Spiral Knights
Posted by L4G | Filed under Featured, Thoughts
I remember simple fun. Simple fun was 4 player Bomberman chaos. It was fighting over rupees in Zelda Four Swords. Lately, simple fun has been Spiral Knights. Simple 4 player co-op MMO fun. ^^ Official Site is here. Trailer below.
Spiral Knights’ features read more like a blacklist than a whitelist. No classes. No races. No XP. No leveling up. No skill trees or skills… and you know what.. ..that’s just fine. ^^ I wasn’t playing Spiral Knights looking for a ‘deep meta-game’ that would ‘encourage efficient micro’. I wanted some good old sofa style co-op. Hell, you can play the whole game one-handed with just the mouse! I was eating ice-cream while playing most of the time (ice-cream yay! o^^o).
Essentially, run around dungeons together with your friends hackin’ n’ slashin’ your way through monsters while solving simple puzzles and dodging traps together. Combat roles are defined only by what gear you equip. Anyone can play anything provided they have the items (and there is only a sword or a gun so even here it’s bare bones roles). There is still the joy of collecting phat lootz and crafting new items. Gear does have a sort of ‘meta level’, but it maxes out at 10 and you get there so quickly that we rarely paid any attention to it. As a side note, the less griefing that is possible in an online game the better. While griefing in Four Swords was sometimes funny, it was largely due to you being able to lean over and punch the culprit right afterwards, then get on with defeating Ganon. In an online environment, removing any potential for griefing at all is paramount as it helps focus everyone on getting on with choppin’ monsters and collecting loot. Short of someone AFK’ing, Spiral Knights has this nailed.^^b
There is also a larger macro level of co-op taking place in Spiral Knights. All players on the server are ultimately working together to unlock new mine shafts (dungeons) allowing us all to delve deeper into the earth. Mine shafts are unlocked by players depositing minerals down them which are acquired from their adventures. The combination of minerals used to unlock shafts affects their alignment with certain para-elements, which ultimately alters their content. Realworld time-of-day also affects what dungeons you might encounter as you progress downward (the world beneath the surface is shifting), so there is a good chance of seeing a lot of variety provided you don’t have a 7:30 bedtime (next year ima stay up to 8:30! ><).
Must give a mention to the excellent business model they are running using a free ‘energy system’. All players are given a free amount of energy each day which will let you do 10 dungeons soaking roughly 2+ hours of your time. Crafting items also costs energy, but is directly proportional to the level of item being crafted. Dying may also cost you a tiny bit if no teammates can rez you, but essentially the game can be played unhindered for a few hours a night (more than enough for me in my lifestyle). Anything beyond the relaxing few hours a day though (or higher level gameplay) will eventually tempt you to purchase energy in bulk. It is an elegant implementation of a system I have seen executed very poorly in the past (not to mention names, a spaceship game where a collected fuel resource was required to move and shoot.. but moving used fuel so, it was a loop of searching to collect fuel, to search, to collect fuel.. ..and never get to shoot anything ever -_-).
Honestly, Spiral Knights is probably a little too simple for my tastes. Even at late game, there appears to be little customisation and what I would call “stimulating challenge”. As a way to enjoy killing a few hours at night occasionally with friends though, it certainly ponied up. It makes me wonder at the direction a lot of online MMO’s seem to be taking lately. Maybe there is finally a realisation that the generation which birthed and played the graphical MMO genre as students, have no less passion to play them nowadays but simply less time. Well, it did feel nice to have a sort of virtual sofa where we could collect and sit together again, running mindlessly around whacking anything that moved without fear of consequence. Simple free fun. o^^o
