Wishful Features: A FrontierVille animations toggle button

Ever visit that one Neighbor in FrontierVille who happens to be somewhat of an overachiever? You know who I'm talking about. Almost everyone has that one friend who is Level 150 with the biggest homestead available, every animated decoration out there and his legion of Chickens (see above) for all to see. Did I say "for all to see?" Sorry, what I meant to say was, "for all to cringe in horror as their browsers freeze and processors melt through the surface of their four-year-old laptops."

At least the first part of that vision should be familiar with a good lot of you. And it isn't just the sharp visuals in FrontierVille that are to blame. It's the animations. If you haven't noticed, just about every animal, building and holiday item slash decoration has an animation attached. Sure, most animations are simple one-second-long loops, but multiply that by the amount of items that litter most veteran players' homesteads and it's enough to send the average computer into hiding.

Sure, that Graphics Quality toggle helps a bit, but for those who have yet to--bear with me here--upgrade their primary Facebook-gaming machine in the past few years, Flash-based games (i.e. almost all Facebook games) are going to punish the average computer. It might sound ridiculous that we're talking about computer upgrades on Games.com, but rest assured this is all coming from someone who easily falls into the camp of "average computer" face first with a three-year-old HP Pavilion laptop. I will be the first to tell you that computers do not age like sharp cheese or fine wine, but more like mold on bread or Keith Richards.

With 250 million players, it should be safe to assume that the majority of social gamers are probably in the same boat. So, Zynga, why not add a similar option to the Graphics Quality toggle in FrontierVille? Make it so that players with less-than-favorable computing situations can actually pay their more technologically advanced friends a visit every once in a while. If players are already making liberal use of the Graphics Quality toggle in nearly every game they play (at least I need to), then turning off a few idle character animations isn't going to make the visual FrontierVille experience that much worse. Your fellow pioneers seem to agree.

Do you play FrontierVille on a computer that's older than two years? If so, would you like to see an option like this be added to the game? Sound off in the comments. Add Comment.