After many months in development, Zynga announced today that FarmVille 2, perhaps the company’s biggest title to date, is now out of closed beta and available to players on Facebook and Zynga.com.
The sequel includes a variety of improvements and changes to the social farming formula Zynga helped popularize back in 2009, but the most dramatic change is undoubtedly the new 3D visuals. Gameplay plays out from the same semi-overhead viewpoint found in most other Zynga titles, but now all decorations, crops and animals are rendered in full stylized 3D instead of 2D pixel art.
In a recent demo of the title, members of the FarmVille 2 team repeatedly stressed to me that one of the team's big creative goals for the title was to give players the feeling that they were “bringing the farm to life.” FarmVille 2’s 3D crops, animals and decorations are far more interactive than in any previous Zynga game. Crops and trees sway in the wind. Animals will wander around freely unless kept in a pen. All decorations spring into action when players mouse over them – fires crackle to life, rocking chairs rock, kites fly lazily and so-on.
When playing in full-screen, the fidelity of the visuals and the high-quality animation and sound made it easy for me to forget I was looking at a “simple” Facebook game. Zynga’s presentation and artistic prowess has come a long way in the last three years.
Only a lengthy hands-on play session can determine if the company’s game design chops have also kept up, but here my early impressions are also positive. All of FarmVille 2’s farming systems are now interconnected and feature actual crafting trees, giving “hardcore gamer” min/maxers something to chew on. Is it better to sell your wheat, or turn it into feed for your cows and sell their milk? Or should you save the milk and combine it with more goods to craft and sell high-priced baked goods like pies, custards and cakes?
Gone are the days of clicking on a crop to see an abstract pile of coins pop up – players must now balance crafting, feeding their animals and watering farm plots.
Just as some elements of Farmville 2 are becoming more complex and properly “game-like,” Zynga strove to simplify some of the original’s rough edges. Players can now mouse-over large swaths of crops to plant, water or harvest them – no need to click hundreds of times. It’s a change sure to please the wrists of millions of virtual farmers.
Since FarmVille 2 uses Flash 11 as its foundation, this also gave Zynga access to the right-mouse button for the first time. The company put it to use as an easy “redecorate” button. Right-clicking a farm plot, decoration or animal picks it up. Right-clicking again drops it in its new location. Simple.
FarmVille 2 is full of little details that show the game was created with more care than most social games. When purchasing an expansion for your farm, the land doesn’t just magically pop up. Instead, an army of goats rush in from off-screen to eat up the tall grass, tin cans and other trash to make the land farmable. When players pick up an animal it dangles in the air, eyes bulging out, as if it had been picked up by the scruff of its neck. Your custom avatar is also fully animated and will jump fences & perform other complicated movements to perform his or her farm chores as efficiently as possible.
Zynga told me that their goal for FarmVille 2 was to create an experience that felt “relaxing and pastoral.” They want the title to evoke a feeling of nostalgia and recapture the feeling of living in a small town and running a small farm. They want the five-minute breaks people spend with FarmVille 2 to be “The best five minutes of their day.”
Whether the social gaming giant has achieved that goal remains to be seen, but FarmVille 2’s combination of actual crafting complexity, lively and atmospheric visuals & quality-of-play improvements are all steps in the right direction.
Justin is Editor of IGN Wireless. He has been reviewing mobile games since the dark days of Java flip phones. You can follow him on Twitter and IGN.
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