Monday, August 25, 2014

Kingdom of Loathing


Year: 2003
Genre: Role-Playing
Website: https://www.kingdomofloathing.com


Shane:
  • Platform: Browser
  • Hours logged: 13.0
  • Playthroughs: 0
  • Rating: 7/10


Notes and Discussions:
  • Shane (7/24/2014): I really have a thing for browser based games.  A friend of mine from my WoW days who works as a game developer used to talk about wanting to build up his own game development company to create a passion game with a small following (2 - 4 thousand folks or so) to retire and muck around with content.  When I play browser games like KoL, I think of this friend and smile.

    Some of my favorite elements of Kingdom of Loathing are its simple art, intuitive and basic controls, minimal starting options, and absurdly complex amount of content in mid to late game.  The dialog is pithy and clever throughout with pop culture references shoehorned in wherever possible.  The classes are uniquely un-heroic sounding and the quest givers, by and large, really aren't impressed with you.  All of this combines into a remarkably consistent feeling game that has plenty of reasons to play a bit tomorrow.

    Which brings us to an important point.  This game limits your interaction with it.  There are a maximum number of actions that can be taken each day.  You get a free 40 actions at rollover each night when the servers go dark for a bit of maintenance.  More actions are available through eating and drinking items that you find or craft in the game.  You can carry actions over from day to day, but only to the hard limit of 200 at a time.  This left me with a strange compulsion to try and maximize my cocktail crafting to get the most actions and stat boosts that I could each day.  Then I found out about the phases of the moons in the game giving bonuses to the stats gained on certain days...

    And this is why I only gave the game a 7.  I am not willing to devote my life to it.  I actually did love many parts of it.  I am also not done with it, but I did get exhausted by all of the content.  I played the first few days without the aid of the wiki.  I then spent a few days looking just at items that stumped me as to their usage.  A few days after that I found myself googling the title of every quest and every item. I was spending as much time on the wiki as I was in the game itself.

    *Shane's note*  As I was writing this post I ended up pausing here for several weeks.  Whatever closing passage that I was going to write but couldn't figure out how to word is now interestingly unimportant.  I haven't returned to this game in the last several weeks.  Admittedly I spent much less time at the computer during that time, and what time I did spend gaming I was playing with other people.

    I think it is telling that I wasn't able to finish my thoughts on the game earlier.  It is also fitting that I have nothing more dramatic to say now.  I still feel that I will return to this game at some later time.  In the mean time, what time I have to play games is likely to be spent with more "quick reward" fare. 

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