Faunasphere Preview

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Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake 4. The PC gaming kingdom has long been ruled by these emperors of machismo and testosterone; benefactors of ultra-violence and garish gore, perpetrators of everything that’s typically considered sweaty, salty, and staunchly masculine. If PC gaming product content creation has been a crosshair, we hairy men have been the target. But something is changing in the realm of the maleness; a wind has shifted. The fest of sausage is finally receding, and left in its wake is a little bitty MMO package called Faunasphere, published by Big Fish games. It’s marketed unabashedly and specifically to women aged 18 – 35, it’s cute and cuddly, and it’s pastel. And the real scary part fellas? It’s pretty damn addicting.

I know what you’re thinking. You can admit it. I was thinking it to. “A chick-based game that’s mostly comprised of Moms with kids? A casual MMO? 2D sprites? Yeah. It’ll be crap in digital form.” Then I chatted with the devs, started playing, and something weird happened. I wasn’t bludgeoning anything with baseball bats and crow bars. I wasn’t swearing at teammates and pumping myself full of med-kits. And I wasn’t breaking any alien necks with my bare calloused hands. And yet, I was having fun. What the hell? How did that happen? Well, dear readers, let me break it down for you.

For one, this isn’t a commodity designed on a whim to make some quick dough by cashing in on a trendy new demographic. This is a labor of love concocted and molded by such MMO talents as Toby Ragaini and Ryan O’Rourke. These guys are no slouches in the industry. Ragaini was a lead designer on Asheron’s Call and a creative contributor to The Matrix Online. O’Rourke did time with Monolith and Sony before saddling up and taking Faunasphere out of the stable.

The basic concept of the game is simple: a 100% free web-based cartoonish MMO that’s easily accessible, wholly non-violent, and subtly captivating. There’s no installation required. If you’ve got Flash, internet, and a browser, you can play it (even on a Mac). Using a top-down point and click perspective, you assume the starting role of a mighty horse, a cheerful dog, or a speedy turtle, with handfuls of visual variations of each. After selecting your ridiculously (and awesomely) adorable Fauna, you venture forth into Tranquility Plateau to begin your journey.

The main tasks you and your Fauna will likely run into are menial but entertaining. You’ll learn how to feed and keep your energy up, check your inventory for goodies, and go through the process of exploring and digging up loot, as well as making and adding friends. You’ll also discover how to spot and zap ugly spouts of pollution, which after elimination grant you in-game currency (called Lux), experience, and other nifty trifles. Every player gets their own unique home base from the beginning as well. You can travel there at any time by clicking on your Fauna and selecting an icon. Once home, you can pay minor amounts of Lux to build, add, and terra-form the parcel of land with any materials you’ve traded or collected. Think of it like your own personal ecosystem playground with a minor tollbooth for manipulation. And should the unfortunate happen where you exhaust your Fauna’s energy while out in the wild, rather than death, you’re transported back to your home to begin anew.

After you’ve accumulated enough experience (gained by completing quests or clearing spoliation), you’ll level up and produce an egg. You can then pawn off the egg to another player, or incubate and hatch an extra critter to keep for yourself. There’s a large emphasis on trading and cooperation in the community, as many of the materials and trinkets you’ll pine after can only be procured or obtained by other players. And from my experiences there are plenty of players out there taking this game in. New Faunas popped up at all hours of day, ranging from early morning to midnight, and none of the lands were ever barren or ghostly.

Perhaps the cleverest beauty lies in the inner complexities masked by a sparse interface and non-scary HUD. Should a crafty player wish to extrapolate gene pools and splice chromosomes to attain preferred traits in their hatchlings, it’s all there for the toying. You can even trace other Fauna’s family trees and study their collected attributes, and study how they got them. And like any other MMO, the higher level characters will naturally have far more to delve into than their lowly furry counterparts. The level cap currently rests at 20, but it takes significant play time to get there.

The environments traversed are pleasantly varied and stylized. You can traipse chilly ice-covered snow plains, sniffing for rare material drops, or you can bask in the tropical sunlight and bump palm trees and dive into waterfalls for pleasant surprises. And while the art and animations are admittedly unelaborate, Faunasphere maintains a certain level of charm and panache that never seems to dissipate. Worse yet (for my hardy mannish ego at least), I found myself seeping back into the game more and more in favor of such titles as Plants vs. Zombies.

Oh well. If a female gamer marketing revolution is actually upon us, I figure I might as well embrace it rather than become a casualty. Expect a review of Faunasphere soon.