not labelled as cheaters and apparently still get to feature in the game’s rankings, skewing the whole thing.
The encounters are pretty confusing and require no interaction. You just press the “Explore” button, some rolls are made and you either win or lose. Rinse and repeat until you’re low on health or are carrying too much loot, at which point you return to base to stash your stuff and heal. Sometimes things are mixed up where you meet rival factions and must pick one or land in a mechanical maze and must get out - but it’s still all automated.
The servers are slow, but what I am mostly concerned with is that if you hit an error page while adventuring or get a server timeout, the game still deduces action points from you. This would be okay if the game were completely free to play, but it changes completely when people have been paying for them. Not cool.
Well, that’s kind of the problem, isn’t it? If you were expecting something other than an elaborate and mildly Zork-flavored incentive to get you to micropay, you’re in the wrong genre. I don’t know of any free-to-play micropayment-based browser games that hold up much better*.
That said, yeah, it’s pretty dull. I’m hoping if I drop in to visit once a day for a few days, I’ll eventually start running into interesting things with the grouping system and the card collection. We’ll see.
-Tom
To be fair, I don’t know of many free-to-play micropayment-based browser games, period.
I don’t know about “in the wrong genre”–the game is firmly in the same genre as Kingdom of Loathing, which is a perfectly fine game that isn’t all about the micropayments.
The problem is that Kingdom of Loathing looks to be a much better game.
The fact that Zork is considered to have “an established world and lore” is the biggest in-joke in a game full of in-jokes. The Flatheads was a make-it-up-as-we-go-along throwaway kinda thing, you know, like the Clone Wars.
KoL is fun, for a bit, but all the years of accumulated cruft and items and little things all around the game make playing it without using the KOLwiki pretty much an exercise in futility. Still the humor is fun, and they do manage to do a few large scale events a year that really get the community involved and working together.
I think KoL is just charming, even while requiring that playing knowledge of a thousand oxygenarians before you - it’s the kind of game where the micropayment is paying a few bucks to get a cute custom stick figure drawing that they really don’t have time to draw for you, and probably the polar opposite of this Zork game from how its being described.
The problem with Zork is that it isn’t ‘free-to-play’. Its free to play a little bit, then pay if you want to play more that day. Most other free to play games give you loot or other incentives for your micro transactions, they don’t charge you to just play the damn game.
I’ve been dabbling with it a bit for a couple of days now and, other than the names for stuff, it isn’t even remotely Zork-like for me. I have yet to take anything away from the experience other than a sense of being in a Great Underground Shopping Mall. Like Angrycoder says, their ecommerce strategy really doesn’t serve the game very well. The art may be its only selling point, but even it feels a bit too…Penny Arcade?
