Inside Social Games

It seems like every day there is a new text-based-RPG on Facebook. Unfortunately, for many of them, if you’ve played one (like Mafia Wars, for example), you have more or less played them all. Each game has a similar game play that consists of doing quests to level up and limitations imposed on how many you can do via a passively regenerated stat that is usually dubbed “Stamina.”

The last text-based Facebook RPG to really stand out was Hammerfall (in which you could manually influence boss battles as opposed to simply clicking “Attack” and getting a randomly generated outcome). Well, The Fellowship by Appsorama has taken what Hammerfall started and taken the level of interactivity one step forward.

This RPG contains most of the familiar elements of the classics (stamina, equipment, gold, currency gained through offers, etc), but what stands out above everything else is the combat system. Essentially, when a player starts a quest, they are given a little storyline and prompted to actually do something for the quest. If you have to fight something, you fight it in a turn based style. You choose who to attack, what to attack with (magic, melee, etc), to use potions, or to defend.

Furthermore, each quest can become more than just a single encounter. You may often find yourself slaying half dozen monsters before the quest is actually done. Of course, you don’t have to stay on the quest if you do not wish. If it is your desire, you can take a break from questing and complete it later, or just abandon it altogether.

Another great feature is that you can have up to six playable characters (like in most mainstream RPGs), plus any Mercenaries that you choose to hire. As you may have guessed, however, this number is directly correlated to the number of friends you invite to your Fellowship. While this is the same idea in almost every other social RPG,  in the early levels there isn’t a drastic need to desperately mass-invite players. The only real limiting factor to not adding members seems to be difficulty, which is a nice way to avoid force-feeding the necessity of that “invite” button. Instead, they just provide “convincing persuasion” once you get stuck on your own as you, ahem, “learn the hard way.”

Unfortunately, the game has some annoyances too. Perhaps the chief irritant is the fact that you start a quest, engage in battle, click an action, wait for your page to refresh, and repeat. It might seem minor, but with a slower connection and a long battle, this gets old very quickly (not to mention the constant clicking sound and flickering refresh of the browser window).

There are other issues to consider too: For example, stamina takes a lifetime to recharge (30 minutes for one stamina, which seems like a way to strongly coax people into using the ads page), and there are a number of complaints about many quests being far too difficult, as well as the general lack of quests. Luckily, the developers are more than aware of the latter two issues, and have stated they are hard at work on fixing it. This is certainly a good thing, and not merely because the game is still in development: for any online game, especially an RPG, to be successful, the game should change from time to time in order to keep the experience fresh and interesting.

Granted, game is reminiscent of a watered-down, mainstream RPG, but it is still a step in the right direction. That’s not to say that the older Facebook RPG titles are bad. On the contrary, they are most certainly successful, addictive, and fun, but for a new title coming down the pipe, a little uniqueness doesn’t hurt.

Despite its short-comings, The Fellowship is still quite the interesting, highly interactive game that tries not to force-feed any features to players.

AppData for The Fellowship