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MMObility: Tynon forces players to come to grips with automatic gameplay
It's been over a year since I last looked at Tynon, a browser-based pseudo-MMO that has been magically transformed into a much larger and more MMOish MMO. What a difference a year makes! Many of the key gameplay elements remain, meaning that you can still play the entire game (at least I have been able to so far) by clicking one or two buttons, over and over. So much of the game is played for you that it made me wonder -- as it did the first time around -- what the point was. Then it made me wonder just how much the gameplay in Tynon is like many of the more "standard" MMOs I have played, meaning that so many of them are the same one or two button chunks of gameplay, only wrapped in a three-dimensional exterior that features hotbars. I'm not making excuses for auto-play features, but I'm not making excuses for the mindless clicking that many MMOs feature, either. As with most things, the details matter the most. In Tynon, there are almost too many details to count.
Rise and Shiny: Tynon
Ah, social gaming. Some call it Facebook gaming or even casual gaming. Honestly, I don't like any of those terms, at least not most of the time, simply because there is so much variety and so many different player types when it comes to these games that no one term can cover them all. This week I am covering a casual -- er, social -- game. I was told that there are MMOesque mechanics in the game, and there are, but Tynon is not an MMO. Forgive me; call it my contribution to Not So Massively. Instead of debating the good and bad of the social, Facebook, or casual market, I would rather take the neat parts of Tynon and explain how MMOs might benefit from them. It's important to note that my playtime was a press-only beta of sorts, so the cash was flowing and I grew rather fast, without really noting much about how I grew. Either way, let's get to it.
