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FOnline: Ashes of Phoenix, a PvP oriented Fallout MMORPG
Hello everyone!
After almost 2 years of intense development, time has come to present you a new MMORPG taking place in the post-apocalyptic universe of Fallout. It is called FOnline: Ashes of Phoenix, and it's a game oriented around open PvP.
In 2077, bombs of the Great War ravaged the whole planet, or almost. We're now in 2220, in Arizona. The center of Phoenix' city is one of the exceptions, spared by nuclear fire, isolated and ignored by the rest of the world for nearly 150 years.
Eventually, a rumor speaking of plentiful resources and intact buildings has been spread into the Wasteland. Locals but also outsiders showed up, wishing to take over this new eldorado. In this chaotic and conflicting situation, dozens of lonely adventurers are seizing their chance as well.
You are a Wastelander, recently arrived in Arizona. Guided by your own motivations, you'll have the choice to join one of the four powers in place and take part in the conquest of the city.
FOnline: Ashes of Phoenix features an old-school gameplay, very close to the first Fallout games, but transposed in a massively multiplayer context with four distinct sides in which players will gather. The game is entirely in real time and works with a revisited action point system. Nearly all the Fallout 1 and 2 game systems are there, but reworked and improved. Plenty of elements and features have been introduced too, graphics, items, a random assignment system or a fame system summarizing your PvP accomplishments are some examples.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of what AoP has to offer:
- A new region of the Fallout world to explore around the city of Phoenix, a giant location with dozens of connected quarters where everything can happen.
- An advanced system of factions and reputation, including private bases for player platoons, merchants, assignments and more, regrouped inside faction headquarters where you can rest between missions and meet new mates to explore the Wasteland.
- A completely reworked character system with hundreds of viable profiles, guarantying that you can actually create any character you want and develop it on the long term, while still being competitive against other players. No level cap, but a soft cap at level 24, where evolving your character further will make it rather more versatile than strictly more powerful.
- A deeply revised combat system fully in real time with the introduction of a new Action Points system, new burst mechanics, deployable weapons, covers, squads and many more features implying personal and group strategies for an exciting and ruthless combat experience.
- A strong PvP system stimulating fair savage PvP and involving the control of Phoenix. Twelve quarters can be claimed, strategy and smart moves matter more than ever. Exploring Phoenix underground dungeons can also be the occasion for player groups to ambush each other.
- A huge diplomacy potential with the presence of four main factions: Jim & Jack & Joe Lawyer Agency, the Family, the Brahminboys and the V-Technologists. Player platoons will deeply influence the diplomacy of their faction.
- A vast equipment composed of hundreds of weapons and many armors. Multiple new items have been added, like new grenades, traps, spears, energy SMGs and many more. Those items bring a new dimension to PvP, like smoke grenades, Incinerators or the legendary Bozar heavy sniper rifle. Every player should find multiple suitable combinations of weapons and armors for his playstyle.
- A vast crafting system including the search for relics, exchanged with your faction for blueprints unlocking more advanced weapons through different tech trees. Your character is able to be fully independant without suffering from any power gap with other player characters.
- A strong economy based on player trades, smart scavenging and crafting where bottle caps and equipment in general are more difficult to stockpile.
- A completely new interface optimized for PvP including a new Pipboy, called the Cheapboy and working both as an intel provider and an encyclopedia.
- Enhanced NPCs for a more natural and dynamic experience. Raiders roam the ruins of Phoenix, packs of wild animals are out for blood in the Wastes and friendly travelers might come to your aid. You never know what's hiding behind the next corner.
- A maximal randomization makes sure every journey in the Wastes is a new experience. Loots, mobs and even assignments you can get from your faction will lead you to new places and situations in which you have to adapt and quickly react.
- A mini-adventure tutorial will introduce some of the game mechanics and give you the occasion to play safely on your side before joining the actual game field.
General information
FOnline: Ashes of Phoenix is a fan game entirely free to play. It is a tribute to the excellent universe of Fallout, a way for it to be discovered by new people and our own vision of it in multiplayer.
You need to own a copy of Fallout 2 in order to play. Concretely, you’ll need two files called ‘MASTER.dat’ and ‘CRITTER.dat’ located in your Fallout 2 directory, which contain Fallout graphical assets used by Ashes of Phoenix.
The 1.0 version of the game will be available soon (within a few days/weeks) and the server will be opened to everyone. The officiel date will announced as soon as it is confirmed.
Official website: http://fonline-aop.net
Moddb page: http://www.moddb.com/games/fonline-ashes-of-phoenix
Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/FOnlineAOP
Finally, we're regularly releasing dev diaries to talk about the game on our youtube channel. Your opinions and comments are welcome!
http://www.youtube.com/user/FOnlineAoP
Thanks for your attention, and maybe we'll see each other soon in the Wasteland!
Comments
I will be checking this out. I really like how it's an all new city/area.
Does this game have any relationship with ROnline Reloaded? Not that that would be a bad thing. I am just curious.
Hello guys, thanks for your comments!
We know the people behind FOnline: Reloaded and they know us. We don't work together but we try to keep a relation of respect between us. They have their project, we have ours, and both are very different in term of objectives.
About turning Fallout 3 to MMO, I think there are fan projects that are currently working to enable it. It's a massive work though, as you can imagine. For example, development of the game engine used by FOnline has started in 2004 and the first playable games came around 2009.
Having a multiplayer experience with Fallout 3 assets would certainly be awesome to play. As for us, we're big fans of the old-school version, and all the modding done by the community for the last 15 years.
Hello everyone!
The third dev diary is out. This time we talk about skills, and detail some of the options available in term of character building and combat tactics. This video shows some of the most advanced features of the game, that will enable complex dynamic gameplay for both individuals and groups. We hope you'll enjoy what you'll see and we look forward for your feedback!
http://youtu.be/mkfXaQMFeYI
I like everything I've seen so far, except I can never get behind mmo's that let players become invisible and attack people from being invisible (ie the sneak skill). I am fine with there being some way to simulate sneaking, like sneaking along a wall or hiding in a pile of boxes, but using sneak to run around in a wide open space while invisible and using weapons 10 feet from someone who should be able to see you but can't breaks immersion too much for me. Or to say it another way - there's two main ways to implement sneak in a pvp mmo...
The first way is to use sneak to simulate how sneaking works in real life. In this way, your character would turn invisible as you try to sneak along a wall in a semi darkly lit area past a guard post. Yeah, your dude goes invisible, but being invisible is mainly to represent that the character in the game world is crouching down, taking cover behind objects, trying to be still anytime a guard looks his way, etc. Making the character invisible to represent all this stuff is a short cut so animators and developers don't have to animate and code 1000 different movements for things like hiding in boxes and walking with your back up to a wall and holding super still anytime someone glances your way, etc. Invisibility is a representation of those actions. Invisibility isn't the character actually becoming invisible in the game world. And in this way, invisibility (sneak) is almost purely a defensive ability.
Invisibility as it's shown in this video looks like the character in the game world literally becomes invisible in the game world to the enemies (assuming they don't see him). He is invisible even while he's running around in the open throwing/shooting stuff at the npc who is just a few feet from him. That isn't sneaking. That is literal invisibility. Using invisibility offensively like this is what I don't dig.
I get that it's a video game. This is just one of those things that requires too much suspension of disbelief for me. I'm going to try the game anyway since everything else looks really great and impressive. It's clear your group has done a lot of work on this, and it honestly looks pretty good. You can't let one person's complaints about sneak change your design of the game. I just wanted to throw it out there since you specifically asked for feedback on the video.
Edit: I forgot to mention a pretty big exception to all this. If sneak (and particularly its offensive aspects) are so nerfed that hardly anyone uses it offensively, then for the most part it's fine like that. Still silly, but if almost no one uses it then no harm no foul.
Hello Jimmac, thanks for your feedback! I'm really glad you enjoyed what you saw.
About sneaking, we understand your concern, and we felt the same when we designed the feature in the first place. Sneaking is not supposed to feel like casting Improved Invisibility, that's why we came up with the following design decisions:
- entering sneak mode requires you to carry a stealthboy, a pre war personal stealth device. You can't just magically become invisible.
- you can't enter sneak mode in front of people seeing you, except if they're in the same group as you.
- sneaking near walls, boxes and such items makes you more difficult to detect.
- detection is handled very differently if you're in front, on the sides or behind your target. Trying to reach any decent sniper by running in front of him will result in a quick humiliating death. On the contrary, experienced sneakers with the right perks and equipment are able to come from behind and get to HtH with their enemy without being seen at all.
- weapons and armors impact sneak a lot. Shooting with a non-silent weapon will automatically turn off sneak upon use, and trying to run in sneak mode wearing a Power armor or a Metal armor for example won't be effective at all.
- sneaking against highly experienced players won't be a piece of cake. If at any moment they perceive your presence, even for an instant, they can decide to shoot some bullets in your direction, trying to guess where you're standing. If they hit you doing so, you'll be revealed... and in trouble.
The purpose behind offensive capabilities for sneakers is to give a real role to scouts. In the past, using sneak turned you to an intel provider only, not able to fight decently against enemy fighters (you could basically just try to fight other scouts). Consequence was that sneak characters were not used full time but just to get information, meaning players would often be bored playing them, using a second char at the same time, which is considered as cheat.
We hope that our approach will allow sneakers to be scouts, but also competent fighters.
Sounds cool.
I know some people have issues with "invisibility" style stealth but I see no other way for now to simulate the ability to sneak in an mmo that is not completely first person. When you can see everything in a huge radius around your avatar...it's kind of hard to be "stealthed" upon without an invisibility mechanic.
In first person ..sure.. Skills that make your footsteps silent..or gradually more quiet with advancement. Real camo techniques etc. That would be great. But for most mmos...true stealth is just not possible,
The system here as described sounds interesting and well thought out.
Hello everyone!
Development on Ashes of Phoenix has been really intense during this summer, and thanks to your support and feedback, we've been able to bring multiple improvements to the game. Now, it is time for the launch.
Friday the 5th of September, the public server will be officially open for everyone. That means you'll be free to download the game client and jump into Arizona with all of us and start the adventure!
In a couple of days, game rules will be posted on our forums and the installation procedure page will be updated. We'll post an announcement about it before launch day so you can perform the game installation already if you wish. The exact hour of the launch and some other details will be given at the same time.
This version 1.0 is just the beginning of the Ashes of Phoenix journey though. We have plans for the future weeks and months, and you can expect the game to evolve regularly. We'll talk about this in more detail in a few weeks. You can also expect us to ask your opinions about features of the game, both existing ones and new ones that we plan to introduce. Thanks to those discussions, we hope to develop a better game that corresponds to your desires, and also give you a clearer picture of our vision for Ashes of Phoenix in the future. This game is about combat, exploration, survival and politics, and all those aspects have not been equally developed yet. There is much more to come!
On top of that, in order to allow everyone to take a look at raw footage straight from the battlefield, we will host a livestream on twitch.tv on August 30th, 8-10pm CET, showing live zone control in action.
We hope you'll have much fun playing AoP and we want to thank you for your support which is extremely helpful, boosting our spirit and giving us the energy we need to continue on. We hope you're as excited as we are to start plundering Phoenix with all our friends!
See you soon in Arizona!