Glitch

Overview

Glitch takes the accessible point-and-click elements of popular social media games such as Farmville and incorporates them into a large, persistent online world where players can interact, trade items and help build new areas of the world through community "projects". MMORPG staples such as experience points, skill trees, and quests are also present.

The story revolves around the 11 Giants, who dreamed up the world in which Glitch takes place. The customizable avatars the player controls, or "Glitches", are figments of the Giants' imaginations that maintain and develop this dream world. The antithesis of the Giants are the Rooks, giant black birds that eat away at neglected areas.

Gameplay

Glitch's character progression occurs by gaining experience points by performing tasks, completing quests and achievements, improving skills, and interacting and trading with other players for mutual gain. There are hundreds of activities to do in Glitch, all with distinct skill tree paths: Cooking, Gardening, Mining, Animal Husbandry, etc.

The character's actions are limited by two stats: Energy and Mood. Energy is used for most actions and is depleted for performing more labor intensive actions (such as mining metal rocks), but the energy cost can be reduced by increasing the skill level for that action. Energy can generally be restored by food. Mood is a separate stat that decreases or increases depending on certain actions. Loss of Mood lowers the amount of XP the character gains for actions.

Skills are unlocked by selecting them in the Skill Tree, which starts a countdown timer. Once the timer, runs out, another skill can be selected. The learning time can range from minutes to days depending on the skill level and how much of the Skill Tree is filled out. The learning time can be shortened by donating to a Giant's Shrine and sacrificing items to gain "Favor". Most skills require prerequisite skills to be learned or certain related achievements to be completed. Achievements are typically learned by performing an action a certain number of times: for instance, cooking with the Knife & Board 11 times will bestow a Cooking Achievement.

There is a vast crafting system, and almost every item can be used in a recipe with something else to make a better, more valuable items that can be sold, donated to a Giant's Shrine to increase favor, or crafted into an even better item. By unlocking higher level skills, more complex recipes can be crafted.

Closing

As of November, 15, 2012, it was announced that the game with be ending on December 9th, 2012 due to not attracting a larger audience. There was a page with a FAQ setup explaining why here. The game had a quite dedicated community around it while in existence.