Have You Played… Dofus?
No, you're a Dofus
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.
I don’t remember why I started playing Dofus, but there must have been something to this cartoony isometric MMO that kept me coming back to pick flax and cut crops. Maybe it was the grid-based tactical fights that meant combat had a slower, more thoughtful pace. Maybe it was standing around with your bags full of goodies in the marketplace, selling rubbish loot. Maybe it was simply because the game was free and it would run on any stuttering computer. Does Dofus still exist? Let me check.
It’s made by the French studio Ankama, a band of animators and designers (the same studio have made the MMO follow-up Wakfu) and is probably as old-fashioned as mummorpuhguhs get. There’s yer character classes, yer armour sets, yer dungeons, yer pets, yer mounts, yer wallet full of unreal cash that never, ever seems to be enough. I don’t know how it holds up in today’s world but they must be doing something right to have been around as long as World of Warcraft, even while dozens of others have fallen into the graveyard.
I also remember people being nice in it. That might have simply been the cutesy French animation working its magic, drawing in other kids like me. But I do recall a sense of friendship in almost all the cyber-peeps I used to hang around with. Now, I am forced to play survival games where people murder each other over the sound of racial slurs. Ah, lost innocence.