You know what a King game looks like by now. Despite the broad array of fantastical names and exotic themes, each one is, at its core, a match-three game in which blocks are switched to create lines of uniform colours. It's not a new concept and King certainly didn't invent it, but the young Swedish company has undoubtedly acquired more success from the formula than anyone else on mobile devices.
Through the first quarter of 2016, King has had three titles in the top 15 grossing games on the Apple App Store and Google Play in the US. Candy Crush Saga is arguably the most famous and most played mobile game ever released, and that orange and yellow logo is synonymous with gaming on the go. This success led to the studio recently being acquired by Activision-Blizzard for a rather princely sum despite concerns that it's nothing more than a flash-in-the-pan, one trick pony. King's IPO back in 2014 was a disaster, after all.
So far at least, the company has struggled to bestow the enormous success of Candy Crush upon its other products. With so many people still swiping digital blocks of sugar to pass the time, and with King's line-up being so mechanically uniform, why would players deviate towards another IP? The likes of Pet Rescue Saga, Diamond Digger Saga, and Alpha Betty Saga have been but mere farts in the wind compared to the freemium, money-ranking behemoth that is Candy Crush.
Seemingly unperturbed, though, King is trying yet again.
Farm Heroes Super Saga—yes, another Saga game—released this week. At its heart and completely unsurprisingly, this is a match-three game. It's filled with the spurious explosions and colours and fantastic audio cues that King is famous for (in order to easily extract money from many). Except with Farm Heroes Super Saga, according to King, it has a better narrative.
"What we learned from Farm Heroes Saga [released in 2013] is that players engaged a lot with the characters even though it had only a light narrative. Players started to build up their own associations with the characters, especially Rancid," explains executive producer James Nicholas.
"I think where the narrative in Farm is most effective is that you have Rancid as an antagonist and he's constantly trying to stop people from progressing. We want to give a narrative reason for why players are doing what they're doing. We saw strongly from the player community that if we don't provide this then they will come up with something themselves, so we might as well provide that experience for them."
Rancid, a raccoon, tries to prevent you from winning Country Show events. Country Shows see you complete against other real players to grow the biggest plant, a feat achieved by playing through as many levels as possible, for as long a time as possible, and attaining the maximum three stars across each of them. Rancid actively undermines your performance on certain levels by making it harder for you to match "Cropsies" (read: blocks) during levels. He throws items at your board that disrupt its layout, preventing you from thinking strategically and earning the maximum stars.
There are two ways to look at this. You can look at it through the corporate eyes of Nicholas, who tells me that "the Country Show is an important part of the game in terms of the prizes and the social comparison you can have through it," or you can see it as a psychological trick intended to keep you playing. I'm firmly behind the latter.
The more you buy into the idea of winning the Country Show in order to demonstrate your superiority over other players, the more likely you are to spend real money on items that allow you to achieve it. As with other Saga games, the number of turns per level is limited, with microtransactions available that extend those turns and give you more of a chance of scoring maximum points.
Framing Rancid as the bad guy that must be defeated ramps up the psychological incentive in that you're not only beating friends but also you're overcoming evil. Both the Country Show and Rancid, then, are simply tools to tempt you to part with your cash. The more things change, the more they stay the same. (But hey, it's on a farm this time! People love farms, right?)
"We've found that players like that sense of calm peacefulness that comes from the farm environment," continues Nicholas. "Once we saw that players were attracted to that in Farm Heroes Saga we doubled down on it in Super Saga, basically. I think that's now one of the core pillars of this franchise: us being able to create that peaceful farm environment."
Farm Heroes Super Saga is a little less crass than Candy Crush Saga thanks to its liberal use of (comparatively) calming greens and muted yellows, although they are splashed over neon reds and saccharine pinks. The Super in the title refers to the ability to create "Super Cropsies" by aligning non-super varieties in a two-by-two square pattern. These Super editions of the disturbingly anthropomorphic fruits and vegetables provide a juicy burst of the points required to best each level. As such, it pays to work towards creating them whenever possible.
However, to suggest that Farm Heroes Super Saga is a radical change of pace from other King games would be spurious—and that's what makes Activision's purchase of the company last year all the more confusing. If the mobile market has taught us anything, it's that customers are extremely fickle. Remember Angry Birds? Or Draw Something (which was famously purchased by Zynga for an astonishing $180 million)? Or Canabalt?
Perhaps the magnitude of King's formulaic success means that it'll stick a little longer than your average mobile games company. But churning out endless variations on a theme can't possibly work forever. And it's not like excellent mobile games can't be made. Peggle remains a classic, while Monument Valley shows what can be done with modern devices.
Really, then, Farm Heroes Super Saga simply comes down to whether you want to swipe candy or crops. Are you a healthy eater or not?
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