Duels is a new online role playing game that I’ve wasted most of the evening on. It’s both a social network and role playing game - create a World of Warcraft type character, buy him or her armor, weapons, etc., and then challenge other players to duels. Win and you get experience, gold and other stuff. Lose and you get nothing.
Founder Andrew Busey (previously the co-founder of Austin startup Pluck) says he wanted to create a game where users could play against each other asynchronously and in 10-30 minute chunks, but still move their character forward in an addicting way. He’s done that - when you challenge someone else to a duel you set up how you want to fight but you don’t control the action in the duel itself. So the opponent can accept even when you are offline and the duel will still occur. The end result is a sort of merger of World of Warcraft and Magic: The Gathering.
Every user also has a profile that shows their stats, avatar and fight history. Other users can be added as rivals or allies, and/or commented.
The game is addicting and fun. It hasn’t officially launched yet so there are very few users to fight. There are a number of game-controlled opponents ready and waiting, though.
Be warned: Like Kdice, Desktop Tower Defense and other games we’ve covered, be prepared to lose a few days to testing this out.
Duels is the first product of Challenge Games, the parent company behind the game.
Fury : http://www.unleashthefury.com/
Is looking to be the 3d mmo equivalent of this idea…. competitiveness leads to longevity.
Won my first duel. Think I’ll retire on a high note.
duel for account deletion k?
Michael,
this is definitely interesting… what I’d like to see is someone develop a Facebook application for this… I think that would really catch on…
Aydin.
http://www.bOKnow.com
looks like its down for a bit.
It’s a lot like Kings Of Chaos which I am glad to say I have stopped playing.
Aydin: We’ve definitely been talking about a Facebook app. I agree it could be a really big deal.
On the servers: Sorry about any performance issues. We’ve made a few configuration changes that should speed things up and improve responsiveness. We’re also working to reallocate some additional servers.
It’s pretty cool. I like the use of Flash and wish they’d done the whole thing that way. Going between the sections is slow and disjointing sometimes. All in all a pretty slick find.
=Ryan
rstewart@adobe.com
Legend Of the Red Dragon (LORD) was an early text-based MMOG along similar lines, designed for just this kind of episodic play. Used to run on ANSI BBSs (Zmodem, anyone?) Very popular it was, too. Just shows that nothing really changes, just a change of wallpaper.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.....Red_Dragon
The site seems to be very buggy. I’ve registered with a friend behind a web proxy. We keep getting each others profiles displayed as our own.
As of right now, the game is unplayable. I think his server has been overwhelmed.
Very interesting game, I forsee my next week of productive time going down the drain. I like the games concept, but they could do with a nice server upgrade, seeing as how things to be slow at the moment. But I don’t see that happening anytime soon seeing as how it’s a free server and doesn’t even have advertisements to monetize by the visitor flood.
Eat it, Tarellel.
We continue to make adjustments to accomodate the load. We will be adding serveral additional servers as soon as possible (which if we’re lucky will be today).
Hehe I Finkerized with a steady repetition of dagger stabbing to the torso.
Well, sounds good !
)
Not very discreet though, if you plan to fight at the office !
(TC interns : lucky you, you can still pretend to update some review !
This is really addicting game. Thanks for pointing this out. I haven’t played such a fun game in a long time.
Sooo slowwwwww
I find the interface to be disjointed as a previous commenter mentioned. I wonder if it’s meant to be this way to increase pageviews but it really makes me want to write a script to do a lot of the page-to-page tedium (accept challenges, make challenges). Is there anything in the TOS against writing scripts?
I also find it annoying that I don’t have an easy way to see my scores and how close the fight was or wasn’t. In addition I’ve already grown tired of watching my guy duke it out, just show me the end result without the blow by blow recount.
I don’t like this game. Boring clicking.
Anyone tried Travian (www.travian.com)?
Erm… Now, no offence to the guy behind this, but there’ve been at least a dozen games that are exactly like this over the years. I don’t remember the names because, generally, I only played them for a week or two.
Congrats for building a game and all, but there’s nothing I can see in this that hasn’t been done at least 3 times before.
Still, all of those games were sold for decent amounts of money so I’m sure this’ll succeed too.
Jeremy Wright: Exactly. not to be critical. He speaks with truth.
On the other hand, there was nothing new about blogs either. Message boards and guest books and free template driven hosting services like angelfire.com were around for a long time. So lets say you can take an old Idea add a twist and have a smash hit on your hands.
other sites: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_free_MMOGs
Michael
Please stop covering games, they are killing the world’s productivity
what’s the revenue model?
Bad time for one of these games, August is probably the worst time for me to get addicted because I have school coming up so soon.
You know… I would be an avid reader of a hypothetical “GameCrunch”. Michael and I seem to have similar taste. Then an RSS of gaming madness could pour straight into my brain….. muahaha
I signed this morning and played for about 20 minutes, ate lunch and when I came back and tried to login again it wouldn’t let me. After about 10 minutes of this it let me login. I then went to the battles page and it logged me out! This game has a lot of potential but could definitely do with some server upgrades and serious debugging.
We’ve made some additional modifications this morning which should result in improved performance. It’s possible that you got logged out when we did a server update.
We will be adding additional servers within the next few hours which should alleviate the current performance issues.
That is really cool. I hope there are more games like this.
so slow… couldn’t even get into a battle. And still pretty buggy. When I clicked agree to accept a task, it brought me to a page saying “your account has already been created”
As a father of a son who was seriously addicted to WOW for 2 plus years, watch out in promoting all of this addictive behavior. Thankfully his computer burned out from 6-7 days a week 5-6 hours a night as a guildmaster and no relief showed up in the form of fixing his twice bombed computer. He now has a girlfriend, real friends surrounding him and a life. He’s one of the lucky ones. Of course living in the mountains of Colorado as I now do I get my share of burned out ski bums to deal with…
I am addicted. It’s alot of fun. Already at 11th level.
It’s the perfect diversion for busy professional types that used to be D&D junkies.
Keep up the good work Andrew- looking forward to the updates and someday playing it on my iPhone.
Oh please, WoW is not a durg. You can’t be physically addicted to it. The problem lies with your son, not the game.
Very slow. May be it’s because of its popularity - everybody trying their luck!
Rajesh Shakya
http://www.rajeshshakya.com
Helping technopreneurs to excel and lead their life!
site is just plain down. Wait a day and try it then.
I haven’t been able to play yet, but this game looks remarkably similar to another game with a similar name:
http://megaduel.com/
(I even thought they were the same game when I saw this article). So if you are looking for another web based Duel game, try this one before it’s server get’s blown as we..
Andrew,
Megaduel looks great. So far I like it better than Duels.
Will keep testing it, but it seems to be quite different despite of the similar names. Ie. it doesnt require the opponent to accept the duel, so it all goes faster.
We’ve doubled our server capacity and the site is back up. It seems to be handling the traffic now.
Durrr still pretty slow, problems with getting logged out (and sometimes not able to log back in).
They’ve released a product that encourages a lot of page views AND uses a lot of AJAX requests. They’re going to have a real fun time every getting out in front of their server needs if this thing actually gains traction.
It doesn’t have female avatars. WTH?
So I have to play as a He-man type with no shirt
and it logs out every fifteen seconds or so?
It looks like it will be a great game once it develops more.
Actually, this game is not as fool proof as it seems. I quickly wrote a script that lets me advance levels like crazy. It is available at http:\\dy-verse.blogspot.com. Can anyone inform the makers of the games about this potential problem ?
The problem is coz the ids of players are sequential numbers.
Parashuram - thanks for letting us know.
Rin - we are working on female avatars. We have female NPCs in, but in the case of NPCs we are able to control the armor they wear. The reason you can’t use female avatars right now is that a lot of the armor doesn’t quite look right. We’re fixing this and hope to have female avatars up shortly. Obviously solving the performance issues are our top priority right now.
Richard - Yeah we’re adjusting aspects of the site to better handle the load we’re seeing.
Thanks to everyone who has checked out the site and the great things everyone has said.
Same here, I dont seem to be able to play “duels” long enough without getting some sort of problem. I hope they fix it soon.
In the other hand, the “Megaduel” game posted by Andrew Wooldridge (are you the developer?) works great. I like its simplicity and its addictive. Doesnt have much of an english community yet, but the spanish forum seems to get a post every 3 minutes , and I got a dozen attacks during the night. Too bad they dont have female warriors either.
how do u get onto this game
I don’t see any real improvement in the performance. I tried all morning (UK time) and periodically through the day, it took me at least 15 minutes to find a duel, execute it, and see the results.
I agree with other posters that the UI framework being so page-driven for trivial activities, seems a bit odd.
Looks great…Heading over now.
Or not…The site is down?
seems to be down again, and again …
yep… get a game going, get it on techcrunch, and then lose all momentum when not prepared for the flow.
keep in mind people - you’ll have thousands flocking to you right away
Andrew, you might want to check out Apache 2.2.4, as it has numerous http proxy load balancing enhancements.
We’re still working as hard as we can.
Stefan: Thanks for the tip.
Mike… you killed another website, damn you! =P At least this is one I believe will survive beyond the initial TC/Digg visit spike.
Andrew, awesome service! You’ve already got me scratchin’ my arms like a meth addict because I can’t log in! I think you’ve properly nailed an MMORPG/social networking web-based hybrid that will keep the casual players friendly and coming back for more!
Since you seem to be checking in here so frequently, might I offer a few suggestions and requests?
1) You may want to consider some UI enhancements, that drift a bit further away from the very graphic-intensive design you’re currently using. I’m sure this, coupled with the Flash animated combat are really hurting your servers. Another option is to look into the Amazon S3 image hosting service as it will take a LOT of stress off your own servers and it’s really not that expensive!
2) Once you’ve dealt with your immediate server issues, would you consider enhancing the searchability within the Battle pages? It would be nice to show ONLY monsters or show ONLY potential enemies at a certain level.
3) Any way of saving preferences with cookies or within your own profile? Every time I go to the Battles page I need to hide the offline users (because I don’t really care about em!) or every time I want to view a fight summary, I am defaulted to the animated view, rather than the text view, which I prefer.
Just some ideas to think on!
Congrats on your instant success and I wish you luck sorting through the bugs!
Brooke:
Thanks very much for the nice feedback.
1. We’re actually using S3 for most images. We’re in the process of moving most of the flash stuff there now. I’m hopefully we’ll have it working tomorrow and I expect it will add a lot of peppiness.
2. That’s definitely a priority and we’ve been tossing around ideas/mock-ups. That is the most trafficed page by far and we definitely need to optimize for both usability and performance. In beta we didn’t have so many users, so defaulting to online only never came up.
We didn’t really expect to have 140+ pages of level 1-4 users so quickly.
3. That’s definitely something we will look at. We’re also going to offer a view: option for fight details that lets you choose animated, narrated, or summary.
Thanks again for your post. We’ve been working like crazy trying to improve performance and comliments / helpful feedback definitely make it easier to stay focused and energized.
3 days is like 3 week on internet, and 3 days without constant services from your website seemed 3 months for me, BUT it’s definitely addicting despite those early bugs.
One tip for the pack/token bug : when you refund the token to the victims of the bug, think of XP , because when you can’t buy pack, you’re at a disavantage for your next fights, and so you potentialy loose XP.
I know, we’re not on duels.com forum, but the site is down again, so …
I must say that I am very impressed with this game and will be one of the many who wait out the initial storm to continue to play.
I would definitely suggest separating the game and the forums though as not everyone will realize that you all are continuing to update everything by checking this site for the comments.
And along with that I assume that oxygengames.com is hosted on same network as even getting to that site is extremely slow over the past few days as well.
Other than that I am very much looking forward to the success of duels.com
- Mindless Muse (lvl 9 - Path of the Staff)
The site is still basically unusable - proxy error for most page views…
It’s been a constant battle over the last few days, but I think we have the site in a reasonably stable state now. Peformance should be good. We’re still wrangling with the other issues a massive influx of users brings with it, but the site should be tolerable now.
Thanks for your patience!
oops, i did it again !
all databases seems to be deleted, or is it just maintenance ?
A job well done, Andrew Busey (that’s a rather ironic surname you’ve got considering the huge amount of time you must be putting into this project at the moment ^^)! This is the first time in years that I’ve felt so addicted to a game which takes place in my own browser and I look very much forward to any and all upcoming updates - whether they be nothing more than performance update or new features, such as the eagerly awaited socketing that will put our jewels to use
Duels is a smash hit and I congratulate you for it!
ConraDargo: Thanks for the compliments.
We’re finally getting the performance stuff under control - several new servers up today.
The response has been spectacular and we have some great things in the pipelines.
Has anyone come across any boards or websites that explain the formula’s on character building or stat optimizing, or use for the cut gems? The forum’s are still slim and when the server is down…. so are the forums.
cool do u have to buy it downtown or can u just download it also is it free?