Ubisoft is pumping out the free to play titles like mad. With three browser based games, a co-op RPG, a free to play shooter, they now add in this free to play dungeon siege game.
Maybe a rant about dungeon siege games.
I think one of the failures of dungeon siege developers is that they’re always trying to make and re-make classic dungeon sieging games like Stronghold and Lords of the Realm. What you end up getting is crappy half done games like Citadels and Stronghold 3.
Instead these studios are afraid of innovating and giving us something new.
Leave it up to big corporate Ubisoft to be the innovators.
The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot is a twist on the dungeon builder genre. Instead of building a castle you just get one. You simply design the shape of it. You deploy traps and minions to defend your keep from people.
This makes it closer to a Tower Defense type game, a perfect fit.
People will show up in your castle and have to get through your traps and minions. The better designed the harder it is for them to beat your castle.
Here’s the kicker.
Let’s say they get through.
They get 10% of your total gold.
To be fair it’s done on a timetable and if they can’t get through in time they don’t get the money.
It means that you can design your castle simply around slowing people down, as opposed to beating them outright.
There’s a flip side to this of course.
It means you invade other people’s castles and steal their gold.
With the gold you can invest in new gear, items to use while sieging, level ups, traps,minions, and walls. You level up, you level up your castle and you progress to get bigger and stronger.
The more gold you are earning the more you will need to spend to protect it. Every time you die in their castle you give them 100 gold.
The revenue model of the game is purchasing premium coin in order to get bigger badder minions and traps to make your castle more secure.
But Ubisoft also announced they will be rolling this system back because it ruins the game.
The game has a weird app on Facebook. It counts how many chickens have been slain and the numbers are ridiculous. The top chicken killer of this week has 82,000 kills… that’s insane.
But it makes a lot of sense.
My daily morning routine is I wake up, turn on my computer, take the dogs out for a walk, feed the dogs, make breakfast for me and my girlfriend, walk the dogs again… and then I play games.
Well the morning I got this game I decided I would play this game for a few minutes, just turn it on and I’d make breakfast shortly.
Well 30 minutes later I realized my girlfriend would be eating cold cereal.
Completing people’s dungeons takes about 3-20 minutes depending on how difficult they are made. But you always feel like going going and going. The idea that your castle can be raided by people really hurts over time.
They can take a maximum of 10% of your fortune per day… meaning that if you don’t play for ten days you will be broke.
Ouch.
The game is definitely fun and you’ll get tones of value out of it. The downside is it uses Facebook-like hooks to keep you playing… which doesn’t entirely make sense without a mobile component.
TheGameGuru.Me 