Interesting Decisions

I spent some time recently in Illyraid, a web based MMORTS.  I think I racked up 3 or 4 weeks of playtime.  It's a decent game with a lot of similarities to Eve Online.  I ultimately stopped logging in though.  The game just ended up not being engaging enough to keep me hooked.

I think Illyraid lacked interesting decisions to make.  As a new player, you're expected to spend your time increasing your research production and performing other building improvements.  Eventually, you are able to create another city, but that takes some time.

A sandbox game, like Illyriad, should provide interesting decisions to players as soon as possible.  I don't think I should have to put weeks into the game before it gets interesting.  It probably explains the new player attrition web games often suffer from.  Of course, if it was an easy thing to do, they would all be doing it.

It got me thinking about my development test bed, Stellar Fortune, and whether or not my plans had interesting decisions to make early in their life.  Trading is one of the early game activities, which in itself does not provide anything too interesting.  However,  an event system which presents players with choices on how to proceed might spice things up a bit.

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Illyriad Impressions

For the last few weeks, I have been trying out a new game: Illyriad.  It's not something I'd normally play, but twitter folk were talking about it so I figured I'd five it a shot.  It's a browser based game (HTML 5 I believe) where you build up a kingdom in an expansive persistent world.

I'll cut straight to the point.  So far, I have not had much fun in the game.  Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of things to do, but as of yet none of them are very interesting.  Actions such as improving a resource and researching new technologies take time (up to days) to complete.

Since I have started playing, all I've been doing is logging in, improving resources and setting up research.  This has gone on for weeks and I have yet to experience any other part of the game.  There is a military and sovereignty system (expand to other parcels of land), but I need to have a larger population and meet other requirements in order to experience those.  For example, my Storehouse needs to be upgraded 15 times before I can research Sovereignty.

As I have dabbled in making web games, Illyriad has taught me an important lesson.  I need to give the player interesting decisions to make as early in their experience as possible.  Upgrading resources and building for several weeks has not been very interesting.

There is a microtransaction system called Prestige.  It lets you take some shortcuts, but nothing overpowering that i have seen so far.  You can even get this currency free for logging in once a day.  I have not used any of the prestige I started out with yet either.

Illyriad may have a lot of depth once I get past the building up stage, but I'm not sure that i am going to make it that far.  I would like to mention its very kind community though.  They are quite helpful and tend to be very generous.  I asked a question, got a good answer and someone sent me a bunch of resources.

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