h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi Lady Scott

I noticed your reply/comment on the cheapo, stingy, free internet games thread.

I have recently been looking at cheapo stingy free internet multiplayer game world thingies. From your comment I assume you have dabbled in them or at least Runescape.

Is it worth playing? Do you know of anywhere on H2G2 where I could ask about which games are best to play?

My two worries are: a) is the game in depth and detailed enough have fun playing and/but b) not so addictive or requiring so much time to get anywhere in it that life out of work becomes the game itself.

Thanks,

Alf

Yeah, I play it far too much...

The free version includes enough quests and money making activities/skills to keep a person busy for at least a couple of months.

There is a paid version, but it's only $5/month, and includes loads more quests and activities. Although the free player worlds only have so much of the map and a limited number of activities and levels available to them, it would be pretty much impossible for a paying player to run out of things to do on there, because there are new quests, monsters, and various other things added every couple of weeks. Even so, I've been playing this since summer, and I'm still doing the free version.

I like the fact that it's a medieval style setting, and that they sneak in a lot of little "educational" things, like the fact that you need to mine both tin and copper to smelt bronze, and that woad leaves actually do make blue dye. (A lot of the players are school kids ) It's also had the principles of supply and demand built into the buying and selling prices in the shops, although you are always free to trade with other players, for whatever price the goods you've made will bear.


The down side of it is that the experience points needed to increase a level start out very small for every skill... but as the level goes up, the experience points needed to increase a level also increase - almost exponentially. That's fine for the first 40 levels or so, especially since you could whisk right through about the first 10 levels in a couple of hours, but when it gets to the point where you need for instance 30,000 experience points in order to increase one level, and each time you do a certain activity it only gives you say 75 points... well, you do the math - that's a *lot* of clicking, especially since most things you make require more than one step. For instance, if you're making ruby amulets, first you need to have rubies, which are either random monster drops, or random mining finds - but they're in their uncut form. Once you have your rubies, you need to cut them, using a chisel. Then you need to mine gold, and smelt the gold. Then you need to melt the gold and use a jewelry mold with the gold and the ruby to make the amulet. But... it's not worth much unless you string it, so you need to go shear some sheep to get wool, then take the wool to a spinning wheel to spin it, then finally use the ball of yarn to string the amulet. The good part about all this is that you get experience points in various skills, depending on which step you're doing.

Another downside to this game is that your character spends an inordinate amount of time just walking from one place to another. The game was designed to put what you need just about as far as possible from where you gather the raw materials. For instance, the mines aren't anywhere near the smelt furnaces, and the smelt furnaces aren't anywhere near the anvils. Usually, there's a bank not too far away from at least some of the places you need to go. There is a "run" function on the character, but your "energy" runs out in about a minute, which usually isn't enough time to get from where you are to where you want to be, and then it takes several minutes to regenerate.

Oh and speaking of regenerating, in the "free to play" worlds, there is an inordinate amount of competition for things like mining rocks, since the higher level ores regenerate slowly, and there aren't anywhere near enough mining rocks to go around for the number of people trying to mine them, so higher level players all too often don't seem to have any conscience, and will "steal" the ore out from under the lower level players who are trying to mine. (They can't steal it out of your pack, but with a higher mining level, and a higher level pick axe, they usually manage to mine it from the rock in only a few hits, even if a lower level player has been hitting the rock for a minute or more)

There's also the aggravating thing of the programming automatically logging you out if it doesn't detect any "activity" from you for more than a minute. This means that if you're fishing, or cutting a higher level tree, both of which you could theorhetically do for several minutes from one click while your pack automatically fills up, you still need to keep clicking around someplace on the game so it can detect that you're actually still there, or it'll automatically log you out. I realize it's to prevent players from using auto-miner programs (told you there was a lot of competition for certain ores), but it's aggravating to be sitting there watching your pack fill up and suddenly see that you need to log in, yet again.

So as far as it being too much like work, that really only happens if you're intent on achieving high skill levels or a lot of money as quickly as possible. I would suggest that you look around on there a bit, reading the manual, and doing the tutorial to get an idea of what the activities are like. There area also forums available on the web where you could discuss the various pros and cons to the game. There are also various sites devoted to the game, including information on scores needed for various levels, where to find what raw materials needed for each skill, and even walk throughs for the quests.

Wow, thanks for the long reply. I feel almost obliged to play it now after that!

I will have a little dip into the manuals etc tonight and 'waste' some time in it later in the week.

I felt bad writing a small book for you to read, but there are so many different aspects to the game, I would have felt worse not telling you about as many pros and cons as I could think of off the top of my head.

Let me know what you think of it when you try it out.