Legends of Zork: Post-mortem

I loved the IDEA of a modern, casual update to the classic Infocom adventure game, Zork. The devious puzzles, the humor, the sense that something wondrous (or at least hilarious) was right around the corner, but mostly the puzzles. We’d get together in UNH’s McConnell computer cluster and try to figure them out — for HOURS. Then try out our guesses on that creeky old VAX up in the engineering lab.
When I found that the much-anticipated browser sequel to the Zork series was more akin to a Facebook app than an adventure game, I was willing to take the game as it was and not how I wanted it to be.
It’s been six months now. I’ve played Jolt Online’s Legends of Zork almost every day and seen it change a lot. Now I’m done with it.
You start your Zork life as a meaningless cog in the machinery of the Great Underground Empire. Years of attending self help empowerment seminars have told you many times that there are some who are cut from finer cloth and destined for greatness and you — aren’t one of them. Sorry, and please sign up for the next seminar on the way out.
Years later, you’re relaxing in your hovel, still dressed in your Assistant Apprentice Post-Consumer Biowaste Redistribution Technician’s uniform and wondering if maybe there IS adventure waiting for you, somewhere. You gather some odds and ends and make a dash for the surface world… and find yourself Outside a White House. There is a mailbox here.
Adventure awaits, but those seminars had your number. Whether you choose to follow the schools of Mind, Body or Spirit, your adventures will consist of moving to an adventure area, hitting the FIGHT button until you either die or return to a base under your own steam, and then returning to do more of the same.
Since the monsters you meet are not seen until you’re in battle, it’s impossible to adjust your attack from among the different stances available, or the defenses chosen by changing your armor, to match the battle so that choice becomes meaningless.
The primary goal of LoZ is to earn zorkmids (money) by winning battles and selling loot, with which you can purchase better weapons, better armor and better magic so that you may more easily go out and do more of the same.
You may also partake in PvP, where you can choose your opponent and get an idea for their strengths so you can choose your attack stance and defense appropriately, but it hardly makes a difference. Your entire character is largely summed up by two statistics: your Attack Rating (AR) and your Defense Rating (DR).
These two stats are combined with any bonuses or weaknesses you may have compared to your opponent, and give a percentage chance that you will hit or be hit in a round. The battle continues without input until one party or the other dies.
It’s not all mano a mano battles. Sometimes you come across a pitched battle, where you may choose a side and settle in for a good thwomping. Other times, you may be ensnared in a {magical|mechanical} {trap|maze|puzzle} (referred to by Zorkians as TMPs), which may mean trauma or treasure, depending on the roll of a die.

Most treasure is simply automatically sold when you entire a town, but occasionally you’ll find a playing card for the wildly popular Double Fanucci card game. These cards may be organized into hands that can boost your power substantially. At least until the point where you have found enough cards that you can max out every hand, Double Fanucci is one of LoZ’s few strategic, and certainly the most fun, minigames. If Jolt took this one feature and turned it into an actual game, I’d play it.
The other strategic element is the sidekick you can choose at level 30. There are many to choose from, and there’s one to fill any perceived needs you may have, but the choice really comes down to: do you have the millions of zorkmids necessary to get the best gear, or are you struggling?
The Accountant sidekick used to let you accrue zorkmids at entirely unbalanced rates. Some players would have TRILLIONS of zorkmids. Players lucky enough to have an accountant in their clan would find the clan bank overflowing with the very best gear, and players who needed money were encouraged to take stuff from the bank, sell it for zorkmids, then come back and get some more. Everyone was rich, everyone was happy. But money became meaningless, clans without accountants could not do anything for their members, and people were generally either bored or unhappy. Jolt then put a hard cap of a billion zorkmids per player in place and severely nerfed the accountant to a point where she might provide for one player’s needs but not that of an entire clan’s.
I estimate it would take ten million zorkmids to buy every available skill and the best gear and spells. At my current average of 30K zorkmids per day adventuring at level 45, it would take a year of buying nothing to earn that. I took advantage of a free sidekick swap and changed out my Gent (helps with TMPs) for the Accountant, and two months later, I have that ten million zorkmids.
With such simple and repetitive gameplay, what incentive do players have to keep coming back? Rankings and Achievements. You can win fame in the Arena, be the richest adventurer in the realm (post-Accountant-nerf players cannot rank here), have the most experience points, etc. The degree to which these matter to you determines your goals in the game. The recently added Achievement system add more avenues for in-game fame, such as defeating ten of every kind of monster in an area, or ten fights in a row without injury, or finding certain Double Fanucci cards, etc.
Jolt doesn’t run LoZ purely for the enjoyment of 80s-era adventure game fanatics. It has its own ways of getting baksheesh from tight-pursed players.
You can play for free if you enjoy watching ads. Ads are everywhere (though you can pay a small fee to turn them off). Sometimes LoZ will serve up ads that pretend to be official Windows virus infection warnings but really are just ads. Having a game give its players the impression that playing it infects their system with viruses is a risky move, imho.
You can also buy “perks” in the LoZ store. You can pay, for instance, to try another sidekick (LoZ helpfully has an achievement for paying to try them all). You can pay to change your sidekick’s name. You can buy a lot of things, but the most popular are potions that give you more adventure points — an AP is spent whenever you fight in the wild or in the arena. They are usable once a week and if your goal is to get ahead in levels as swiftly as possible, you (like so many before you) will buy these as often as you can.
Jolt added quests here and there. These are as non-interactive as the battles. You sift through the quest text for clues as to the the location of the next piece of the puzzle, and battle there until you are told where next to go. If you go to the wrong area, you are gently hinted until you are in the correct place.
The quests are usually fairly funny and well worth doing.
If pressing the fight button again and again becomes too tedious, you can join a group with some combination of three friends and randomly chosen strangers, and read about your exciting adventures in daily emails.
As a dyed-in-the-wool non-achiever, I made my own goal in the game. Earn ten million zorkmids without buying any potions or other real-cash items. And I did. I charted my Accountant sidekick’s progress on a spreadsheet, which dramatically illustrated the meaning of the phrase “diminishing returns”.
Final verdict: Legends of Zork has fantastically whimsical artwork and often hilarious writing along with the germ of a decent card game buried within it, but all that can’t hide a game where the play consists of hitting the “Fight!” button repeatedly until you run out of that day’s Action Points.
Still, it’s better than 90% of those Facebook apps, so if you’re a dedicated Facebook game player and are looking for a similar game with slightly more depth, the Great Underground Empire is calling your name.

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