If we think back to an earlier age of video gaming, games having an end was normal. Not just for arcade games, which for obvious commercial reasons can't give you more than X minutes of play time for your quarter. But also for more complicated strategy games like Civilization: You play on a map with a civilization until you win, lose, or lose interest, and then you start on another map with another civilization. Of course, such games still exist. But increasingly, as part of the "games as a service" idea, there are games that never end. There are people out there who have been playing the same character in World of Warcraft for 15 years. Now games like WoW still offer you the possibility to start over with a new character, or even on a new server. But some of the games I have played don't have that possibility. The only way to start over in World of Tanks, for example, is to open a new account.

I recently mentioned that my wife started playing Assassin's Creed Rebellion. So I occasionally helped her and showed her things that weren't well explained by the game itself. And I noticed that playing those lower levels of Assassin's Creed Rebellion was a lot more fun than my version of the game. Because I had been playing for months already, I had reached the level cap, reached the end of the story, and had two thirds of my heroes already at the highest possible 5-start rank. There wasn't much to strive for left in the game, and it had gotten a bit boring. So I decided to reroll. Which is absolutely not foreseen in that game. While the game is played on iOS or Android, the save game is hosted on Facebook. I might have been able to delete that save game on Facebook, but of course then I would have lost the ability to go back to my high-level save game if I ever wanted to. So in the end I had to create another Facebook account with another e-mail in order to be able to start a new game of Assassin's Creed Rebellion.

The advantage of the reroll game of ACR is that, having already been at the top level, I am in less of a hurry to get there again. So I am less tempted by offers to spend money to advance faster, and happily play with the more common heroes the game gives me for free.

Of course another option would be to stop playing this, and start playing another game. However finding a mobile game that I like is very hard. There are now literally a million games on the app store. If you start a search on games that use the same fundamental mechanic as Assassin's Creed Rebellion, which is to say a game about collecting heroes and battling with them, there are thousands and thousands of those around. Unfortunately, most of them have extremely boring battle mechanics, with the best option usually being setting battles to "auto" mode. A game like Assassin's Creed Rebellion, where you really have to think which heroes to take with you on a mission, and which one of the three heroes to use for each room, and which of the various options (sneaking, running past, assassination, combat) is the best for each enemy, are rare and hard to find. I'd be open to suggestions!

- posted by Tobold @ 11:09 AM Permanent Link