Month: September 2015

Realm Grinder‘s reset mechanic has the important effect of speeding the player back to where s/he left off. In MMO terms, think of this as letting your alt quickly play where you main just was. There are drawbacks, but this seems generally a good thing that could be adopted elsewhere in some form.

For those who have not played this sort of game: after a slow first run while you are learning the game, you reset and advance steadily until you hit a wall in terms of progress, when you run out of new multipliers and abilities; you then reset, which gives you a bigger bonus and pushes the wall further out. Realm Grinder accelerates you towards that wall, which sounds bad to phrase it that way so let’s instead say that it brings you back to your personal late game. You are banking progress and continuing, not starting a long journey over.

This will not be to everyone’s liking because some people really love the early game. Alts! New characters! A simpler game in a purer spirit! Let’s say that incremental games do not have the early game feel that The Shire does. And games recognize that you have played the early game enough, hence boosts to near-max level or GW2’s birthday gifts of scrolls to skip the early game. To the extent that the early game is exactly the same whenever you start over, you want to accelerate/skip it; in a game like Civilization, the early game is often more interesting than a same-ish late game.

In Realm Grinder, this works out very well because you explore the early game diversity pretty completely the first time you play a faction. After that, your new multipliers quickly get you back to where you were. If you are going ten or a thousand times as fast, there is no more early game. You go through it as quickly as you can click. As you accummulate gems, you skip the early game and get back to prestige races in minutes rather than days. As you accummulate reincarnations, you zip back to the Mercenary stage in hours rather than weeks. In the late game, these bonuses just push The Wall out a little further, but they are ridiculously effective in burning through the early game, which you already know, to the late game, which might have something new for you.

If you are a “the real game starts at the level cap” player, really trying something new involves getting back to the level cap.

: Zubon

Realm Grinder is an incremental game that explicitly merges idle games and clickers. The emergence of “incremental game” demonstrates the convergence of the two, but Realm Grinder embraces both sides with options that gave it more interest and life for me than most incremental games. I may even go back.

Realm Grinder starts with six factions, whose abilities support different playstyles. Elves are the purest clicker faction, Undead the purest idle faction. Demons favor big buildings and Fairies favor many small buildings. Angels like magic and Goblins like money. As you advance further, the game offers prestige factions, first neutral factions to go with the good and evil trios, then a faction to add on top of good/evil. More recent updates have added Mercenaries that combine abilities across factions, along with bloodlines and heritages to let you bring forward racial strengths. These choices let you customize according to your playstyle, although only the Mercenaries allow much customization beyond the initial choice of a faction.

Like most incremental games, Realm Grinder lets you reset (“abdicate”) and start over with a stronger start, potentially changing factions. Then there is another tier of reset (“reincarnate”) that resets that process for a different series of bonuses; the progress currency from abdications is eventually cashed in for reincarnations, your “I beat the game” reset rather than “bank and go faster.”

The customization is more notionally interesting than relevant as balance is not quite there. This is a manager game about increasing numbers, and it can be mathematically proven that some options are orders of magnitude stronger than others. For all the potential options, only a few are in the range of “optimal” at any given point, although what works best for you might vary based on whether you play actively, leave the game running idle, check in occasionally, use offline progress, etc. So it matters a bit, just not as much as one might dream.

The diversity of abilities and factions, the existence of multiple paths, and the support of different playstyles makes it the best incremental game I have seen.

: Zubon