Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[The Moonlit Knight]

Might be a bit of a long post but I'll try to make a tl;dr version.

I've recently come across games in the vein of Cantr and Faery Tale Online, these being essentially text-based MMORPGs that simulate societies. The first players of FTO started out alone in the middle of some wilderness, started reproducing, foraging for food, steadily making a living for themselves. As time passed, more and more people were born (as children, no less, at first unable to speak in full sentences) and raised by their parents to contribute to the fledgling society.

Cantr has already gotten to the future of this concept; entire societies and cultures have been born from nothing but players coming together and creating them. There are no NPCs beyond wild animals, everything is player-built, and there's no storyline or setting built-in. Everything is defined in the course of playing the game, histories passed down through word of mouth and written texts. Quite the emergent behavior.

I wanted to discuss these sorts of games a bit because I find them fascinating, possibly because they coincide with the typical romantic vision of the apocalypse; the slate of mankind being wiped clean and allowed to start over.

I had the idea that a game of this sort actually set around the apocalypse would be pretty damned cool. The first players would be survivors of whatever holocaust ends civilized society; they would roam the wastes, searching for a place to settle (or living as nomads). Would be a few different groups, split geographically, allowing for varied cultures to emerge. Eventually, new players would have to be born as children as the last survivors of the apocalypse would be elderly by then, and soon there wouldn't be anyone alive who'd actually witnessed the end of the world.

So, questions.

Does anyone else even find these sorts of games interesting?

What are some problems they seem to have?/What could they improve on? Is there anything in the genre that seems blatantly stupid or boring?

And what would be cool to see in such a game? Setting-wise, feature-wise, random idea-wise, whatever.

[Dasleah]

I find myself naturally drawn to these sorts of games. There's something about creating something with your bare hands, even if it's entirely virtual, that can be incredibly satisfying. To log into a game and realise that not only have you created something to benefit your fellow players, but have also helped create the language and culture used around it, is something almost intoxicating.

I'm almost always left less than impressed with the implementations of them, however. With no overarching direction placed by the developers, I find the worlds created by players tend to stagnate and exist for no other reason other than to justify the player's log in times. It's all very nice to create buildings and quests and histories, but for what? What point do they have for existing other than their own existence? I'm not saying that there needs to be a developer with you every step of the way saying what you can and can't do, but some sort of reason, some justification. Society doesn't just develop 'just because'. It develops in response to something - a need to present a common level for trade or war, in retaliation to the influences of an outside society - things like that. I guess I almost find the absolute freedom normally present in such games paralysing - given the opportunity to do anything, but no reason to, I find myself staring blankly and unable to motivate myself to dig further.

And honestly, the post-apocalyptic genre is pretty tired these days. There are so many more interesting reasons why people can be isolated and divorced from existence as we know it from which all sorts of interesting new game mechanics can be drawn. One thing I've been thinking about is fooling around with the nature of paranoia - players are often divided along immediate lines of teams and servers, things like that. Remove the ability to distinguish between friendly and unfriendly players, and now everything changes.

[woose1]

^^^
What he said.
But I don't like online crap. BAH!

[vitaoma]

I also like this kind of games and I find particularly interested in the Legends mode. However, being born as a kid must be a boring role in this society. Maybe a game featuring all this but with full-playable characters only.
I like games where the Game Masters or whatever intervine as least as possible and the economy is ruled by the players.

[woose1]

I was just about to bump this thread. Whaat a coincedence!

I need someone to find me a Dwarf Fortress-like game set in the apocalypse.

[JoshuaFH]

I don't know what this thread is about, but I want to read more.

[Karlito]

I was like the 5th person into FTO.  Its been interesting playing just from the perspective of one of the first people into that game.  There's only around 64 players actually playing right now, because of the birth system that's set up.  Its pretty far from any kind of completion, but I believe Lumin's taking it in the right direction.  Its interesting to note that there probably around 4 isolated colonies that all consist of different 'races', so right from the get go, players are being set up to compete with each other.

[Broose]

Isn't Lumin a member of these forums? That's how I found Faery Tale, in her sig.

[IndonesiaWarMinister]

His*

And yeah, he is here. But I thought he hasn't posted again, after he runs the game.

[Poltifar]

I always liked the idea of these rpg society emulators, and Faery Tale Online seems the most promising one yet, and the first PBBG game in a while to get me very excited about trying it. However, this birthing system is complete and utter fail. No matter how much it would be nice RP-wise, having to wait who-knows how long to make a character is just too much of a pain. I registered yesterday, when I was 272nd in line to have my character generated. Today, I'm 271st. Seriously, even if the speed gets ten times faster eventually, its still too much to have to wait a month for a character especially since we can only have on character at a time and if he dies, we have to wait yet again for another character...

Lumin should think first and foremost about the accessibility of the game. What good is his awesome rpg game system if the ultra-long character creation system discourages most players? Personally, I think I will have completely forgotten about the game by the time my turn came. I understand that Lumin doesn't like the unrealistic "people appear out of nowhere" traditional approach to character generation, but sometimes, games need this sort of stuff, and realism be damned. Atleast have this happen at first, to have an acceptable amount of people in-game, say, 300. Just say these first 300 people were the natives of the land, not that they appeared out of nowhere. Or have colonizers appear from distant, far-away lands and continents, whenever the "birth queu" is longer than, say, 50.

I think I might post something like this in the suggestions part of the FTO forums.

[Armok]

or just [litersize:100:100]

[Poltifar]

or just [litersize:100:100]

Heh, from what I'm reading in the forums, that's close to what's happening in-game now. With a current population of about 65 in the whole game world, of which probably 40% are babies, the mature couples are mating practically nonstop, with families having 10 or so kids each.

[Karlito]

Eventually the game will reach a critical mass of players and waiting in the queue won't really be an issue.  Besides, the game is still heavily underdeveloped, so flooding the world with players wouldn't exactly be ideal...