That is no more true than in our
third category of adventure sources: Myths and Legends. Contracts and
opportunities are both ephemeral in that they rise out of server
conditions and go away. They are mostly procedural, as a result. Myths,
on the other hand, are elements of the world that have always existed,
or at least that predate the history created by players as they play the
game. They, in a sense, are always there, waiting to be discovered by
adventurers. Here, the adventure isn’t the myth itself, or even the
prize, but the effort you make to track down the truth. When it comes to
pursuing myths and legends, you are writing your own adventure.
For example, in Revival, the original edition of the Necronomicon, Al Azif,
is an incredibly powerful Grand Grimoire, containing spells and lore
literally unavailable anywhere else, but no one knows where Al Azif is,
or if it even still exists. For a mage interested in the fight against
the Outer Gods and the Great Old Ones, such a tome would represent the
ultimate weapon and so over the years many have sought it out, each
recording their findings and their effort through conversation or by
writing them down in books and the like. Can a player find Al Azif?
Perhaps, but doing so would likely require significant research and
expeditions into the wilder and lost regions of the world. Such an
effort could take quite awhile, perhaps even spanning an entire career. A
huge stretch of time, spent traveling foreign lands, seeking out lost
knowledge, conversing with strangers and perhaps even fighting for your
life... if that’s not an adventure, I don’t know what is.
Of
course, all of this research means all sorts of things to keep track of.
Who said there was a god buried in the desert again? That sort of
thing. With conventional quests, you’d have some sort of quest tracker
to tell you what to do and where, but Revival isn’t really that kind of
game, is it? So how do we make it possible for you to track all of this
stuff, without a quest tracker? The answer is your journal. Every
character you create will have a journal. It is essentially a blank book
that your character adds to as you play. When you meet important or
powerful people, what you learn about them is added to a dossier you
compile in your journal. As you encounter creatures in the world, basic
information about is added to your bestiary in your journal, as well.
These are just two of the five types of information your journal stores.
It also stores basic information about the lands you visit, compiles
the results of your research and records the interesting things that
happen to you every day. This means that when you overhear a rumor, it
will be added to your journal and if you know anything about the subject
of the rumor, it will link right to it so that you can read more. This
way you’re kept in synch with the knowledge your character has, which is
important both because you can forget and because what you the player
knows and what your character knows may not be the same thing all the
time. In other words: your character’s journal is how you keep it all
straight “in your head.”
Any mmo worth its salt should be like a good prostitute when it comes to its game world- One hell of a faker, and a damn good shaker!
Well, now that that’s out of the way, let’s just have a nice chat, yeah?
Something simple and innocuous, like the weather? Here in Colorado, we
had our first snow of the year this week. It was nothing major, but
weather seldom is, right? I mean, sure you might have something extreme
happen every once in awhile, but mostly the weather does what you expect
it to. But what about when the weather isn’t normal? What makes it
change? How can you represent that without simulating the actual
weather, one of the most difficult problems in computing ever attempted?
Weather is a global phenomenon, an aspect of life in Theleston that connects all parts of the world and Revival
aims to show you that. But to do that we need to do a lot more to track
the weather than most games. The first piece of this comes in the way
we treat the world.
Make no mistake, no matter how a game world
is presented to a player, it’s actually broken up into areas or zones.
Those zones may be big “this is a discrete level” affairs like the zones
of EQ2 or WoW, or they be small slices of land that are stitched
seamlessly together and then streamed to you to present the facade of a
whole world. This is true in Revival as well, but we also devote a lot
of resource to simulating the world as a whole, which is something most
games skip. This includes passing on information about the weather
between areas, so that weather, winds, currents and storms are global
events.
If you think of the world of Theleston as a soccer ball,
then you can think of each hexagon or pentagon on the surface of that
soccer ball as a “cell” of Theleston. Each cell tracks its own internal
weather conditions at about 10m per pixel fidelity, tracking
temperature, wind direction and speed, humidity and atmospheric
pressure. Each cell also has a “normal range” defined for it that,
barring any external influence, the conditions will generally stay
around given the season. There’s some random fluctuation here of course,
but generally speaking, it’ll be warm in summer, cold in winter, that
sort of thing.
The cellular nature of weather tracking allows for
highly regional conditions, such as microclimates. The same perspective
with respect to compartmentalizing data allows us to account for things
such as conditions changing based on altitude or position on the
planet. In other words, you can travel up a mountain and experience
colder conditions as you go, or travel towards Theleston’s equator to
experience warmer and calmer climes, or towards its poles to experience
colder and more volatile weather. Mind you these changes are somewhat
gradual, what with cells adjusting conditions over time such that they
generally stay within the normal ranges defined for them.
While a
cell will want its current conditions to move slowly towards the normal
range of an area, local conditions are still influenced by outside
entities. For example, the conditions of the neighboring cells or
weather “entities” that are moving through them will both alter the
current conditions of a cell. Consider, as another example, that
different latitudes of the planet have different prevailing winds; all
things being equal a general flow of wind in one direction is noted at
particular latitudes. This is true in Theleston, as well, with bands of
prevailing winds and jet streams crossing come of the world’s cells as
world-spanning “ribbons.” When these ribbons of wind perturb and cross
through cells, this will change the air pressure and wind speeds of the
area.
These changes in turn can trigger events which will create
the storms and other moment-to-moment weather of the game. This is one
of the ways a weather entity such as a storm or a tornado could spawn in
the world. A weather entity is sort of like a mob, it is an entity with
its own sort of AI, though players won’t “fight” them or interact too
directly with them, instead when a weather entity spawns, it directly
affects the local weather data in a cell, changing temperatures,
pressures, humidities around it. This then adjusts wind speeds and the
like in turn, which can bleed into other cells. The weather entities
each have their own AI and their own conditions for spawning and
breaking up or “dying.”
And of course, this also means that there
are ways to directly influence the weather. In truth there are several
methods, and almost all of them can be harnessed by players directly in
the form of weather magic. A weather mage can lower or raise atmospheric
pressure to drive wind towards or away from them, or if the mage wants
more finesse, the same magic can be applied to “bend” the vectors of a
cell’s weather in a specific direction and create a wind flow, say to
clear a fog of smoke off the field of battle or fill the sails of a
ship. And of course, a strong weather mage can spawn weather entities
the way a summoner might bring extraplanar creatures into the world.
These are, of course, extremes we’re illustrating here; the primary
purpose of the system is to make sure that the weather of the world
behaves the way worldly weather should, including reacting to the
influences of the moment and accommodating trends that come as a
consequence of each cell being one part of a whole globe.
So for
example, Crowns Rock sits on the globe of Theleston in one of its
temperate zones, where winds generally blow west to east. However, a
jetstream like wind sometimes shifts from its usual pattern in the south
during the winter to cross into this area, and when it does that ribbon
of cold easterly air disrupts the prevailing wind, which in turn spawns
cyclones and other storm events that further disrupt the weather as
they move through the area, leading to a hard, windy and icy winter that
can damage homes, freeze harbors and kill the already meager selection
of winter crops available to farmers. This is because the passage of the
weather entities and the flow of the jet stream all change the
information stored in the weather data for each cell of the world,
driving it away from the averages set for a normal year. All of this
changes inputs into other systems such as the currents in the oceans or
the growing system for crops so that changes in the weather are more
than just a pretty show of skybox changes and particle effects. Instead,
changes in the weather will be felt by all aspects of the game so that
weather is a “real” and palpable thing in the world of Revival.
Any mmo worth its salt should be like a good prostitute when it comes to its game world- One hell of a faker, and a damn good shaker!
looks good, but I think It's gonna have paid subscription.
Only for the Gold Servers - Storyteller Servers, these servers have an active GM team on them that participates in world events and takes control of npcs. Otherwise there are f2p servers.
A huge part of our sandbox world is the fact that everything is so
dynamic. So much so, that we need to make sure players are always having
a rewarding experience. We want to make sure that if you set off on
adventure and exploration that you get something out of it. As
previously discussed, our tagging, resource spawning and dungeon
populating systems are all very in-depth systems that allow for a lot of
variety in the way you play.
When I’m discussing difficulty
scaling, I am specifically talking about combat. Scaling in Revival
isn’t like scaling in games like Skyrim. First, Revival doesn’t have
character/mob levels. Secondly, we don’t scale our NPC enemy levels
based on your level. They are either easy or ridiculously difficult,
depending on how good of a player you are. How good of a player you are
depends on how how well you’re using our skill system. The higher your
skill means using whatever combat mechanic is going to be easier to
control, predict, and use.
With that in mind, just know if I
think I’m giving you - as your character - a difficult enemy, it means
it is a difficult enemy that roughly fits your skill level, tagging
system tags, local conditions and karma.
When we raise difficulty
in an area, it means we are averaging out the players that are in that
area and essentially rolling some chance that you might encounter more
bad guys that are more in line with the people of that area. I’m
referring to NPCs too, not just players. Remember, NPCs are extremely
important in the world, so even if players aren’t around - our virtual
DM system is reacting to what is going on.
Now this isn’t a cut
and dry system. Every area has a population we call the minimum fill.
This fill is determined by what makes sense for this region both
aesthetically and how far it is from heavily populated areas. Smooth
rolling hills? probably not too dangerous. Large, jagged mountains that
take a long journey to get to? Guess what you’re going to find there. It
definitely won’t be pretty fun times. That is how we populate areas. We
also don’t populate areas like an ocean of enemies just standing around
waiting for combat like in 99% of all MMOs. Our enemy NPCs have job
roles and things they’re doing, just like NPCs in cities. This means you
might have a light forest area filled with things you’d expect to find
there - small woodland critters, a few big bad guys, big animals lightly
scattered around. Not too much, but not too little. This minimum fill
is always there unless we’re doing an event that overrides it or the vDM
is doing its equivalent thing, directing NPCs and the like into an area
based on triggered events and conditions.
The big question is,
is the area filled with super bad ass players? In that case, our virtual
dm system will slightly turn up the heat and occasionally spawn a
‘wandering’ difficult enemy. If we have to, we’ll turn the heat up a
lot. This is a chance system and is on a time limit so it doesn’t feel
so systematic. This keeps players on their toes and also makes sure that
if “most players over here are X then the content around them is X”.
Don’t fear though, we believe that most of these cities should be nub
friendly. It’s still just far enough away from the larger populated
areas that you’ll be able to get your feet on the ground as a nub - just
maybe not as easy as other places.
To help with this, we’ll be
introducing a difficulty meter on cities when you create your character.
Before deciding what city you will spawn in for the first time, you can
see how difficult it will be for nubs.
Our goal is to make the
game accessible to nubs or solo players, while also making sure that our
more experienced players can have an amazing experience just in arms
reach from wherever they are.
Any mmo worth its salt should be like a good prostitute when it comes to its game world- One hell of a faker, and a damn good shaker!
Only for the Gold Servers - Storyteller Servers, these servers have an active GM team on them that participates in world events and takes control of npcs. Otherwise there are f2p servers.
A huge part of our sandbox world is the fact that everything is so
dynamic. So much so, that we need to make sure players are always having
a rewarding experience. We want to make sure that if you set off on
adventure and exploration that you get something out of it. As
previously discussed, our tagging, resource spawning and dungeon
populating systems are all very in-depth systems that allow for a lot of
variety in the way you play.
When I’m discussing difficulty
scaling, I am specifically talking about combat. Scaling in Revival
isn’t like scaling in games like Skyrim. First, Revival doesn’t have
character/mob levels. Secondly, we don’t scale our NPC enemy levels
based on your level. They are either easy or ridiculously difficult,
depending on how good of a player you are. How good of a player you are
depends on how how well you’re using our skill system. The higher your
skill means using whatever combat mechanic is going to be easier to
control, predict, and use.
With that in mind, just know if I
think I’m giving you - as your character - a difficult enemy, it means
it is a difficult enemy that roughly fits your skill level, tagging
system tags, local conditions and karma.
When we raise difficulty
in an area, it means we are averaging out the players that are in that
area and essentially rolling some chance that you might encounter more
bad guys that are more in line with the people of that area. I’m
referring to NPCs too, not just players. Remember, NPCs are extremely
important in the world, so even if players aren’t around - our virtual
DM system is reacting to what is going on.
Now this isn’t a cut
and dry system. Every area has a population we call the minimum fill.
This fill is determined by what makes sense for this region both
aesthetically and how far it is from heavily populated areas. Smooth
rolling hills? probably not too dangerous. Large, jagged mountains that
take a long journey to get to? Guess what you’re going to find there. It
definitely won’t be pretty fun times. That is how we populate areas. We
also don’t populate areas like an ocean of enemies just standing around
waiting for combat like in 99% of all MMOs. Our enemy NPCs have job
roles and things they’re doing, just like NPCs in cities. This means you
might have a light forest area filled with things you’d expect to find
there - small woodland critters, a few big bad guys, big animals lightly
scattered around. Not too much, but not too little. This minimum fill
is always there unless we’re doing an event that overrides it or the vDM
is doing its equivalent thing, directing NPCs and the like into an area
based on triggered events and conditions.
The big question is,
is the area filled with super bad ass players? In that case, our virtual
dm system will slightly turn up the heat and occasionally spawn a
‘wandering’ difficult enemy. If we have to, we’ll turn the heat up a
lot. This is a chance system and is on a time limit so it doesn’t feel
so systematic. This keeps players on their toes and also makes sure that
if “most players over here are X then the content around them is X”.
Don’t fear though, we believe that most of these cities should be nub
friendly. It’s still just far enough away from the larger populated
areas that you’ll be able to get your feet on the ground as a nub - just
maybe not as easy as other places.
To help with this, we’ll be
introducing a difficulty meter on cities when you create your character.
Before deciding what city you will spawn in for the first time, you can
see how difficult it will be for nubs.
Our goal is to make the
game accessible to nubs or solo players, while also making sure that our
more experienced players can have an amazing experience just in arms
reach from wherever they are.
Very well, I'll keep myself updated about this! Gonna try it for sure
I heard from this game years ago and I remember dismissing it because it was Open World PvP with just a flimsy protection for people who didn't want to be ganked all day long in a game that is supposed none-combat roles as much as combat ones.
From their mission statement: It is, in fact, more like an ongoing drama where each and every player has an opportunity to enjoy a starring role.
It sound like they are missing the glorious days of guild drama. I've yet to meet a MMO players who likes drama...
They had some good ideas, but like basically all the current MMO developers they fail at the utopia that the people who will play their games will do what they want them to do (in this case, role-play a character in gameworld instead of going off their own scenarios or most likely not role-playing at all).
edit: Just realized that I indirectly financed this game. IllFonic did contract work on Star Citizen for the FPS module...
They had some good ideas, but like basically all the current MMO developers they fail at the utopia that the people who will play their games will do what they want them to do (in this case, role-play a character in gameworld instead of going off their own scenarios or most likely not role-playing at all).
Some role-players have asked questions related to this issue on Revival's forum. The idea is that role-playing in Revival won't be based at all on role-playing that players invent by themselves. The game will automatically enable role-playing for everyone through its different systems and features. Of course, there will most likely be some "unofficial" role-playing that certain players will create out of their own imagination, but it won't have anything to do with the official main role-playing enabled by the game's systems and live storytelling teams. Developers have implied that everyone will be role-playing due to the nature of the game. They have also pointed out that Revival will be a MEOW (multiplayer evolving online world). The focus for players will be to emerge and live in a virtual world populated by a lot of complex active NPCs and other player characters.
A long time ago I used to play an MMORPG called Face of Mankind. In that game everyone was also basically forced to role-play. You had to choose a faction when you created a character and your gameplay was determined by your faction's goals and agenda. For example, if you joined Law Enforcement Department, you were a police officer and your gameplay was all about patrolling streets, guarding a prison planet, scanning citizens for weapons and narcotics, chasing and arresting criminals, assisting the government, upholding the law, aiding federal agents etc.
I'm sure you are right about this part because Illfonic are funding Revival mainly with revenue from their other projects.
So much that even the Revival's president in person spent this year working on numerous other projects
This is from his own Linked In profile:
Currently Charles is working with Psyop on Moving Hazard (Working
Title), Gun Media on Friday the 13th: The Game and also helping to
launch IllFonic's publishing label with titles Project Advena (Working
Title), Nexuiz (Re-Release) and Revival.
Note that Revival is barely mentioned as the last, 5th, and I guess other 3 ( !! ) Revival's enlisted team members (info from their own site) share similar activities. Since when did making MMOs become so easy?
I'm sure you are right about this part because Illfonic are funding Revival mainly with revenue from their other projects.
So much that even the Revival's president in person spent this year working on numerous other projects
This is from his own Linked In profile:
Currently Charles is working with Psyop on Moving Hazard (Working
Title), Gun Media on Friday the 13th: The Game and also helping to
launch IllFonic's publishing label with titles Project Advena (Working
Title), Nexuiz (Re-Release) and Revival.
Note that Revival is barely mentioned as the last, 5th, and I guess other 3 ( !! ) Revival's enlisted team members (info from their own site) share similar activities. Since when did making MMOs become so easy?
If you look at the following video, it seems that Illfonic has at least 15-20 employees.
Charles Brungardt is a co-founder of the company and doesn't seem to be heavily involved in Revival, at least at this stage of development. He has been mentioned on Revival's website and forums only a few times. For Revival they have Kehdrin Gonzalez as creative director, Adam Maxwell (Snipehunter) as lead systems designer and Chris Holtorf (Ombwah) as lead lore designer. There are also others working on Revival but they mostly don't come out on the forums, mostly.
A week ago Gun Media secured funding for Friday the 13th The Game, getting over the minimum $700k goal to the final $823k total funding. It obviously means that some of the crew at Illfonic will be busy with that project. Moving Hazard and Friday the 13th: The Game should probably be released within the next 12 months.
The company is possibly trying to get as much efficiency out of their employees as possible. Maybe if someone doesn't have any work for one project, they work on some other project instead. For example, one of their former 3D model artists, Matt Campbell, did some work for Revival but he was mainly involved with the other projects.
There have been many mentions of shelters for the wayward, and we’ve
touched more than once on the idea that many denizens of Theleston won’t
own property of their own. Fawn is one of these, a wanderer, and in
this Day in the Life, we will follow her.
Fawn rarely spends too
long in town. She is happier on the drift, passing through to pick up
supplies when necessary, or to sell a bit of news down the line. If one
asked her what she did for a living, she would be hard pressed to give a
straight answer. She might qualify as a part-time adventurer, and she’s
seen places that your average cityfolk have only read about, but for
her, life is more about seeing the world than it is about plunder. She
isn’t often rich in coin, but her wealth of worldly experience makes up
for it. On the road she’s seen every city on the map, sailed Blackwell
sound with merchants and thieves, and trekked the grasslands of
Khollaja, camping on the shore of the freshwater sea.
Fawn’s a
half decent shot with a bow, and once or twice she’s done a bit of
shrewd negotiating with a dagger, but her targets are more often game,
and her knife cuts more skins than throats. The road may have a
reputation for danger, but in Fawn’s experience, shrewdness and
forethought generally suffice to keep her out of trouble. In the worst
case, her bow is likely the most expensive thing in her packs, and that
could be replaced in any big city. She has a vault-box in Tide’s End for
her few objects of great value, maps, mostly, but sometimes the
occasional artifact.
When she’s not camped, Fawn’s kit is stowed
on her mule, Frank. Aside from her bow, Fawn’s kit includes the makings
of a camp site. A tent of tight canvas, a bedroll, a tinderbox,
cookpots, a small bundle of food. These things allow Fawn to go anywhere
and still rest in relative comfort, out of the elements, sipping tea as
she looks over her maps. It is in this tent, sheltering from a steady
grey rain, that we join her.
Fawn is a few minutes hike up into
the woods, off of the road, a ways down the mountain from Skypass. She
picked the site last night, under clear skies, but now the rain is apt
to make for cold, slow travel. Skypass is an expensive place for a
wanderer, and Fawn doesn’t like to stay in that city for too long as a
rule, but her passage from Anakhatha had only taken her as far as the
dingy freeport at the base of the Bulwhark, and the only route over
those mountains is straddled by the Brauggine’s ancient stone gatehouse.
So, to Skypass she went.
The night she spent in the common room
of The Stone Man proved fruitful after all, though. A few hours’
conversation with a fellow explorer and a tip about safer places to camp
in Anakhatha had netted her the map, purported to hold the location of a
ruined Brauggine abbey in a wood known as Fallshollow far to the
southwest. Fawn was headed south already, and this ruin sounds like an
interesting destination. Once she’s seen it for herself she’ll turn
about and loop back north to the coast to follow it back towards Tide’s
End.
The rain hasn’t let up, and Fawn wonders how long it will go
on. At first, the wetter weather this side of the channel was welcome,
but right about now, Fawn is wishing for the predictable aridity of the
Anakhathan desert. She stokes the fire, and makes tea before returning
to the map. It’s still a bit of a journey south toward Falcreek on the
side of lonely Cloudspire, but Fawn intends to skirt that mountain to
the east, and keep to the thicker woods where she’s less likely to be
hassled. On the way ‘round, though, she’ll stop by the burgeoning camp
just at the base of the mountain, where the road starts to climb again.
There are always a few folks there, and Fawn can usually make a few good
trades without going all the way up to Falcreek. It’s a popular camp,
already traders have come together in common cause to build a trading
post amidst the tents and Fawn suspects that it may grow into a township
in its own right, one of these days. If she spends a night there, and
drops a little bit of coin, she’ll be helping them along.
Frank,
tied nearby, snorts in the rain, and Fawn worries about losing the
whole day in this tent. On Anakhatha she’d spend the hottest part of the
day in the tent and ride all night, but on Greyshore traveling at night
isn’t Fawn’s favorite choice. The less-savory types prefer the cover of
darkness, after all. Still, sitting on the side of a mountain in the
rain isn’t getting her anywhere, and if she packs up and gets going now
she can at least make the plains before it’s really dark. Fawn looks out
at the sky again and sighs, stows the map, and finishes her tea before
packing the campsite up onto the mule, and heading out into the rain. At
least it wasn’t snowing.
Any mmo worth its salt should be like a good prostitute when it comes to its game world- One hell of a faker, and a damn good shaker!
One of the more memorable blogs that we put out was the blog about
whaling and what we generally call "Commercial Fishing." The idea of
plying the high seas with a crew as you seek out the big game of the sea
is certainly a compelling one, so I suppose I can understand that, but I
have to admit that I was still a little surprised. Whaling has a high
payoff, for sure, but it seems like hard work. If I was going to take up
the life of a fisherman, I think I’d spend my time closer to home… a
lot closer to home even, like on dry land. Yep, I’d much rather spend my
time with a fishing pole, a bucket of bait, and a collection of my own
hand-made lures. I’m talking pole fishing. The kind you can do with a
beer in one hand!
Well, OK, in truth there’s more to it than that in Revival,
but that shouldn’t come as a surprise. Still, at the abstract, pole
fishing is a relatively simple idea; pick a hook or a lure, add bait (or
don’t), then cast and start fishing. In reality though, each step of
that simple process is a process in and of itself. Let’s talk about
lures, for example.
Lures aren’t the plastic or silicon or
rubber affairs you might find at a sporting good store, for example.
Instead they’re made by hand, crafted just like any other object in the
world. It might seem strange, but crafting hooks and lures and tying
flies are actually part of the jewelry crafting trade, mainly because of
the mechanics and equipment involved. Different lures will behave
differently in the water and they will attract different types of fish
as a result. How well they do what they’re meant to is a factor of how
well they’re crafted and what materials were used. Even after having
acquired or created a collection of lures, some thought is going to have
to go into which ones you use and how you fish with them.
Bait
is no different. Preparing bait is a simple use of the butchering
crafting skill, but how and where you cut is going to play a part in how
well it attracts different types of fish as much as what sort of meat
you’re using as bait in the first place. And just like what sort of hook
or lure you use, you’ll have to consider what sort of bait your using
and the sorts of fish you expect to find when it comes time to bait the
hook and cast.
The moment when you cast is when the fishing
minigame itself begins. Casting is sort of a "gestural" game, where you
draw out the arc of your cast with your mouse. Once your lure is in the
water, the trick is to work the line so that the lure behaves the way
it's meant to and hope it attracts a fish who takes a bite. Then, as
long as you can set the hook with a quick jerk of the pole, the game is
on and the fight between fisher and fish begins in earnest. Assuming you
can haul that fish in without breaking the line, dislodging the hook or
breaking your pole, you'll win the day and have a story to tell.
Of
course, the "how" is only half the story, right? Any fisher worth their
bait knows that rivers, lakes and ponds are their own little worlds,
with their own legends and myths. From an old mill pond with the oldest
catfish you ever saw, to the rushing river known for its yearly salmon
runs, the environments and stocks of fish can all be different. You may
even encounter unique fish with their own personalities, like the Ol’
Wily Cat in the mill pond whose “mouth is as big as your head is wide”
or the trout in the lake that always slips the hook (the only way to
catch it is with a weddin’ ring, I hear…) Each presents their own
adventures and challenges to fisherfolk and "progression" is as much
about what you learn about the behavior of the fish you seek and what
you've managed to catch.
While the fishing mechanics create a
pretty fun and compelling fishing experience, they don't really explain
fishing's importance, or even really its role in the world. If you're
not making your own lures and preparing your own bait, it could even be
an expensive habit. So what does fishing get you in return? Well, a
couple of things. I suppose the most important thing though is that pole
fishing is the only way to acquire certain types of fish, many of which
have unique properties that make them valuable to cooks, alchemists,
mages and others. Even journalists and artists will seek out particular
catches for the unique inks and pigments that can be made from them. As
an angler, you may not be dealing with the same sort of volume that
commercial fisher folk see fishing from boats, but the types of fish that
can be caught and the unique ingredients they offer crafters means
there will always be demand for an angler's catch and for the efficient
and skilled angler, fat profits can be made trafficking in rare
ingredients that are hard to store and ship. Ingredients like that can
demand a high price, both in the market at large and when sought after
by individual buyers seeking to secure a reliable source of reagents for
their work.
For some, the economic bounty of the fish caught
will be reward enough, but for the true anglers, the glory is in the
size and nature of the catch. It's not enough to bring home a feast of
fishes, a true angler wants to catch the king of the pond or river they
fish. Revival will offer that experience organically; as fish slip hooks
and get away, they will earn tags and those tags will change the fish.
One might become more intelligent, or more wiley, or larger and more
aggressive. If that fish continues to survive, it might eventually earn
itself a name and a local legend. And, in catching that legend of a
fish, the angler might become a part of that legend, gaining in
reputation and, perhaps, even wisdom along the way.
Or maybe, just one hell of a story about the one that got away.
Any mmo worth its salt should be like a good prostitute when it comes to its game world- One hell of a faker, and a damn good shaker!
Comments
That is no more true than in our third category of adventure sources: Myths and Legends. Contracts and opportunities are both ephemeral in that they rise out of server conditions and go away. They are mostly procedural, as a result. Myths, on the other hand, are elements of the world that have always existed, or at least that predate the history created by players as they play the game. They, in a sense, are always there, waiting to be discovered by adventurers. Here, the adventure isn’t the myth itself, or even the prize, but the effort you make to track down the truth. When it comes to pursuing myths and legends, you are writing your own adventure.
For example, in Revival, the original edition of the Necronomicon, Al Azif, is an incredibly powerful Grand Grimoire, containing spells and lore literally unavailable anywhere else, but no one knows where Al Azif is, or if it even still exists. For a mage interested in the fight against the Outer Gods and the Great Old Ones, such a tome would represent the ultimate weapon and so over the years many have sought it out, each recording their findings and their effort through conversation or by writing them down in books and the like. Can a player find Al Azif? Perhaps, but doing so would likely require significant research and expeditions into the wilder and lost regions of the world. Such an effort could take quite awhile, perhaps even spanning an entire career. A huge stretch of time, spent traveling foreign lands, seeking out lost knowledge, conversing with strangers and perhaps even fighting for your life... if that’s not an adventure, I don’t know what is.
Of course, all of this research means all sorts of things to keep track of. Who said there was a god buried in the desert again? That sort of thing. With conventional quests, you’d have some sort of quest tracker to tell you what to do and where, but Revival isn’t really that kind of game, is it? So how do we make it possible for you to track all of this stuff, without a quest tracker? The answer is your journal. Every character you create will have a journal. It is essentially a blank book that your character adds to as you play. When you meet important or powerful people, what you learn about them is added to a dossier you compile in your journal. As you encounter creatures in the world, basic information about is added to your bestiary in your journal, as well. These are just two of the five types of information your journal stores. It also stores basic information about the lands you visit, compiles the results of your research and records the interesting things that happen to you every day. This means that when you overhear a rumor, it will be added to your journal and if you know anything about the subject of the rumor, it will link right to it so that you can read more. This way you’re kept in synch with the knowledge your character has, which is important both because you can forget and because what you the player knows and what your character knows may not be the same thing all the time. In other words: your character’s journal is how you keep it all straight “in your head.”
Any mmo worth its salt should be like a good prostitute when it comes to its game world- One hell of a faker, and a damn good shaker!
If you are interested in making a MMO maybe visit my page to get a free open source engine.
https://www.revivalgame.com/forum#/discussion/1047/weekly-blog-53-nice-weather
Great Minds of Theleston
Well, now that that’s out of the way, let’s just have a nice chat, yeah? Something simple and innocuous, like the weather? Here in Colorado, we had our first snow of the year this week. It was nothing major, but weather seldom is, right? I mean, sure you might have something extreme happen every once in awhile, but mostly the weather does what you expect it to. But what about when the weather isn’t normal? What makes it change? How can you represent that without simulating the actual weather, one of the most difficult problems in computing ever attempted?Weather is a global phenomenon, an aspect of life in Theleston that connects all parts of the world and Revival aims to show you that. But to do that we need to do a lot more to track the weather than most games. The first piece of this comes in the way we treat the world.
Make no mistake, no matter how a game world is presented to a player, it’s actually broken up into areas or zones. Those zones may be big “this is a discrete level” affairs like the zones of EQ2 or WoW, or they be small slices of land that are stitched seamlessly together and then streamed to you to present the facade of a whole world. This is true in Revival as well, but we also devote a lot of resource to simulating the world as a whole, which is something most games skip. This includes passing on information about the weather between areas, so that weather, winds, currents and storms are global events.
If you think of the world of Theleston as a soccer ball, then you can think of each hexagon or pentagon on the surface of that soccer ball as a “cell” of Theleston. Each cell tracks its own internal weather conditions at about 10m per pixel fidelity, tracking temperature, wind direction and speed, humidity and atmospheric pressure. Each cell also has a “normal range” defined for it that, barring any external influence, the conditions will generally stay around given the season. There’s some random fluctuation here of course, but generally speaking, it’ll be warm in summer, cold in winter, that sort of thing.
The cellular nature of weather tracking allows for highly regional conditions, such as microclimates. The same perspective with respect to compartmentalizing data allows us to account for things such as conditions changing based on altitude or position on the planet. In other words, you can travel up a mountain and experience colder conditions as you go, or travel towards Theleston’s equator to experience warmer and calmer climes, or towards its poles to experience colder and more volatile weather. Mind you these changes are somewhat gradual, what with cells adjusting conditions over time such that they generally stay within the normal ranges defined for them.
While a cell will want its current conditions to move slowly towards the normal range of an area, local conditions are still influenced by outside entities. For example, the conditions of the neighboring cells or weather “entities” that are moving through them will both alter the current conditions of a cell. Consider, as another example, that different latitudes of the planet have different prevailing winds; all things being equal a general flow of wind in one direction is noted at particular latitudes. This is true in Theleston, as well, with bands of prevailing winds and jet streams crossing come of the world’s cells as world-spanning “ribbons.” When these ribbons of wind perturb and cross through cells, this will change the air pressure and wind speeds of the area.
These changes in turn can trigger events which will create the storms and other moment-to-moment weather of the game. This is one of the ways a weather entity such as a storm or a tornado could spawn in the world. A weather entity is sort of like a mob, it is an entity with its own sort of AI, though players won’t “fight” them or interact too directly with them, instead when a weather entity spawns, it directly affects the local weather data in a cell, changing temperatures, pressures, humidities around it. This then adjusts wind speeds and the like in turn, which can bleed into other cells. The weather entities each have their own AI and their own conditions for spawning and breaking up or “dying.”
And of course, this also means that there are ways to directly influence the weather. In truth there are several methods, and almost all of them can be harnessed by players directly in the form of weather magic. A weather mage can lower or raise atmospheric pressure to drive wind towards or away from them, or if the mage wants more finesse, the same magic can be applied to “bend” the vectors of a cell’s weather in a specific direction and create a wind flow, say to clear a fog of smoke off the field of battle or fill the sails of a ship. And of course, a strong weather mage can spawn weather entities the way a summoner might bring extraplanar creatures into the world. These are, of course, extremes we’re illustrating here; the primary purpose of the system is to make sure that the weather of the world behaves the way worldly weather should, including reacting to the influences of the moment and accommodating trends that come as a consequence of each cell being one part of a whole globe.
So for example, Crowns Rock sits on the globe of Theleston in one of its temperate zones, where winds generally blow west to east. However, a jetstream like wind sometimes shifts from its usual pattern in the south during the winter to cross into this area, and when it does that ribbon of cold easterly air disrupts the prevailing wind, which in turn spawns cyclones and other storm events that further disrupt the weather as they move through the area, leading to a hard, windy and icy winter that can damage homes, freeze harbors and kill the already meager selection of winter crops available to farmers. This is because the passage of the weather entities and the flow of the jet stream all change the information stored in the weather data for each cell of the world, driving it away from the averages set for a normal year. All of this changes inputs into other systems such as the currents in the oceans or the growing system for crops so that changes in the weather are more than just a pretty show of skybox changes and particle effects. Instead, changes in the weather will be felt by all aspects of the game so that weather is a “real” and palpable thing in the world of Revival.
Any mmo worth its salt should be like a good prostitute when it comes to its game world- One hell of a faker, and a damn good shaker!
https://www.revivalgame.com/blog/50-weekly-blog-update-49-difficulty-rising
Great Minds of Theleston
A huge part of our sandbox world is the fact that everything is so dynamic. So much so, that we need to make sure players are always having a rewarding experience. We want to make sure that if you set off on adventure and exploration that you get something out of it. As previously discussed, our tagging, resource spawning and dungeon populating systems are all very in-depth systems that allow for a lot of variety in the way you play.When I’m discussing difficulty scaling, I am specifically talking about combat. Scaling in Revival isn’t like scaling in games like Skyrim. First, Revival doesn’t have character/mob levels. Secondly, we don’t scale our NPC enemy levels based on your level. They are either easy or ridiculously difficult, depending on how good of a player you are. How good of a player you are depends on how how well you’re using our skill system. The higher your skill means using whatever combat mechanic is going to be easier to control, predict, and use.
With that in mind, just know if I think I’m giving you - as your character - a difficult enemy, it means it is a difficult enemy that roughly fits your skill level, tagging system tags, local conditions and karma.
When we raise difficulty in an area, it means we are averaging out the players that are in that area and essentially rolling some chance that you might encounter more bad guys that are more in line with the people of that area. I’m referring to NPCs too, not just players. Remember, NPCs are extremely important in the world, so even if players aren’t around - our virtual DM system is reacting to what is going on.
Now this isn’t a cut and dry system. Every area has a population we call the minimum fill. This fill is determined by what makes sense for this region both aesthetically and how far it is from heavily populated areas. Smooth rolling hills? probably not too dangerous. Large, jagged mountains that take a long journey to get to? Guess what you’re going to find there. It definitely won’t be pretty fun times. That is how we populate areas. We also don’t populate areas like an ocean of enemies just standing around waiting for combat like in 99% of all MMOs. Our enemy NPCs have job roles and things they’re doing, just like NPCs in cities. This means you might have a light forest area filled with things you’d expect to find there - small woodland critters, a few big bad guys, big animals lightly scattered around. Not too much, but not too little. This minimum fill is always there unless we’re doing an event that overrides it or the vDM is doing its equivalent thing, directing NPCs and the like into an area based on triggered events and conditions.
The big question is, is the area filled with super bad ass players? In that case, our virtual dm system will slightly turn up the heat and occasionally spawn a ‘wandering’ difficult enemy. If we have to, we’ll turn the heat up a lot. This is a chance system and is on a time limit so it doesn’t feel so systematic. This keeps players on their toes and also makes sure that if “most players over here are X then the content around them is X”. Don’t fear though, we believe that most of these cities should be nub friendly. It’s still just far enough away from the larger populated areas that you’ll be able to get your feet on the ground as a nub - just maybe not as easy as other places.
To help with this, we’ll be introducing a difficulty meter on cities when you create your character. Before deciding what city you will spawn in for the first time, you can see how difficult it will be for nubs.
Our goal is to make the game accessible to nubs or solo players, while also making sure that our more experienced players can have an amazing experience just in arms reach from wherever they are.
Any mmo worth its salt should be like a good prostitute when it comes to its game world- One hell of a faker, and a damn good shaker!
Very well, I'll keep myself updated about this! Gonna try it for sure
From their mission statement: It is, in fact, more like an ongoing drama where each and every player has an opportunity to enjoy a starring role.
It sound like they are missing the glorious days of guild drama. I've yet to meet a MMO players who likes drama...
They had some good ideas, but like basically all the current MMO developers they fail at the utopia that the people who will play their games will do what they want them to do (in this case, role-play a character in gameworld instead of going off their own scenarios or most likely not role-playing at all).
edit:
Just realized that I indirectly financed this game. IllFonic did contract work on Star Citizen for the FPS module...
Some role-players have asked questions related to this issue on Revival's forum. The idea is that role-playing in Revival won't be based at all on role-playing that players invent by themselves. The game will automatically enable role-playing for everyone through its different systems and features. Of course, there will most likely be some "unofficial" role-playing that certain players will create out of their own imagination, but it won't have anything to do with the official main role-playing enabled by the game's systems and live storytelling teams. Developers have implied that everyone will be role-playing due to the nature of the game. They have also pointed out that Revival will be a MEOW (multiplayer evolving online world). The focus for players will be to emerge and live in a virtual world populated by a lot of complex active NPCs and other player characters.
A long time ago I used to play an MMORPG called Face of Mankind. In that game everyone was also basically forced to role-play. You had to choose a faction when you created a character and your gameplay was determined by your faction's goals and agenda. For example, if you joined Law Enforcement Department, you were a police officer and your gameplay was all about patrolling streets, guarding a prison planet, scanning citizens for weapons and narcotics, chasing and arresting criminals, assisting the government, upholding the law, aiding federal agents etc.
I'm sure you are right about this part because Illfonic are funding Revival mainly with revenue from their other projects.
* more info, screenshots and videos here
This is from his own Linked In profile:
Currently Charles is working with Psyop on Moving Hazard (Working Title), Gun Media on Friday the 13th: The Game and also helping to launch IllFonic's publishing label with titles Project Advena (Working Title), Nexuiz (Re-Release) and Revival.
Note that Revival is barely mentioned as the last, 5th, and I guess other 3 ( !! ) Revival's enlisted team members (info from their own site) share similar activities. Since when did making MMOs become so easy?
If you look at the following video, it seems that Illfonic has at least 15-20 employees.
Charles Brungardt is a co-founder of the company and doesn't seem to be heavily involved in Revival, at least at this stage of development. He has been mentioned on Revival's website and forums only a few times. For Revival they have Kehdrin Gonzalez as creative director, Adam Maxwell (Snipehunter) as lead systems designer and Chris Holtorf (Ombwah) as lead lore designer. There are also others working on Revival but they mostly don't come out on the forums, mostly.
A week ago Gun Media secured funding for Friday the 13th The Game, getting over the minimum $700k goal to the final $823k total funding. It obviously means that some of the crew at Illfonic will be busy with that project. Moving Hazard and Friday the 13th: The Game should probably be released within the next 12 months.
The company is possibly trying to get as much efficiency out of their employees as possible. Maybe if someone doesn't have any work for one project, they work on some other project instead. For example, one of their former 3D model artists, Matt Campbell, did some work for Revival but he was mainly involved with the other projects.
* more info, screenshots and videos here
https://www.revivalgame.com/blog/62-weekly-blog-update-60-a-day-in-the-life-of-a-nomad
Great Minds of Theleston
There have been many mentions of shelters for the wayward, and we’ve touched more than once on the idea that many denizens of Theleston won’t own property of their own. Fawn is one of these, a wanderer, and in this Day in the Life, we will follow her.Fawn rarely spends too long in town. She is happier on the drift, passing through to pick up supplies when necessary, or to sell a bit of news down the line. If one asked her what she did for a living, she would be hard pressed to give a straight answer. She might qualify as a part-time adventurer, and she’s seen places that your average cityfolk have only read about, but for her, life is more about seeing the world than it is about plunder. She isn’t often rich in coin, but her wealth of worldly experience makes up for it. On the road she’s seen every city on the map, sailed Blackwell sound with merchants and thieves, and trekked the grasslands of Khollaja, camping on the shore of the freshwater sea.
Fawn’s a half decent shot with a bow, and once or twice she’s done a bit of shrewd negotiating with a dagger, but her targets are more often game, and her knife cuts more skins than throats. The road may have a reputation for danger, but in Fawn’s experience, shrewdness and forethought generally suffice to keep her out of trouble. In the worst case, her bow is likely the most expensive thing in her packs, and that could be replaced in any big city. She has a vault-box in Tide’s End for her few objects of great value, maps, mostly, but sometimes the occasional artifact.
When she’s not camped, Fawn’s kit is stowed on her mule, Frank. Aside from her bow, Fawn’s kit includes the makings of a camp site. A tent of tight canvas, a bedroll, a tinderbox, cookpots, a small bundle of food. These things allow Fawn to go anywhere and still rest in relative comfort, out of the elements, sipping tea as she looks over her maps. It is in this tent, sheltering from a steady grey rain, that we join her.
Fawn is a few minutes hike up into the woods, off of the road, a ways down the mountain from Skypass. She picked the site last night, under clear skies, but now the rain is apt to make for cold, slow travel. Skypass is an expensive place for a wanderer, and Fawn doesn’t like to stay in that city for too long as a rule, but her passage from Anakhatha had only taken her as far as the dingy freeport at the base of the Bulwhark, and the only route over those mountains is straddled by the Brauggine’s ancient stone gatehouse. So, to Skypass she went.
The night she spent in the common room of The Stone Man proved fruitful after all, though. A few hours’ conversation with a fellow explorer and a tip about safer places to camp in Anakhatha had netted her the map, purported to hold the location of a ruined Brauggine abbey in a wood known as Fallshollow far to the southwest. Fawn was headed south already, and this ruin sounds like an interesting destination. Once she’s seen it for herself she’ll turn about and loop back north to the coast to follow it back towards Tide’s End.
The rain hasn’t let up, and Fawn wonders how long it will go on. At first, the wetter weather this side of the channel was welcome, but right about now, Fawn is wishing for the predictable aridity of the Anakhathan desert. She stokes the fire, and makes tea before returning to the map. It’s still a bit of a journey south toward Falcreek on the side of lonely Cloudspire, but Fawn intends to skirt that mountain to the east, and keep to the thicker woods where she’s less likely to be hassled. On the way ‘round, though, she’ll stop by the burgeoning camp just at the base of the mountain, where the road starts to climb again. There are always a few folks there, and Fawn can usually make a few good trades without going all the way up to Falcreek. It’s a popular camp, already traders have come together in common cause to build a trading post amidst the tents and Fawn suspects that it may grow into a township in its own right, one of these days. If she spends a night there, and drops a little bit of coin, she’ll be helping them along.
Frank, tied nearby, snorts in the rain, and Fawn worries about losing the whole day in this tent. On Anakhatha she’d spend the hottest part of the day in the tent and ride all night, but on Greyshore traveling at night isn’t Fawn’s favorite choice. The less-savory types prefer the cover of darkness, after all. Still, sitting on the side of a mountain in the rain isn’t getting her anywhere, and if she packs up and gets going now she can at least make the plains before it’s really dark. Fawn looks out at the sky again and sighs, stows the map, and finishes her tea before packing the campsite up onto the mule, and heading out into the rain. At least it wasn’t snowing.
Any mmo worth its salt should be like a good prostitute when it comes to its game world- One hell of a faker, and a damn good shaker!
One of the more memorable blogs that we put out was the blog about whaling and what we generally call "Commercial Fishing." The idea of plying the high seas with a crew as you seek out the big game of the sea is certainly a compelling one, so I suppose I can understand that, but I have to admit that I was still a little surprised. Whaling has a high payoff, for sure, but it seems like hard work. If I was going to take up the life of a fisherman, I think I’d spend my time closer to home… a lot closer to home even, like on dry land. Yep, I’d much rather spend my time with a fishing pole, a bucket of bait, and a collection of my own hand-made lures. I’m talking pole fishing. The kind you can do with a beer in one hand!
Well, OK, in truth there’s more to it than that in Revival, but that shouldn’t come as a surprise. Still, at the abstract, pole fishing is a relatively simple idea; pick a hook or a lure, add bait (or don’t), then cast and start fishing. In reality though, each step of that simple process is a process in and of itself. Let’s talk about lures, for example.
Lures aren’t the plastic or silicon or rubber affairs you might find at a sporting good store, for example. Instead they’re made by hand, crafted just like any other object in the world. It might seem strange, but crafting hooks and lures and tying flies are actually part of the jewelry crafting trade, mainly because of the mechanics and equipment involved. Different lures will behave differently in the water and they will attract different types of fish as a result. How well they do what they’re meant to is a factor of how well they’re crafted and what materials were used. Even after having acquired or created a collection of lures, some thought is going to have to go into which ones you use and how you fish with them.
Bait is no different. Preparing bait is a simple use of the butchering crafting skill, but how and where you cut is going to play a part in how well it attracts different types of fish as much as what sort of meat you’re using as bait in the first place. And just like what sort of hook or lure you use, you’ll have to consider what sort of bait your using and the sorts of fish you expect to find when it comes time to bait the hook and cast.
The moment when you cast is when the fishing minigame itself begins. Casting is sort of a "gestural" game, where you draw out the arc of your cast with your mouse. Once your lure is in the water, the trick is to work the line so that the lure behaves the way it's meant to and hope it attracts a fish who takes a bite. Then, as long as you can set the hook with a quick jerk of the pole, the game is on and the fight between fisher and fish begins in earnest. Assuming you can haul that fish in without breaking the line, dislodging the hook or breaking your pole, you'll win the day and have a story to tell.
Of course, the "how" is only half the story, right? Any fisher worth their bait knows that rivers, lakes and ponds are their own little worlds, with their own legends and myths. From an old mill pond with the oldest catfish you ever saw, to the rushing river known for its yearly salmon runs, the environments and stocks of fish can all be different. You may even encounter unique fish with their own personalities, like the Ol’ Wily Cat in the mill pond whose “mouth is as big as your head is wide” or the trout in the lake that always slips the hook (the only way to catch it is with a weddin’ ring, I hear…) Each presents their own adventures and challenges to fisherfolk and "progression" is as much about what you learn about the behavior of the fish you seek and what you've managed to catch.
While the fishing mechanics create a pretty fun and compelling fishing experience, they don't really explain fishing's importance, or even really its role in the world. If you're not making your own lures and preparing your own bait, it could even be an expensive habit. So what does fishing get you in return? Well, a couple of things. I suppose the most important thing though is that pole fishing is the only way to acquire certain types of fish, many of which have unique properties that make them valuable to cooks, alchemists, mages and others. Even journalists and artists will seek out particular catches for the unique inks and pigments that can be made from them. As an angler, you may not be dealing with the same sort of volume that commercial fisher folk see fishing from boats, but the types of fish that can be caught and the unique ingredients they offer crafters means there will always be demand for an angler's catch and for the efficient and skilled angler, fat profits can be made trafficking in rare ingredients that are hard to store and ship. Ingredients like that can demand a high price, both in the market at large and when sought after by individual buyers seeking to secure a reliable source of reagents for their work.
For some, the economic bounty of the fish caught will be reward enough, but for the true anglers, the glory is in the size and nature of the catch. It's not enough to bring home a feast of fishes, a true angler wants to catch the king of the pond or river they fish. Revival will offer that experience organically; as fish slip hooks and get away, they will earn tags and those tags will change the fish. One might become more intelligent, or more wiley, or larger and more aggressive. If that fish continues to survive, it might eventually earn itself a name and a local legend. And, in catching that legend of a fish, the angler might become a part of that legend, gaining in reputation and, perhaps, even wisdom along the way.
Or maybe, just one hell of a story about the one that got away.
Any mmo worth its salt should be like a good prostitute when it comes to its game world- One hell of a faker, and a damn good shaker!
http://www.revivalroleplay.com/home
Any mmo worth its salt should be like a good prostitute when it comes to its game world- One hell of a faker, and a damn good shaker!