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The Game Archaeologist's fear and loathing in the Kingdom: The highlights
It is, in so many ways, the antithesis of a modern MMORPG. It has crude stick figure drawings instead of lush 3-D graphics. It limits your daily activities to a handful of encounters. It often mocks, belittles and berates you for your stupidity. It uses meat for currency and has a character class that dabbles in pasta-based magic. It's been in open beta for the better part of a decade now. And its endgame is actually an end-of-the-game instead of an eternal raiding grind. I speak, of course, about The Kingdom of Loathing, one of the oddest online RPGs on the net -- and one of the most beloved. When I mulled over the game for this month's retrospective, I found myself really wanting to talk about KoL but a little unsure whether it truly belongs in the pantheon of accepted MMOs. At best, it's on the fringe; while you do play in a world populated by hundreds, if not thousands, of other players at any given time, it's mostly a solo exercise apart from the chat channel. However, it is a persistent world, it does hold many of the trappings of MMORPGs, and the creators have come up with clever ways for players to interact within a turn-based RPG. I'm also a huge fan, having dabbled in KoL off and on for over four years now, and I love recommending it to friends. So what the heck -- we're doing it. Kingdom of Loathing is a great success story in its own right and has a lot to teach the rest of the MMO industry about unconventional methods of structuring and presenting these games. Hit the jump and we'll run down eight highlights that separate KoL from the rest of the pack and make it a game well worth your spare time.
Is there a city of hobos in your cellar?
The world's most popular stick-figure meat-trading MMO, Kingdom of Loathing, takes a bold step into history with the release of its new hardcore raid expansion, Hobopolis. Where before, your interactions with other people were limited to trading barbed quips in perfectly formed haiku, or robbing their camps when you felt pretty sure the owners might be away, now you can gather to explore the subterranean metropolis of Hobopolis, the City of Hobos.Seal Clubbers, Disco Bandits, Accordion Thieves and all the other peoples of KoL are now able to come together to take on challenges that are too much for any one Pastamancer to meet. Such are the dangers when clan leaders decide unwisely to build basements in their clan hall, and then wonder what lies behind that door ... that smelly door.Kingdom of Loathing is a free-to-play, browser-based MMO that doesn't require Flash or special clients or anything, really, but a sense of humor, a taste for puns, and a desire for some surprisingly deep gameplay.
