Let’s say you’re having a slow day at work and you can’t really commit your attention span to a more active mobile MMORPG but you still want the good feelings of filling up bars of skill XP. Then perhaps you can consider Idlescape, which as its name suggests is an idle MMORPG that lets players sort of auto-level skills in a rather relaxed and mostly hands-off manner.
The game runs perfectly fine in any browser of your choice and operates like other idle MMOs that you may have heard of; simply select either a gathering vocation or enter a combat area and let your character skill up without too much direct management. It’s not all something one can take their eyes off of, as there are some inventory management things to do like selling useless materials or burning gathered items for Heat to use in other crafting, specifically dropping ingredients into a pot for cooking, and naturally keeping an eye on character health while in a combat area.
I personally spent a few minutes seeing how Idlescape runs and found it to be mostly competent enough. Most of my focus was on gathering and crafting, since my avatar had no weapons or armor to speak of. The first combat zone mostly has you fighting rats, cows, and goblins, but things can still get dicey if you’re not cautious. About the biggest demerit in my very brief experience was the game’s chat scroll, which is about as fun to look at as most shout/global chat channels tend to be. So in that regard, it definitely has the “true MMORPG” experience, regrettably.
Of course, being a browser game, you can check it out for yourself. Especially if you’re in that bored at work scenario I led with.
