Tuesday, August 31, 2010

FrontierVille (Facebook)

Wait a minute, why are you reviewing facebook games?! The reader stomps off in a fit of rage...

Yeah, I think most self-styled hardcore gamers will be pretty down on any facebook related gaming thanks to the click-farming horrors that we all formed our association with. However, with the massive influx of first-time gamers that facebook brings to the table, and the huge amount of revenue pulled by some of these titles, it becomes worth your while to at least take a look and understand the genre.

There are a lot of facebook games around now, so I'm going to pick the one that seems to be the latest evolution, crafted by facebook giant Zynga - FrontierVille.

FrontierVille's basic premise is that you are a brave pioneer, working hard to set up a new place to live 'out west' somewhere, probably during the mid 1800s. You arrive alone in your covered wagon and have to clear land, plant crops, raise animals, build structures, tend trees, and do other wilderness-oriented stuff to improve your personal space.

Every action generally takes one energy to perform, and you have a limited supply of energy which regenerates one point per five minutes of real time. You also get refills by leveling up, or the odd bit here and there from random drops (when you clear land/harvest/etc it drops goodies), or you can purchase more from the shop in exchange for food resource.

The first few levels come very quickly, so you get to play a bit longer on your first sitting since it keeps refreshing your energy every time you level up. It has a long quest path where you are assigned one task after another. This both gives you something to do, and lead you towards developing your area in the normal sequence. Note that you can choose to completely ignore the quests and just do your own merry thing - build 28 sawmills into the shape of a giant turtle if that's what floats your boat, but the quests give you useful rewards and generally ask you to do reasonable stuff so you'll probably follow along.

You quickly run out of energy and will need to set the game aside for a bit. "How annoying!" your hardcore gamer self says. But that's also an advantage for their target demographic - casual gamers who really don't want to spend a lot of time playing something. Instead, it rewards them for checking in on it every day, puttering around a bit, and then setting it aside again without the pressing temptation to just play nonstop.

Normal gameplay is to check in once or twice a day and see what you can do to advance your homestead. To begin with, your entire area is overrun with weeds, rocks, trees, etc.. These need to be cleared out so that you'll have room to build and plant. Occasionally clearing something will turn up a varmint which also needs to be chased away (more energy use). This portion of the gameplay isn't bad. You've got a couple limited resources (energy, wood, food, money) and make choices on how best to build your homestead (buildings, trees, animals, crops) to unlock new items, create additional resources, and advance your quests. All pretty solid gaming fare and enjoyable in a bit of a Harvest Moon sort of way. One interesting element is that the land actually evolves a bit in real time, so each day when you check back the trees grow and you'll have more grass, flowers, bushes, saplings, etc.. there to deal with. More importantly, the new arrivals are proportionate to what you had on your homestead beforehand, which is both a plus and a minus. Careful though! It is very easy to clear every single cactus from your homestead early on and then never see one again only to later realize you have a cactus quest for 5 of 'em and no way to cause new ones to grow.

After you progress down the quest path a bit you start getting letters from your wife who will come out and join you if you make the right preparations, build the right structures, and collect the right supplies. Unfortunately this is also where you're going to start hitting the loathsome aspect of facebook gaming - the expectation to spam your friends. Yeah, all building construction requires building supplies that can only be acquired by spamming your friends for help. It is typical stuff for facebook games, but honestly pretty crappy. If none of your friends happen to be playing this game at the same time you can make yourself a fake account and farm it that way, but welcome to nuisance.

Even worse, later on you'll hit the minimum number of frontier friends requirements to unlock various items and structures. "Sorry, you can't do that until you have 3 more neighbors!" This too, is a common evil of facebook games but one that I feel really breaks the original purpose behind facebook - that of having a social environment to keep touch with your friends. Now you end up making one of several distasteful choices. You could spam your other friends who aren't already playing to play too - generally a bad option since if your friends wanted to play they'd already be doing so. You can create some fake accounts to neighbor you - bunch of extra nuisance for a low impact game. Or you can just friend a zillion random internet strangers who play the same facebook games you do and turn your facebook experience from one of interacting with actual people you know, into just a platform for crappy games.

I'm sorry facebook game makers haven't figured this out, but while cooperative gaming is good as an opt in experience, expecting people to spam their friends frequently or with stuff they don't actually want is terrible. I hope they figure it out before the industry suffocates itself with this kind of garbage since when you disgust a casual gamer to the point where they quit playing, you didn't just sour them on your game, you probably soured them on the entire genre. Its really just greed pushing marketing decisions that spew onto game design in a putrid way. Zynga, get your act in gear now!

So you probably get the basic idea now. The game progresses further down these lines. You have a kid, build a schoolhouse, convince a teacher to come work there, make more buildings, raise more animals, plant more crops, spam your friends, etc... The school teaches classes, which also require friends to send you supplies, and there is a quest path to expand your homestead (give you larger playing area) which also requires you to... wait you know this one... spam your friends.

Overall the game is moderately fun, and does have some nice resource tradeoff decisions and a cool gradual land evolution which lets you tailor your environment. The later quests get ridiculously long and repetitive so you need to kind of figure out when you feel done rather than expect an end to it. I'd suggest trying it out just to get a feel for what's hot in facebook gaming these days. This market is huge now and doesn't look to be going away soon.

FrontierVille
Rating: 6.1 (basic gameplay probably 7.1, but -1 for friend spam)

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