Dragon's Tale is a game with enough direction to permit a notion of progress, but enough freedom to make "what am I supposed to do" less applicable than "what am I able to do," or "what will happen if I do ____?"  Bucking the modern trend to relieve players of the "responsibility," the "burden" of deciding for themselves what is enjoyable (via increasingly linear game design), DT focuses on supplying its players with the tools to design their own user experience.  Updates are infrequent and generally of marginal impact, but the game doesn't depend on them for its replay value.

The modern content pump model for player retention is so common (presumably it yields the highest profit ceiling) that it's sometimes mistaken as the sole means of achieving replayability.  To see the contrast, ask yourself why the Nintendo 64 Zelda games remain popular decades after release.  It's not because the quests were suffused with randomness or ultra-finely tuned to manufacture variety, and it's certainly not because the developers are pumping it with new levels, new characters, new DLC, etc. every month. It's because the game itself has such a robust, nonlinear structure that players are still able to find their own ways to extract entertainment value from it. Search Ocarina of Time Bingo for an example.  Organic replay value has the potential to extend the life span of a game orders of magnitude beyond what can be achieved by repeatedly injecting new content.  When I hear "we need to change ____ to keep a game fresh," I wonder why its freshness was built to decay in the first place.

Almost every object in DT is actually a game; kicking the tree is one of many. The outcomes of some games largely depend on luck, while many others are strongly influenced by player skill, and in most cases, it’s clear which games are which. While some pari-mutuel and player-versus-player games have been implemented, a large number are built on an innovative wagering system that makes it feasible to reward player skill even in house-banked games.  The basic idea is to automatically scale the cost and/or prizes of a game to recalibrate its difficulty, much like the Bitcoin mining target.  The result is house-banked gameplay encapsulated by an outer, pari-mutuel layer.

There is also an inventory for storing items used by some games, and a quest system where your avatar can level up. A bonus called “Dragon’s Treasure” is rewarded during game play, which grows larger as your level increases.  So DT does have some healthy amount of structure (unlike Second Life, for example). Give it a try if this sounds like fun to you.