Qwertyuiopia

Cities is a free web-based multiplayer online RPG with an attitude: a distinctly English attitude, to be precise. It’s setting is a (pretty web-conscious) pseudo-medieval land full of puns and mathematical absurdity, called the ‘Kingdom, ruled by the game’s creator, ‘King Elseware, and the Council of Great Lords, five people also responsible for parts of the game.

The game experience is comprised of the game’s web interface, the Wiki, and various external sites that help with mapping, calculations or market prices (as well as an irc channel for the talkative types). The wiki is a very important part of the game, as rules, quests and other info are documented there by the players themselves. The wiki is also used for social interactions and trade between players, and various projects are organized and maintained either for the benefit of new players or for easier access to areas or items.

Despite (or maybe because of) its lack of graphics and a more captivating user environment, Cities is a very smart game. Combat is turn-based and with its own logic to be mastered, and it’s alignment-based system for making stuff is brilliantly balanced in a way that promotes interaction between players.

Registering a character, a new player gets to choose one of four alignments: Earth, Air, Fire or Water. This element defines a starting bonus the character gets (i.e. Earth players start with more Hit Points (HP), while Fire players start with a better % chance to hit.), the elements it deals double damage to and takes double damage from in combat (Water beats Fire but is beaten by Air), and what kind of crafts the character is good at. So, in order to make a slice of bread, grinding the wheat into flour would be an Earth craft, making the flour into dough would be easier to do to a Water character, baking the dough into bread a Fire craft, and slicing it an Air one.

The game’s quests are, to a great extent, one of the major things that set it aside from other RPGs. While in most online RPGs a player’s progress and skills are mostly a product of gathering combat experience (XP), the quests in Cities are diverse and –most of the time– interesting. For example, to get initiated to the crafts of Air (one of the first things a new player would do) you simply have to visit all the four aligned cities; The Talisman Maker will only teach the art of Enchanting Talismans to someone who’s read everything by Robert Heinlein (his whole collection is available as items in-game); The quest of Time and Space requires you to “Worship” at 4 shrines the correct time of day: 04:00, 12:00, 2o:oo and 00:00. The tasks required for most of the quests are pretty complex, and some of them require careful planning or waking up weird hours and can even take months to complete.

Although Cities is a very complex game, with hundreds of items and a lot of locations (there’s even another continent, south of the area depicted in this map and about as large), it is designed so it won’t take more than 20 minutes a day. Fact is, that you can easily spend an hour (or even a lot more) a day playing, but there are also always tasks that cost a lot of Action Points (AP), and spend a day’s moves mining, or fishing, or constructing items. Beginning the game, you get an action point every fifteen minutes, up to a maximum of 100. There are ways to increase your maximum AP and AP regeneration rate through quests in the game, and items, like Mugs of Coffee and Fags, that grant you some AP when consumed.

And yes, there’s more. Parties, shamans, pets, player shops, disease epidemics, alternate planes of existence and magic beans: There’s always more. Cities has evolved to be a very complex universe and a very alive one, at that — Players face new, yet-uncatalogued monsters, items and locations with a frequency that would be impossible to maintain in a more graphical environment, and it’s up to them to discover and map the ever changing land (There’s even been a mapping contest). Complemented by the wiki, the constant development gives the game an atmosphere of exploration and study of the mechanics behind things that is rarely achieved in the commercial MMOs.

Overall, Cities is ideal for people who are bored of (or don’t have the time for) MMORPGs, but still like the idea of a consistent presence on an online universe. It’s for people who like exploration, experimentation and mathematical thinking. Oh, it’s also for people who like puns . Anyway, Smart Game.

Useful links:
The Game:
(http://cities.totl.net/)
Wiki: Main Page:
(http://wiki.cities.totl.net/w/Main_Page)
Wiki: Introduction to Cities:

(http://wiki.cities.totl.net/w/Introduction_to_Cities)
A place to get started.
Wiki: Development:
(http://wiki.cities.totl.net/w/Development)
A place to get plugins for your browser
4cities – Cities Quest Progre

ss:
(http://cities.jocarter.co.uk/progress.php)
A tool to check your progress in cities’ quests, by Jo Carter.
Cities Mapper – Darksatanic Survey:
(http://survey.darksatanic.net/detailmap)
Automapping project of the ‘Kingdom

maintained by Darksatanic.
Citiesberg:
(http://cortex.ecs.soton.ac.uk/citiesberg/)
Bot feeds of the prices at the markets

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 14th, 2007 at 15:32 and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.