Eric F. Savage

Second in a series on browser-based games. First post here.

Ikariam is a strategy game, with Roman themed artwork and an ancient/medieval setting. As of this posting, it’s in version 0.2.7, so I guess that means it’s beta/still in developement. I’m still technically active in the game, though active is an overstatement since I basically log in each day to see that it will still be many days before I can grow again.

It probably has the nicest art of any of the browser games, it’s even better than many installable games. Ikariam starts out strong, with fairly rapid build times and cheap expansion, but what might be its fatal flaw develops later on. Expansion costs are exponential, typically doubling or more, while the returns on that investment are meager, 10-20%. This makes the game slow to a crawl after a few weeks. Combat is slow and relatively simple, and there really isn’t any reason to fight someone except to pillage them, which is barely worth the effort.

I’m not sure what the designers were thinking, perhaps there is some unreleased feature that will open the game up, but for now, I’d have to say its a dud.

Lately I’ve been exploring the not-new-but-maturing area of BBMMO (“Browser Based Massively Multiplayer Online”) games. They have some cool aspects that drew me to them, and I figured I’d talk a bit about some that I’ve tried in my first-ever series of posts.

These games largely fall into two categories: strategy and role-playing. The role-playing ones are all about you building up a character, typically to compete with other characters. The strategy ones are usually about building up cities and armies and warring with other players or guilds. Both types can be found for all of the standard gaming genres: medieval fantasy/sci-fi/cyberpunk/sports. They also vary widely in terms of competitiveness and social aspects.

Persistence and asynchronicity are defining attributes. They are designed to be played casually, whenever you want. You can attack someone who is not online, or assist a friend on a completely different schedule. This is more like the old play-by-mail games than games like World of Warcraft or Starcraft. Active players often log on several times a day, typically for just a few minutes, and read messages, read reports, launch attachs, issue build orders, etc.

These games typically lack the flair of a downloadable/installable game, or even that of a flash game. Some of them are even almost entirely text-based. They seem to be heavily focused on game mechanics rather than interface, not unlike a board game, and this has a noticeable effect on the type of gamers you’ll encounter. Those lacking patience or the desire to dig deep typically become inactive quickly.

There are hundreds, possibly thousands of these games out there, many with active playerbases in the tens of thousands, yet they are largely ignored by the mainstream gaming community probably because of their lack of commercialization and blockbuster titles. Over the next few days I’ll be discussing some of the ones I’ve tried, including Ikariam, Tribal Wars, Travian, Duels, and Baseball Boss.