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There’s more than a little of Half-Minute Hero to Realm Of The Mad God. Marvelous Entertainment’s matchbox-sized charmer used a simple increase in speed to ridicule, explore, and ultimately benefit from the structures and quirks of the RPG, and now Wild Shadow Studios has opted for a little genre gene-splicing in order to do much the same for the MMOG. The twin-stick blaster is the unlikely donor in this strange scenario, and the end result is a healthy mutation – the designers are calling it a co-op fantasy MMOG shooter – that works far better than you might initially imagine.
Realm is both ambitious and pragmatic in its design: there’s room for the development team to scale the project in almost any direction as the money trickles in, but the central mechanic couldn’t be simpler. From the Nexus, players are despatched into a large shard-based fantasy landscape where their job is to take down wandering monsters in order to enrage the Mad God Oryx. Once a sufficient amount of Oryx’s minions have died, he’ll summon an entire server’s worth of players into his presence for a final confrontation. As such, the game itself plays as a series of randomly-generated assassination missions that open up as you cruise around one of many expansive world maps, sniping at passing enemies, collecting loot, and waiting for a boss to spawn nearby – or a dungeon entrance to be dropped by a foe – in order to gain a valuable XP boost.
Co-op is encouraged, but it’s also a pleasantly ad-hoc business. You can lock yourself to other players if you like, but simply joining in to down a boss will see you rewarded as part of the team. In fact, it’s entirely possible to make a pretty good go of levelling by simply photo-bombing the various battlefields you pass, turning up at a fight that’s already in progress and staying on the periphery just long enough to grab some rewards and head off again. Enemies drop loot as well as granting XP, much of which is class-specific, and the game encourages bartering with other players to get the best gear.
Such unadorned grinding should theoretically be rather tedious, but while Realm thinks like an MMOG, it acts like a shooter, and that allows its endless battles to be tackled at speed with an action game’s sense of ill-considered heroics and on-the-hoof strategising. It’s the perfect means of handling encounters for a brisk RPG with a level 20 cap and some forgettable – if charming – top-down landscapes. Beyond the moment-to-moment blasting, new classes are gradually unlocked by levelling up existing characters, and all of them come with a special move to back up their delightful 8bit visuals. The economy, meanwhile, is a typically streamlined mixture of Realm Gold, which can be topped up via micro transactions, and Fame, which is generated when a character dies.
Given Oryx’s habit of summoning an entire shard of players for each final battle, the endgame in Realm can be unexpectedly sudden. That said, although it’s almost always a tough fight, it’s capped with little more than a welcome shower of loot and a friendly wipe of the world map. Adding a touch of malice to proceedings, meanwhile, is a neat lift from Rogue-likes in the form of perma-death. As such, you’re encouraged to replay and rebuild fairly regularly, a move that brings a welcome tension – and variety – to proceedings, even if it may account for the game’s general lack of escalation in its pacing.
Wild Shadow’s micro-MMOG started out as a prototype created for the TIGSource Assemblee Game Jam. Since then, the project’s been in open beta for the best part of a year prior to its recent launch on the Chrome Web Store - a move that may account for the large and committed fanbase that has already grown up around it. Player interaction has clearly shaped Realm throughout its development, with everything from its in-jokes to its monster designs making the transition from ideas forum to current builds. If the designers can keep that momentum going, the team might have a mini Minecraft on its hands. Wild Shadow’s already shown how simple an MMOG can be, then – next we may get to see how scalable they are, too.