Excited about Celetania? I am!

First of all, go check out World of Goo, which was just released for Linux. Alright, now on to the rest of this post…

I recently quit playing Travian, a persistent-world web game where you created your own medieval empire. I won’t go into all the reasons, but suffice it to say that there were balance issues with larger player swallowing up newbies and ruining their play experience (not that I was one of these newbies, of course).

As I understand it, there are a number of persistent-world games out there (games in which the world continues evolving while you are not present and playing). I haven’t spent enough time looking into other titles, so Celetania was able to completely capture and hold my attention.

http://celetania.com/

So why am I so excited about Celetania? It has quests! If the way I assume they work is right, they have the potential to eliminate the balance problems between players of different skill levels. I don’t like picking on Travian exactly, but it’s the only game I’ve played like this, so I’ll use it for comparison. In Travian, there are no quests, and no “safe zones” for newbies. It is a common strategy for larger players to attack and “farm” smaller players for their own benefit. How to quests help?

If done properly, quests may give greater rewards for larger players than attacking small players, thus making it a better use of your time to pick on people your own size. I assume quests are adaptive to a player’s size, so they also give small players a chance to expand safely.

Anyway, that’s all for now!