I might as well admit it. What I've really been doing for the last year is playing Dragons of Atlantis on facebook. Naturally, I'm still doing other things, too, but I've been playing Dragons of Atlantis a whole lot. It's a fun game created by Wonderhill, which has been acquired by Kabam, the people who also made Kingdoms of Camelot and Edgeworld. There are people to talk to, a city and outposts and an army to build--which includes several kinds of dragons and mythical beasties--alliances to join or to oppose. The graphics are great, though it has no animation other than outpost fires and moving dragons in your city and outposts. They move around, and they look like crap when they're injured. I was happy when fires were added to the map. It's so pretty when you light up an opponent's outpost. This is often referred to in world chat as a barbecue, and people will be asking if anyone has marshmallows (though most of them misspell it "marshmellows," to my annoyance). The fires don't seem as pretty when they are in your own outpost. Peculiar. Dragons of Atlantis is an MMORPG, and very successful, too, so I'm not the only person who's hopelessly hooked on it. Some people are hooked a lot worse than I am. I still manage to eat once in a while and see real humans from time to time, and I don't spend a lot of money on the game. (You don't have to spend any money at all to play it, but you can.) Some people spend hundreds, and their humongous armies reflect that. There are always things to do in this game, and there are always a lot of other people online playing it. Of course if they're not online, you can always go and visit and plunder their cities. Unless they're in an alliance that is friendly with your alliance. Did I mention alliances? There's chat, world chat and alliance chat. Because it's glitchy and because you can only chat with your specific alliance members in it (as opposed to, say, Noble Fools II and III as well as your own Noble Fools) and can't monitor world chat at the same time, no one ever uses alliance chat anymore, they just make facebook groups and chat in them instead. Which means that people know each others' names and then they get to be friends in real life. Almost. Sort of. Some of the time. When you start out in the game, you have to choose a name. Do it carefully, as it'll cost a lot to change it later. The game *is* free to play, but some things you can only get by buying rubies, the game currency. Choosing a name is difficult now that so many people are playing it, as a lot of great names have already been taken. I have taken a couple of them myself, as I play in several realms. Each realm (server) is a unique game world even though the map looks exactly the same. You can have built up a fantastic city in some realm, and have millions upon millions of resources, but if you begin to play in a new realm--and they are adding more of them all the time--then you have to start all over. Ok. So you start playing by building your city. If you follow the little quests that are given to you, then that's one way to build. There are others. You really don't need to do everything the quests suggest. Like a theater to keep your happiness up? Once you have enough gold rolling in from theft you don't need your people to be happy, as you won't need to tax them, which is the only thing that makes them unhappy. Silly people don't care if you draft their asses into your armies, and you need to do that on a regular basis. The critical thing to remember when you are building is that this is a war game. So make sure you have room for lots of garrisons in your city and lots of training camps in your outposts. If you want to read how to do the game, then go to the Dragonomicon. It's a good guide to all things Dragons of Atlantis. Game on. |
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