BrowserQuest is a free to play MMO created by Mozilla to show off what a browser can do natively with HTML 5. ?In terms of gameplay it is ?fairly simple ‘kill enemies get loot’ type of game. ?But there?s enough content in the game for at least a few hours of play. ?There’s really no story to speak of, but you can explore a beautiful world, meet NPCs, and kill creatures while upgrading your items.
You begin the game in a small town and have few options to go from there. ?You will probably notice a rat or two, which automatically invites you to go kill it, it’s just natural! ?You can go talk to a friendly NPC or take a look into one of the houses in town to pick up some health. ?You will see other players in town with some really cool looking armor and swords, which of course you’ll immediately want to know how and where they got it. ?I took to minding my own business (because i’m a freakin’ explorer damnit!) and went for a leisurely stroll to find more bad guys to kill.
My first instinct was to head south, i’m assuming down is south, to see what I could find. ?There was ?a nice beach area with some crabs that looked tasty enough to eat. ?Of course I cut their heads off and found a sweet looking axe! ?I’m?definitely?on my way to glory I thought. ?It wasn’t until after slaughtered a colony of crabs that I realized I wasn’t getting any exp. for all this sweet killing I was doing. ?There was also no inventory of note, which was fine except I wanted to hoard all the goods I had come across so far.
Picking up an item is easy as clicking on it. ?In fact, as far as I can tell, you only use one button the entire game, your left pointer. ?If you click an item that is inferior to an item you already equip, it lets you know and you continue on your merry way. ?I started venturing north, up, to see if I could find some more difficult creatures. ?There were some skeletons and snakes and bats and eyeballs and goblins and big fat guys holding turkey legs (probably not turkey legs).
I found my way to some caves and a lava area with tougher enemies (you know this, lava = shits about to get real). ?You’ll notice players all around the map, it appears that around 60 players on the server at any one time. ?The main ‘boss’ is located in the upper right hand corner of the map. ?he’s a cool looking skeleton guy. ?The few times I went up to visit him there were plenty of players there camping to get his gear. ?He gives you a powerful golden sword and some sweet golden armor. ?After that you can pretty much kill anything in the game without much help.
The graphics are pretty neat, very simple but fun to look at. ?The game itself is very inviting, bright screen, easy to read, easy to understand. ?The game-play is simple and you don’t have a tutorial popping up every second to show you how to do everything. ?You’ll find that you wish the game was filled out a bit more, but BrowserQuest is more of a template for what browser-based games might be like in the future. ?It’s a great way to spend an hour or so and appreciate what we might see in the future from HTML5 games.
The game runs on Firefox, Google Chrome and Safari, as well as iOS devices, and Firefox for Android. Mozilla has also made the source code available on?GitHub, if you?d like to poke around under the hood.