The common people of Arvum wouldn't really call the last thousand years a 'golden age'. Since the founding of the Compact of Arvum, the five great noble houses of the realm have schemed and warred against one another, locked in a millennium-old struggle for dominance kept only in check by the occasional powerful monarch. But even as the fragile peace frays with the latest dynastic crisis, creating courtly intrigues in the capital city of Arx, ancient foes that took mankind to the brink of extinction a thousand years ago stir once more.
Currently in closed alpha, Arx is a low-fantasy, original theme game, built from evennia to create a heavily coded mush/RPI hybrid that incorporates a lot of the ideas from both that we find to be the most fun. We like a lot of the stronger story-telling aspects of mushes, while we also like the heavily coded games ability for players to make their own fun and affect the game world without being as GM-reliant (a selling point of games like RfK, Firan, RPIs, etc). Arx will have a story driven, episodic style metaplot that changes the game world significantly over its span separated into different distinct 'Seasons' of the game's story, able to go in wildly different directions based off player actions.
Posting about this now since most of the systems are done with, and soon it'll be time to start breaking things in a spectacular fashion in a closed beta and seeing if I can drive our coders into a bleak depression with how many things need to be rewritten.
Features wise, our design philosophy has been to focus on implementing systems that promote consequential RP between characters developing organically, which ideally will in turn free up staff to focus on the metaplot and the overall story. This means there's a lot of design choices that some people will love, and a few will very sincerely tell me I'm a bad designer that should feel bad.
For example:
Fully coded and automated combat, without GM interaction. Both small scale tactical combat that can include character death, and large scale army combat as nobles can go to war with one another, conquer each others' lands, and create all sorts of problems without putting in a single request/job.
Player-controlled noble fealty system and land control with a civ-style minigame, along with organizational minigames that let players influence the political power of different groups.
Crafting system, all the player-controlled items that implies.
Gossip/Rumor system and Prestige system of player-controlled political influence.
A slew of different RP promoting systems that are similar to ones in other RP formats (play-by-post, MMOs, tumblr, etc) to encourage characters being interconnected. Character journals, changing timelines of character relationships, shared character milestones, rewards for RPing about character niches, things like that. As well as a number of minor system to encourage IC communication over ooc ones to give a more immersive, organic feel. I personally believe it's hard to overdo it on giving characters fun reasons to interact with another, while never making them feel forced or obligated to.
Alright, but what's the setting like?
Completely original world, because we wanted more freedom in storytelling. Well, 'completely' is a bit of a stretch, since there's going to be homages (shameless ripoffs) to any number of series that we love, and being low fantasy there's going to be parallels to Game of Thrones, and I'm a huge fan of Joe Abercrombie's First Law trilogy so there's many a homage there. But it'll be low fantasy in the sense that while magic and fantastic elements exist, they are rare/understated enough that thematically there is doubt they exist, and the emphasis of stories will fall on a more human, character-driven element.
Except aesthetically, which is an odd thing to talk about in pure-text games. Because while I respect gamers who adore historical costume pieces, I think most people would rather not be in a frock. The aesthetics for the game are closer to eastern style high fantasy ridiculousness found in games like Aion, Tera, Guild Wars 2, Archeage, Black Desert, etc. So low fantasy world, high fantasy aesthetics in the medieval stasis trope.
To the brave and extremely curious that want to glance at the lore, you can look at our painfully basic webpage that exists as awkward testimony that none of us are the least bit proficient in CSS here. That will be completely redone before we launch.
If anyone has any questions, I'll be happy to ramble on endlessly about the up and coming game.
