Virtual Villagers: Facebook's 'first true God game' debuts

Launched today, Virtual Villagers for Facebook is the latest addition to a well-received series of desktop games, the oldest hailing from 2006, released by the San Francisco indy games developer, Last Day of Work (LDW). LDW has partnered with the Australia-based casual games developer, 3 Blokes Studios to bring a version of their title onto Facebook that incorporates social gaming elements.

At first glance, this game has a ton of similarities to Zynga's immensely popular FrontierVille, sporting a "persistent game world" that changes over time. But it also vows to provide "real, dynamic multiplayer storytelling that unfolds according to the actions of all the players together." Like FrontierVille, your characters can get hitched. But not only can you have kids in this game, they will also inherit some of the skills from their parents. Your characters will have stats pages. They can acquire special skills over time. They can also grow old, get sick, and be nursed back to health.

Basically, this game is promising to do everything that FrontierVille does, and more. We'll be providing additional coverage on this soon. For now, everyone can play god by logging into Facebook and giving the game a spin here.