http://dofus.com/en
Yesterday, a coworker encountered Dofus, a tactical mmorpg done in flash. It’s very close to the sort of game I’ve always wanted to write – with numerous little stylistic differences of course.
Oh, and it’s free. Well, there’s apparently some sort of subscription option, but I can’t find any solid documentation on what subscribing actually earns you. The game is entirely playable with a free account from what I can tell.
As is traditional for this sort of pricing scheme, it is only natural that the game was produced by some random Japanese company I’ve never heard of before. The English client looks like it was actually originally developed in French – there are still random untranslated phrases in places and there are 3 French servers to 1 English.
Since it was written in flash 7, it should work on any modern operating system. They offer downloads for Windows, Linux, and Mac (OS9/X). Solaris (sparc and x86) also has a port of flash 7, so it might be possible to run the “linux” release of the client on there. I’ve not tested this theory yet since I haven’t had access to a Sun since I quit at ECE. Come to think of it, I’ve not actually tested on a linux box yet either 
I’ll probably fire it up on Hedwig tonight.
Also, a bit of warning. Since this is such a big program and it’s done in Flash, it abides by Flash’s security rules – which are annoying. The absolute first time you run the program on a computer might be kind of problematic. You’ll have to agree to letting it write stuff on your hard drive – and sometimes there are issues with full screen animation loading at the same time as that dialog, etc…
As is also traditional for this sort of game (small asian mmo’s on the optional pay scheme), the documentation is poor – or at least poorly translated. There is a good bit of information available, and the in-game tooltips and stuff are something amazing when you consider how bad/nonexistant they could have been.
The art on the web page is tremendous (as tradition also mandates 
). It feels a whole lot like the Nippon Ichi games (Disgaea, etc…) or Ragnarok Online. Unfortunately, the actual in-game graphics are of lower quality.
This reduced graphic quality is entirely understandable – we’re operating in Flash, not in some sort of 3D accelerated environment or anything. We have nice anti-aliased vector graphics, but it’s still 2D. The characters are really quite tiny in-game, and lose a whole lot of the definition that you can see in the full-sized images.
Most room backgrounds inside of town are just flat pre-rendered bitmaps… scaled up to whatever resolution you’re running in. So they actually look kind of tacky if you stare at them long enough while scaled to a high enough resolution (like 1280×1024). This is kind of funny. Most games that I’m aware of that mix these kinds of images do it the other way around – render a nice pretty background in real-time and place pre-rendered sprites on top. Shrug.
The music didn’t wow me, at least, I can’t remember enough about it to have any impression one way or the other.
Latency is a big issue. Flash was never really meant to do real-time communications with a remote server. Especially not one that a few hundred other folks are hammering at the same time. I mean… it can open sockets… but you have to transfer data in XML, which means extra data to transfer, which means more packets to achieve the same goal. (In fact, the API docs for the XMLSocket class seem vaguely of the opinion that nobody should ever use the class for anything, ever ;P)
Andd the latency isn’t just the network’s fault either. Since this is such a big Flash app (50mb) with so many things going on at once (I’ve seen 20+ players running around the same room plenty of times), it will lag all but the stoutest of machines. My 2.4ghz P4 laptop feels noticeably slower when running the game. My AMD64 3200+ at home is a bit better, but not much.
But it’s not just Flash’s fault. It’s the nature of the game. It needs to forcibly pause and delay you because this is a multi-user turn-based environment. So… you have timers and countdowns that you can’t really avoid. You can sometimes click through to speed things up a touch, but not by much.
On the other hand, because your moves in combat are timed, it means you might wind up missing turns if you’re not paying active attention or if you think for too long So it’s not like Adventure Quest where you can kill stuff slowly over the course of a long work day.
So far, I’ve played a few hours with two characters, an archer and a healer fairy type. My only real recommendation about starting the game so far is to go through the tutorial. It takes a while, but is actually pretty good. It’s quite easy to miss this prompt as your first few moments in the game are vaguely confusing. The following things will happen:
- The game will load. You will not be able to do anything.
- An NPC will walk up to you and start talking. Giving some sort of long-winded message about world theme and stuff.
- Click on the Eagle, Ganymede to start the tutorial. Click on the big statue to jump right into the game.
Aside from the fact that the game is so confusing at the beginning, I recommend the tutorial for some fairly twinkish reasons. First, you’ll get a free piece of equipment out of it, an amulet that gives you +1 to damage. But that’s boring.
The really fun bit of the tutorial is that there’s something of a bug/exploit/wierdly intentional situation at the end of the combat portion of the tutorial. You are put into a situation where you’re able to repeat a very easy fight against a mob that’s worth enough xp to get you to level 2 in one kill – level 3 in a few more, and level 4 a few more after that… Oh, and you’re healed to full right after the fight. I leveled my archer to 5 in about 20 minutes of repeatedly killing the little spider. Level 4 to 5 took most of that time – even though she was one-shotting him by then. I am guessing that it might be possible to get up to level 6 or even 7 this way, but that’s probably not worth the trouble.
Get up to level 3 (or 4 if you have any patience at all) before continuing the tutorial. You can’t go back a step, so once you leave the room, you won’t be able to grind against the mob any more.
All in all, I am enjoying the game so far.
The tactical element of combat is brutal. The NPC’s that I’ve fought so far have different AI’s and they can trap you in melee with them (which is not good for wimpy healer type). There seem to be a whole range of options in combat, I like it.
I’ve been in a few multi-player battles so far and they worked out well enough. I’d like to see what it’s like to be in an actual party before passing my final judgement, but I think the game’s worth checking out if you have the time/inclination.