28.2.08

Shattered World Pt. VII - Scale



This will be a short one in comparison, and it actually makes me a bit sad to think about it.

Given our current level of technology, I don't think I'll be getting to the scale I want. I haven't gotten any comments on this, but I imagine when I showed the first photo of the island, your mind automatically did something like this.


But strangely enough, I actually like having continents larger than a small island in the Bahamas. In fact my island is much larger.


I was thinking closer to Ireland.

There are a few things that this brings to the table.

Travel Forms and Mounts

Unlike games like WoW, you won't be working your ass off saving every penny hoping that you might some day be able to travel faster than a snail's toe, just as soon as you get well over halfway to the level cap. No, you should have a travel form of some sort by the time you exit the starting city, assuming you ever exit the starting city. You may have the appearance upgrade of wings, though you will need to put more points into it to counteract enough weight to stay afloat, or you can upgrade for quadrupedal, equine or insectoid. Or you can buy things like roller blades, add to kicking attack as they are literal blades, motorcycles, or ATV like things. Also guilds with their own towns can open portals.

Society and Gameplay

Imagine, if you will, that a bunch of friends are sitting around in a player owned tavern, playing Texas Hold 'em for kicks, shooting the shit up in the mountains north of Matre's Mind. One of their friends who is on a shared channel with the group is running around helping newbies back at the main city. Finally this friend goes on a long tirade about all these f*ing gankers interrupting their helping the newbies. One of them types half jokingly, "why not just move South?"
Someone else pulls out the map that came with their box, "Aren't there supposed to be Angel mobs down there?"
"Yeah have you seen the screens that one guy put up of them, totally weird crap..."
"Hey, if we all chipped in, we could start a city down there. I mean how many gankers are going to play for six hours of travel just to get their asses kicked by town guards."
They all laugh.

Three days later...
"Hey Krimper, can you go buy a field transport kit."
"A what? Where the hell are you?"
"I'm sitting in our brand new Town hall!"
"Where the hell is that?"
"Well, I can't tell for sure, I just kind of walked around exploring for a few days until I found the Northern Angel Fortress... Great view of it from here!"
"Holy crap... give me a second, I'll go pick one up."

A year later.
The same group of friends plus about eighty other players sit on some hills watching Angels and Demons duke it out over the "don't effin build here you twats" zone. It wasn't that they hadn't seen it before, only five or six of the players were new enough to the South to be seeing it for the first time.
"You see the way the Heavy Defenders hit the ground first, they do the same thing in fortress seiges, but not in town attacks. In town attacks they'll usually drop in around the town hall, try to dps the crap out of it before you can retaliate."
"So we all group around the town hall?"
"Nah... what you do is..."
It been a long time since they had been learning that the hard way. The early days of loosing town halls and farms, about every week had been tough. Now though, they were pretty successful at keeping their little alliances' territory. The "Southerners" as they thought of themselves had even built their own forums site, they were just too far removed from the politics up north for it to matter. The Northerners were going to be taking a keep sometime this week, supposedly. It wasn't something the Southerners were going to succeed at any time soon, the Angels had at least twice as many troops as the demons, and so much time was spent fighting them off there really wasn't time to try and push it back to them.
The battle below was starting to look more certain, the demons were getting pushed back hard. Finally the leader stands and all the others stand up right along with him.
"What do you say we make this a wee bit more even guys?"
"Lets roll!"

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