Randomly decided to check in after years and see talk of Doordie and Amel. Lots of fun memories! Arguably my first long time character, Narwyn, ended up closely aligned with Amel as his protege.
Doordie was one of the best RP's I ever played with. His stories, with his character Amel, were amazing. Rich, deep, complex. I hope Doordie is doing well! You have a really great Uncle!
I have to say though that the notion about housing holds little to no appeal to me. Not on Revival and not on Thain, for that matter. That's a personal preference, of course. To me housing plays too much like SIMS. I play RPGs to immerse myself into story lines, not play house. Every moment I spend isolated in my humble abode I could have spent participating in an event or exploring the world. And if I feel like socialising with people on a more intimate level, well, you can always find an inn. Now if housing was a freemium thing I might've considered it, but having to pay RL dollars for something I prefer to play without is simply a no-go.
Registered Member #279
Joined: 4:17:59 pm GMT 09/25/04
Posts: 5460
I agree for the most part. For some, housing and the sims aspect is really important, and people have been discussing ways to cooperatively get the really expensive properties, too. Revival has five tiers of housing, "Tenements" which go for ~$35-40, "Cottages" in the range of $80-100, "Houses" for roughly $200, "Manses" for $300 to $400, and finally, "Estates" for which prices haven't been set yet (but we can inagine). Estates are huge; and more like large guild housing, with huge interior halls, work-spaces, rows of smaller rooms, tunnels and basements, and so on. And people will buy them and use them.
Currently, if one buys a property, they have a way for you to load them up in a test client and walk around in them and decorate them. This is cool, but purely a teaser mode right now. Despite that, on Ghoratul, one the US Gold servers, most all the properties in the first town are already sold. There's a few Tenements and Cottages left, but there's some excitement over housing in the game. Ghoratul is the server most US Roleplayers have chosen to locate to. There's more available on Anakhatha, the EU Gold server, but it's still heavily purchased. There will be more down the road as they open up more town, so even if one does want housing, there's no compelling reason to jump at it now.
One of the more interesting discussions is how one plays without having housing of your own. It sounds pretty cool; you can set up camp in the wilds, rent rooms in towns temporarily, or storage space at a bank. On the Gold servers, they've said that players who are active (they have a way of measuring this by your accumulation of Standing Points) and consistently use the same roads and camp in the same places may see the world respond to that. The storytelling team may notice you've been diligently setting up and improving a camp. Then, your favorite trails might become straighter and easier to traverse from your traffic, and your campsite might become cleaner, safer, and better protected. Eventually NPCs and other players might start using your trails or camping close to your site, and then over a long period of time merchants might stop by, or even set up a stand, and the trail might convert to a road and the camp to a small settlement. (I would probably find a new campsite by then -- it would be getting crowded.)
The other side of not having housing is finding safe spots for your stuff. Revival won't be like traditional MMO's where you can carry some tremendous amount of personal stuff and money around with you everywhere. You're going to need a place to set it down. Let's say you rent a chest in a bank, or in someone else's house. That chest needs a lock, and it could be robbed even if it has one. A bank probably would have guards, so it would be pretty safe. But if you just drop a box in the woods and cover it with leaves, you're at the mercy of luck that it's not found and rifled through. It a player wants to be a true vagabond, they're going to have few possessions, and those will need to be light and compact.
If you carry a lot of money, that's going to be difficult too. In Revival, coins have weight. Okay, so you deposit them in a Bank. That's good, but you have to go physically to that Bank to withdraw them. If that bank is in town X, and then you travel to town Y, the bank in town Y doesn't have your money -- it's still back in town X. If you have a chest you've stashed your spare clothing in, it's only in that chest. In most MMO's, once you stash items in your bank space, it's accessible from any bank access point in the world. Not so in Revival; and I think this is going to confuse (and even upset) a lot of players used to these conveniences in other MMOs at first.
This all seems kind of hardcore, but their vision is that if something doesn't make sense from the setting of their world, they're not going to support it. So no money and items teleporting around to follow us in our travels. A prosperous merchant character might have several houses to use as warehouses for their trade goods in several cities. And hire NPC guards or even other players to protect them while they're absent or logged out.
You make fair points, or, to say it in a bit different way, the devs have made fair decisions. See, I just drew impromptu similarities between NWN and Revival in the sense that your inventory is limitless and that coin has no weight. Were that the case, having a house in which you're able to stash some of your valuables would be unnecessary. You could make the argument and say the devs are forcing housing on people by making a hassle of carrying around valuables, but you could just as easily debuff that by saying they're keeping things realistic and interesting. But it's nice there are alternatives to housing for those of us who do not find the idea particularly attractive.
And it makes sense about co-investing in bigger houses. Sharing an estate or manor with other players is a really good way to incite role play and social activity. There are definite perks to having a place of belonging compared to just wandering the wilds solo.
Registered Member #1033
Joined: 12:18:42 am GMT 04/25/07
Posts: 1107
I get tense when I encounter a situation that encourages fear of lack, as in lack of real estate and lack of opportunity (especially if you don't want to spend real money for fantasy investments). Because that's too much like real life, and games are meant to be more fun than realistic, for me. The whole concept of the world sounds very interesting, but I don't think I'll ever enter its rat race.
I do like the idea of player housing, and think that it can be quite useful for RP, to be able to build your own vision of custom areas to use. The best implementation of player housing that I've seen is in the NWN1 PW Aenea, where you can buy the privilege to make your own 10x10 area, for only 500k, which is easy to make when you get up to moderate levels (a level 40 world). You can install persistent storage and various custom items and scripts into your player house, including CEP placeables. And you can link the custom areas of several of your characters into a family or dynasty manor. My Ramana and Ranara are building a 5-story manor (Two 10 x10 custom areas), including kitchen, waterclosets, workshop (with crafting anvil), lab, chapel, a dressmaking shop with dressmaking dummies (special scripting for armor modification), and more niceties.
The world even has banks in every large city, where you can store and withdraw money from a chain bank. It's really sweet. The only reason I'm not in that PW right now is that it's usually too underpopulated for RP.
I'm Watching You Registered Member #273
Joined: 7:18:06 pm GMT 09/21/04
Posts: 6051
I am sure the developers have considered it (how could they not?), but it does seem a system set up to create socioeconomic status based (at least in part) on what people spend in real money. This seems to suggest the possibility that those unwilling to pay real money will have characters relegated to second-class status in some ways. This may relate only to money, land, and other such tangible (as tangible as can be in a pixelated world) representations of affluence, but hints at a world where in-game actions may be more of a struggle to overcome "low birth" (not having paid-for housing or other real money assets) through daily struggle. Like others have said, this is a game I will be keeping an eye on. Despite how it may seem, this may represent something that adds to rather than detracts from the game.
Registered Member #279
Joined: 4:17:59 pm GMT 09/25/04
Posts: 5460
Ramana Jala wrote ...
I get tense when I encounter a situation that encourages fear of lack, as in lack of real estate and lack of opportunity (especially if you don't want to spend real money for fantasy investments). Because that's too much like real life, and games are meant to be more fun than realistic, for me. The whole concept of the world sounds very interesting, but I don't think I'll ever enter its rat race.
This is a good point. One of the reasons I find it hard to motivate to play Thain lately is that I have that sense of lack due to the new tiers of +4 and +5 gear. I don't feel I can put in the grinding effort to catch up, and without having caught up, my characters all feel like they're broken. In this sense, if housing were a critical element of success in the Revival game, then that would be a serious issue for me, and probably deter me from playing. Having been through their forums and mission statements and blogs and so forth fairly thoroughly, I don't think that's the case at present. One of the big draws to Revival's vision for me at present is the focus they have on game participation, and not accumulated items, gold, experience, and so on. It's the progression treadmill, regardless of how it's implemented or disguised, that I dislike most about MMO's. It attracts and rewards people who can approach a game like a job, and that is what makes the social environment unpleasant to me. I already have a job, and despite being a dedicated professional, I wouldn't do it unless they paid me. I don't need another job, and especially not one where I have to pay to work it.
Revival has a few points that cross this boundary, or at least, that I think might. Housing is one, and those who put in a lot of real-world money, or who work the game system to accumulate lots of items and resources to decorate them will be "ahead" on that. But I don't know that it gives them a real advantage in total. Those without housing will still be able to stash their stuff in reasonable safety. They'll be able to find places to sleep and craft and so on. And they won't be tied down to property; in Revival, your house has to be kept in repair, and it has to be secured and guarded. That might be a lot of trouble to some owners, and I think there's a good chance there'll be a fire-sale of housing after the first few weeks the game is fully live. So I'm not getting on that treadmill, and I don't think it'll be a source of remorse to me.
Frankly, it might be a terrific game to be a talented thief in. All that housing, full of chests of valuable and people who haven't learned how best to secure them yet. This has been discussed too, and being a thief might be pretty challenging too.
Revival also has a non-leveled character system. There's to be a range of qualities of gear, but their intent is that gear not be a determinant of combat success; more one's character's skills and level of use of them, and more the player's ability to play the game. That last part is a +/- to me; I prefer that my character's ability come from how my character has developed, and not my ability to work the game interface. But it's very early, and I don't know how it will develop over time. They expect to have full open world PvP, which ordinarily would be a deal-breaker for me. However, they've gone to lengths to establish that PvP would be rare. First off, death is bad for your character. It's not perma-death, but it's not respawn and run-back. You'd lose your gear. Your soul becomes vulnerable to outworld effects. If there are witnesses, even if you win, you may be quickly cut down by guards, or lose standing or be declared outlaw in various cities. They have one of their first blog entries dedicated to discussion of death, and it alleviated many of my concerns the game could be a ridiculous gank-fest. Here's a snippet:
Illfonic wrote ...
Players, upon death, are relieved of their mortal coil and find themselves standing above their own corpse. The strength of their Spirit skill determines much about what they can do as a ghost, and how long they will remain one, while the Spirit ability of nearby players will determine whether they can see the ghost, communicate with it, or interact with it at all.
Absent of any assistance, magical or divine, ghosts will eventually transition to the Spirit Realm. This is a plane of the Dead, ruled by the Goddess Animae. From this shadowy land, players must make their way to a Mortality Gate if they wish to be re-embodied in the world of the Living. Dying is not down-time, however, for the Spirit Realm is fraught with lost spirits, dream creatures, and the abominations of the Outer Gods. Absent of their material goods, player spirits must use raw manifestations of their core abilities to defend themselves as they seek escape.
With a mechanical system that minimizes the raw combat power between long-term and new characters (no levels, modest differences in mechanical gear attributes, emphasis on player skill), it would be a risky proposition to just try to hunt easy marks for the thrill of ganking; and one with a significant down-side if it went wrong (losing gear and items, needing to make one's way across the plane of the dead), and even if it went right, having the world react against the killer through damage to one's reputation. There would be plenty of conflict, but it would take planning and organization to pull off a good murder/theft.
Again, it's almost entirely dreamware right now, and it's an ambitious goal; I have no idea if they'll make it. But I'm excited that they're trying.
Registered Member #279
Joined: 4:17:59 pm GMT 09/25/04
Posts: 5460
Ramana Jala wrote ...
Very nice, if very dark (era appropriate, of course).
I assume that the chairs, couches, and beds will be useable?
Personally, I think it's too dark, and people will be ramping up their gamma settings, or at least buying more lamps. Supposedly, everything is to be functional if appropriate for the item.
Registered Member #279
Joined: 4:17:59 pm GMT 09/25/04
Posts: 5460
Another of their Blog entries, this one discussing renovation kits to outfits rooms with. The look very nice, and would be great for RP. The descriptions imply the functionality of items shown, but I wish they'd come out and be specific about it.
[ The Island of Thain ]
Revival -- an intruiging Dark-Fantasy MMO in the works
