Lately I have been playing a lot of Free Realms and having honestly a lot more fun than I thought I would. So here is a brief analysis of why Free Realms works and what could be improved. I’m going to use bullet points because bullet points, powerpoints and spreadsheets are how I roll. I will start with things I find to be strengths, then move on to weaknesses and finish up with some friendly advice to those working for Sony on this game.

So without further ado:

Strengths

• Free realms is not attempting to be WoW - This is amazingly important, carving out another playstyle and niche. When games compete directly in their design and demographic with WoW they mostly serve to remind people why they played WoW to begin with, which doesn’t usually fare well in the long term for the budding MMO.
• Exploration - Ooh shiny gold sparkles! I feel the MMO market has been underserving at least one major segment, based on looking at psychological data (Daedalus, et al) is the Explorer Bartle type. Free Realms is one of the few MMOs that gives a real benefit to actually just exploring. It’s unfortunate that they only really support the literal element of the explorer type and have some major issues even there (which I will discuss later) but it does feel like a genuine effort. It also helps to give an economic grounding to the convenience that teleporting brings. Teleport makes grouping and playing together easy, but incentives of collections are thrown to those who go on foot.
• Activity based, not progression based - With the combination of multiple independent jobs, minigames, a card game, racing games, and repeatable quests, the focus is more on what you want to do than who you want to be. I don’t feel somehow penalized for not eeking out the most optimal progression/XP path while power leveling to cap so that I can participate in the game’s available activities. I can choose to do whatever I feel like doing at the moment and I’m rewarded for my time - this lends well to the more casual demographic. In addition, since the game can be played for free there is no urge to “get one’s money’s worth”, so you truly can set your own pace.
• Generally good and inventive minigames - Most of the mini games are not just copies of the popcap/pogo top 10 or classics we’ve seen a million times prior. If anything they pull from a more modern ideaset - the cooking game for example is a wario-ware / cooking mama type game. Perhaps the best (and most reused) is a select-many-and-drop game (*cough* Legends of Laundry), however props to them for really nailing the interface and feel for it. The card game is simple but decent (it’s like a redux of Norrath)
• Combat is treated as a mini-game / activity - Normally I wouldn’t consider this a strength in a virtual world that is focused on providing an immersive experience. However, in a casual setting that is constantly pulling you out of the world to play minigames it is far more consistent. Plus from a game design side, it sweeps a whole slew of logistics problems effectively under the rug. It allows people to play the game legitimately in a non-combat fashion. It removes worries of asynchronous or asymmetrical aid, loot and xp distribution (mostly) and scarcity issues. While it may feel a bit like cheating on the designer’s side, it means a whole clientele of players who do not need to be indoctrinated into tapping, loot etiquette, DKP, same-side pull griefing, and power leveling (it may happen but you don’t watch it if you’re not involved). Loot drops during a minigame (yes even the match-3) seem to have a predilection towards being useful for your current job, allowing you to get better by doing the things you like.
• Mini-achievements and Tickets - Every mini game or combat in Free Realms has on or more primary goals that are required for success, but they also typically have a secondary goal, a bonus goal, and often a few bonus goals that are only available for subscribers (a brilliant ploy if I might say so). The completion of each of these bonus achievements will typically reward the player in the form of ‘tickets’. This system is not too unlike WoW’s PvE loot tokens, except that it is omnipresent and microscopic. You can get tickets for doing just about anything and you get them often. You can trade these tickets in in bunches of 10, 20, or 30 for a random roll of a treasure chest of low, mid, or high level respectively. These rolls can sometimes be items of low worth (like a couple healing potions), but when they are so they are generally items of high use. Since every player can use every item, there is a better chance that the item dropped might be better than something somewhere on your character. Loot also comes in different random colors so you may get something you already have in a different color, and since there is no inventory size, there is no penalty for carrying around these options.
• No inventory - Again, this feels a bit like cheating during MMO Design 101, but it works with aplomb here. No need to explain the complex culture of micromanagement, bank systems, alt banks, and most important no ‘prep time’ getting the right things into your inventory (and right amounts).
• You can generally walk away from the game at any time - Maybe I’m not mounting truck nuts on my mounts’ nuts here or showing my carebear side’s stuffing, but being able to get up and get a drink without worrying about being ganked by a player or killed by a respawning monster and losing something (XP, gold, repair, travel time), makes for a completely refreshing experience.
• Not all kiddie - The rounded edged demeanor that is the child-friendly world of Free Realms is sometimes pierced by something shocking, however I’ve noticed that this only occurs within the subscriber content (Medic, Warrior, subscriber quests). It seems as if the age group for the subscriber content is about 3-5 years older than the rest of the game (discussions of relationships, more serious quarrels, nastier looking weapons, etc). My favorite is probably the medic weapons - they include a bonesaw (Audition anyone?) and some sort of saw that looks like it was stolen from WoW’s goblin logger robots. Other than these minute idiosyncrasies, I’d say that Free Realms has WoW’s visual and tonal style, only here it fits somehow more naturally.
• The Movement controls are copied 98% from WoW - Complete with (numlock) and everything. Of all the things that WoW’s game genetics should pass on to future MMO genre games, everyone else seems to vote for the ! and ? marks. Me? I vote for the movement and camera controls. I’ve never understood why so many games that are blatantly going for the American market choose to use anything but this control scheme. It would be like making an FPS where switching between your weapons are the letters Y,U,I,O and P instead of 1,2,3,4,5 - the possible benefits are outweighed by the loss of familiarity (think DVORAK). This is the one place where you most want to copy convention, and I feel Free Realms is one of the few to do that to this extent.
• Good pricepoint and business model - With so many games demanding ~15$/month worth of subscription money and justifiable time, one can typically only choose one or maybe two. The free-to-play market has creeped up around this, filling in the rest of the space and the play time of those without credit cards or enough justifiable time. Free Realms has hopped in to grab the best of both worlds (which clearly works as RuneScape and Club Penguin will attest), however it bests both by providing far more reasons for upgrading that come at you from every direction, and a robust microtrans system to top it off.
• Streaming Download - No giant pre-download, no long patching times, relatively frequent updates, short waits. Well done.

Weaknesses

Put on your hardhat - now I throw down the heavies.

• Communication - The minigame-laden world prettymuch decimates social communication and context, to the point where it becomes almost exclusively a solo game experience. Each minigame is a short removal from the world, but it generally requires your full attention and interface (often removing the chat window altogether). Any concept of chat continuity goes right out the window as soon as someone pops into a mini game without even so much as an auto-afk to let you know. Without a omnipresent voice chat or external tool like Ventrillo, I can’t imagine trying to play ‘with’ a friend other than popping together to do a combat minigame together.
• Combat - Is highly shallow, with little challenge or opportunities for learning. Some encounters are well scripted and interesting but when you only have 0-3 abilities (most of which just do the same things), it’s generally just a keymashfest at best. Combat also removes the normal game interface, meaning you can’t change equipment, view your equipment, change out your belt loadout, change class, view your quests (to figure out what you’re supposed to achieve in this combat), or just about anything else. This seems like a major mistake - I understand not switching classes or maybe belt items, but not being able to see quests other than their text log outputs is a real head scratcher. On the plus side, you can exit combat whenever you feel like. Too much of the game is combat for it to be acceptable to be this dull.
• Little Class Variance - The class/job paradigm is a little confused in Free Realms. There are two types of jobs: Combat Jobs and Activity Jobs. The combat jobs have very little variance between them in terms of abilities or playstyle with the possible exception of the Medic, which is a pay-only job. It feels like no care at all was put into this department to come up with a unique ‘feel’ for the jobs, or there was an imperative to stretch the game to too many different jobs at the start. The most clear activity jobs (Miner, Blacksmith and Chef) are really 2 activities spread across 3 jobs, which is fine. The rest are all fixed to a single activity or minigame and either aren’t explained how they progress, or do so poorly. The pet trainer job feels tacked on just to add another job, since the pet itself progresses each skill, there are no benefits to the pet trainer class other than unlocking new tricks which will come naturally on the pet’s own progression, and the only way you can improve it is to stand still and do the same 5 second thing a couple hundred times. Which brings me to:
• Pets - Pets seem like a last-minute push for launch to justify more revenue, not a genuine offering. While they put a lot of work into the varied animations, colours, and tricks - the pets are personality-less, incentive-less and fall short of their Nintendogs rhetoric. It feels like a preview of a feature yet-to-come.
• No Danger and Conflict - I understand that this is a kids game, but making a world with combat and no conflict, or danger feels like a hollow offering. The only creature to give me any form of fear/trouble was the Grave Lord, but I still beat it on my first try at level 12. Part of the explorer Bartle Type is wanting to ‘explore’ if you can beat something you couldn’t beat before, or the possibility of some hidden secret or treasure for beating a really difficult or out-of-the-way enemy. Wandering around I often found ‘named’ / ’silver’ / ‘elite’ enemies marked as really dangerous. I fought them. I beat them easily. I got nothing for doing so (not even an achievement or a ticket or anything).
• No zoning or grouping for quests - It’s amazing how hard it is to find a specific quest, or any and all quests nearby within a list of 30 quests across 8 or so pages, none of which show their ‘more’ to tell you what it’s about without clicking on each. Whenever I zoned into a new area, I made it a habit of clicking the ‘right arrow’ to change the current tracking quest through all 30 quests just to see which quests were close by. Only a bug that caused the update of the compass rose / path tracking to fail sometimes hindered even that. In short, the game was meant to be played one quest at a time in a linear way.
• Lot of missing info - Buffs and debuffs don’t show what they do or a duration. Abilities don’t show how much energy they cost anywhere. In general, a lot of information appears to be missing. I understand keeping stuff hidden to not confuse the casual user - the ‘more’ for the quests does this elegantly. The biggest problem: a microtrans item that increases xp rate (stars) didn’t mention how long the effect lasted for. I bought it as an experiment - the buff didn’t show either. It disappeared after exactly one hour. If I thought that it was going to last longer (as many other XP rate micro items do in other games), since I paid money, I would be very upset about this.
• Very segmented interface - The use of very large icons and text everywhere coupled with an exclusive use of paging systems and a lot of information hiding via slidein/out panels lead to a highly segmented interface. In general, information isn’t really ‘presented’ in most of the panels, it is sort of dispersed all around and you have to find it. The job switch dialog doesn’t fit all the jobs on one page, and doesn’t seem to have any sort of logical sort order, so you just have to page back and forth until you find what you’re looking for. The collections interface has no way of sifting finished collections from unfinished or identifying easy the collections that are nearly complete, nor are they grouped by proximity or concept: one warp stone collection might be on page 4 and the other one page 13. Most collections don’t tell you what they give you for completing them, but even that information is only accessible by clicking on each in turn. The quest interface I already talked about above suffers from the same malady. Items have the right start: two view modes, one which is a simple list form so I can directly see the item power levels - but there still is no way of sorting by this. With plans for a console release of this game, sifting through pages of things that must each be selected / hovered to find any info will become less acceptable.
• COMPLETELY MISSED THE POINT OF A WEB MMO - The website is mostly nonfunctional or empty, with the exceptions being what feels like an incomplete leaderboard and a profile page that tells you a couple numbers. The portrait feature seems unimplemented or broken, the friend system is typically broken, none of the flash-based minigames can be played standalone on the web, and there aren’t regular updates of feeds of interesting information - just a news feed and a lagged / broken friend info feed. In short, there is little to no reason for me to go to the website other than the fact that it is the only way to start the client. Other than the social ‘marketing’ side (they have two twitter feeds and a facebook page), they also seem to be missing the point of the social web / mmo - there are no widgets to show off my character on other sites of mine, no apps to kill time or aid viral acquisition, no user involvement or contests through the social media, no GM rum events, no way of accessing my profile data / xml / feed rss.

Advice

Here is some advice for the Free Realms team. I should preface these with stating that I am not the game’s target audience - and then follow that by saying that you are probably underestimating your target audience.

• Explain the Maker’s scores more predominantly - I have tried to figure out what they do by trial and error and still can’t quite get it
• Show leaderboard high score, best of friends, personal best on the start and end of each mini game - right now I have no frame of reference for my score
• Fix the missing info, more mouseovers, effects, more buttons
• Provide an ‘advanced’ interface mode that shows smaller icons and fits more on a page and has sort/filter options or just add the sort/filter options to the existing interface.
• Provide a ‘quests near me’ display, ‘track nearest quest’ button or group quests by zone interface in the quest list
• Repeatable quests’ (!) should be a different color, at least after the second time it’s presented - I often want to feel like I’ve completed everything in an area, and it’s difficult to tell since I have no way of knowing if I’ve already completed the quest before.
• Quest type hint in accept would be nice (not easy to tell between instace quests or the 4 types of search/race quests until you’ve actually accepted the quest)
• The youtube video recorder is a great idea but it doesn’t seem well implemented (the files are giant and yet highly compressed / unwatchable once they’ve been double compressed by youtube)
• In and out of game Contests
• Ways of playing minigames outside of the game client (Facebook app maybe?)
• Make some highly difficult areas or enemies (like possibly unbeatable by a solo player even with microtrans items) - hey guys… remember The Sleeper?
• Look into implementing voice chat for friends to be able to communicate while weaving in and out of solo minigames.
• A way of customizing colours of items for a fee (or maybe a future job tradeskill)
• Residences - I know you’re planning this at some point
• Mounts - I know you’re planning this too
• As you raise the level cap and add new abilities to classes, refactor some of the existing ones so they have a little more variety or flavour
• Add another stat, damage type, or effect (perhaps only at higher level) to allow combat to be more than a mashfest - currently there aren’t many ‘choices’ in combat other than pulling tactics and perhaps item usage.
• More achievements / ticket bonuses! (combat skill-based achievements maybe?)

Lastly, Congrats on 2million! Keep up the good work and look forward to more updates!

‘One of those uninspired “cow in the moonlight” walks.’