Have you ever played "The Settlers Online"?
I have. For a very long time to be honest. And I loved the game. It is quite fun and has a lot of different features. And they do so many great events!
And also their graphics are pretty nice, as you can see on these pictures. And it is quite fun to play. There is a low entry barrier regarding knowledge to have, but there are so many things to do, so that it'll take quite some time until you might get bored.
But they have had a lot of problems. Some more recently, some are older.
The Settler's Online is a browser based strategy and build up game, that is similar to the well known The Settler's games.
And I did join the game almost a decade ago, because I loved those Computer games.
In the beginning it was quite nice. You build up your buildings and fight bandits on your home world. You expand your buildings, conquer new parts of your home world, and so on. Then you finally start to do adventures and fight on a different island against other types of bandits. You try to find the best strategies to win with the smallest amount of losses and to get different special prices.
You have to create a working economy and look after many different things. So it can get messy from time to time or you recognize, that you are not producing sufficient amounts of a specific resource.
A next big part is to learn how adventures and missions work. Also there is a PvP mode, but so far it looks not really like it is used a lot.
One of the problems that lasted a bit longer is the missing endgame. After you done every mission, it can get boring. Yes, there are new missions and campaigns, with different types of missions, that help the game to stay interesting. And there are also economy quests, so it is not all about fighting.
Don't get me wrong. It can still be interesting. And there are some feature that can make even repetitive fighting interesting. But after 1,000s of adventures it can get boring. So yes, they need to work on their late to endgame.
The bigger problem was the transition after Adobe's Flash Player was ended. They tried to do a transition to Unity. Or should I say, they are still trying. I recently tried to play the game - and it is really terrible.
They working on this problem for over a year - and it drove tons of players away from a game they loved and put lots of time and money in.
The Settlers was slow on Flashplayer, which is most likely based on the giantic flow of data, that has to be handled. But at least for me it isn't playable with their new "solution". Right now, because it takes forever to do anything. From the end of 2020 to mid 2021, because they didn't care to make a solution for Linux players. It took them long enough to create one, for Mac users, but Linux was left out completely.
As you can see, I still care for the game. I still would love to play it and still looking forward to the coming events. But I guess, it is time to say goodbye.
It is just a "normal" game, without any options to earn something from it. But it still is sad to say goodbye.
