Features

My hands on weekend with iPhone MMOG: We Rule

Pony up for my kingdom?

My hands on weekend with iPhone MMOG: We Rule
|
| We Rule

There have been plenty of massively multiplayer online games released on iPhone and iPod touch.

Generally they have followed the Mafia Wars-style of gaming though (see the likes of gpsAssasins, Underworld: Sweet Deal and Turf Wars), and while ngmoco's Eliminate Pro offered persistent online ranking data, it wasn't massively multiplayer.

That's one reason the publisher's We Rule - developed by US studio Newtoy - is a significant release.

Another is the business model, which follows the freemium or free2play model, in which you can play the entire game for free, while having the option to purchase items - in this case Mojo - to improve your experience - in this case, speeding up the time it takes to complete tasks.

Failure to connect

Of course, these games are very technically complex to make; something that's been demonstrated by the game's prolonged Canadian beta test, and the server issues that have bedevilled its opening weekend.

Ironically however, playing the game when it launched from a UK time zone, it was error free for most of Saturday - at least until US players started to flood online. Since then, everyone's suffered as ngmoco upgrades its infrastructure.

Still, I've had plenty of time to gauge the game.

Time to Mojo ratio

We Rule's gameplay initially has you planting crops to generate gold. The two in-game currencies are gold - required to buy seeds, infrastructure and buildings - and Mojo, which you use to speed up those actions, effectively making them instantaneous.

You can buy Mojo, at the rate of 99c, €0.79 or 59p for 5 units, up to 800 units for $50/£30. You also get given some every time you level up - there's the usual MMOG experience point system that rewards your activities with XP, locking out items and activities until you reach a certain level.

In terms of how you interact with the game, time is the basic mechanism.

Each crop you plant costs and provides a certain amount of gold and takes a certain amount of time to grow; from seconds to days. Once mature it has to be harvested. If you don't do this, the crop will die and you won't receive any gold.

Neatly you can get push notifications to alert you when your crops are ready for harvesting. Indeed, every in-game action can be set up with a push notification, although for some reason you have to set these individually, rather than having a global setting for all tasks.

You do have to be careful choosing which crops you want to plant in terms of when they will mature. There's no point picking something that's going to need harvesting when you're asleep.

Building a kingdom

As well as crops, you create buildings for your workers. You don't control them directly though. To be honest, they're cosmetic items wandering around the screen, but you do generate gold from their cottages via taxation.

As you level up, more commercial options become available in terms of mines, tailor shops, windmills for grinding grain, butchers, bakers etc.

What's neat about these is that you don't use them, your friends in the game do.

Realising that the success of Farmville and similar games on Facebook is all about their sociability, ngmoco has built We Rule from the ground up as a fairly social game.

The limitation is that it uses its own Plus+ system, which isn't the most popular iPhone social gaming network and isn't the easiest system to find friends within either. (The best option seems to be tweeting or Facebooking your Plus+ name in the hope your friends will add you. I'm summaecodex if you're interested.)

Nevertheless, the ability to easily see your friends' kingdoms - there's a mini-map screen - as well as use their facilities to gain items you can't produce yourself is an excellent design move, and one that will help glue together a We Rule community.

And your status in terms of the power, quality or even aesthetic layout of your kingdom compared to your peers will be massively important with respect to the longterm player retention.

Power of the throne

Server issues aside then, it's a case of so far so good for We Rule.

What I'm not sure about however is the pacing of the game. Certainly in the early stages, the frequency at which your crops die when they're not harvested because you can't be online all the time is frustrating.

I'm guessing this will lessen as you level up and don't rely on quick growing crops for your gold. Also, such frustration is a key driver for players to buy Mojo - something that's vital to We Rule's (and ngmoco's) success.

In this respect then, perhaps We Rule will work best as a game that you check up on a couple of times per day rather than one you sit down and play for an hour at a time.

Talking to ngmoco CEO Neil Young about the Canadian beta, he said the average usage was between 7 and 8 sessions per day, with an overall playtime of 25 to 30 minutes.

More significant than this will be how well the game monetises.

Anecdotally, one of my friends in the game has already spent £18. "I've not got a clue what I am doing and I'm injecting funds to maximise my minimal minutes," he explained.

Ngmoco will be hoping for plenty such players.

Jon Jordan
Jon Jordan
A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon can turn his hand to anything except hand turning. He is editor-at-large at PG.biz which means he can arrive anywhere in the world, acting like a slightly confused uncle looking for the way out. He likes letters, cameras, imaginary numbers and legumes.