Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning
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@surreality said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
@Kanye-Qwest Nicely done! That is really, really great work!
Indeed. I'm curious what you used to make it?
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Thank you, everyone. Really!
I made it in Photoshop CS3, using a random free 'old parchment' texture as the background and painting on top of it.
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Wow. This stuff is awesome.
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Working on finishing some of the last major systems within the next few weeks, if all goes well, and then we can kick the story off and move into beta. With that in mind, if some intrepid souls want to join in the alpha and don't mind the systems being in flux as they get tweaked and revamped, it wouldn't hurt to have a few more people stressing and breaking things as they do some early prequel RP to feel out their characters.
For the interested, can check out the available characters on play.arxmush.org under the characters tab, or log in (same address, port 3000) and check out the roster or make their own character with the CG system that still needs a bit of tweaking. For those wanting for things to be a bit more polished, probably be a month-ish I think. Always a very rough ballpark depending on how much revamping needs to happen.
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Just noticed this thread, glad to see people interested in this.
Arx was pretty much a surprise out of nowhere for us in Evennia-land. I happened to stumble over their website during a google search and went and invited them to come chat to us (their in-game dev channel is connected to the #evennia IRC chatroom now).
You guys have made some very impressive progress so far in a relatively short time, it's awesome to hear you may be approaching a more open testing stage!
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Griatch -
So I am trying this game and it seems pretty great so far, obviously no Big Plot happening but whilst the Firan-isms are weird the quality of RP is high while the overall setting and direction look good.
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Firan-isms?
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Arx is still in Alpha so the metaplot hasn't been rolled out yet.
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We'll probably have a bit more play between the website (which isn't anywhere close to done) and the game itself as time goes on. Code-wise, since the website uses the same database as the game, it's easy and intuitive to have being logged into the website and being logged into the game mean pretty much the same thing, and update on one side automatically reflects upon the other. This lets us try some neat things, like character journals that can go in a searchable format, webs of character relationships, a timeline like history for characters so they can see their individual character milestones and how it relates to the ongoing development o the metaplot.
We'll probably push into beta when most of those story systems are done, the different organizations have more fleshed out coded means to gain and use their resources, and NPC agents controlled by players are more fully defined.
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How the hell did I miss this thread and game? A marriage of RPI and mush? Good quality rp? Alpha?? I'm going to try this out when I get home.
Things like this really make me happy!
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I kinda want to ask you to do a map for a table-top game I'm in now. That map is gorgeous, KQ.
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Yeah, I just looked at the website. I think I'm going to enjoy this.
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@somasatori Thank you! I had a lot of fun making it. Of course, it helped that I could scribble all over a big pad and had someone with the continent's layout there to point and say where things should go.
@ThugHeaven I think you will, too.
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I see who I want to play. Get my Catelyn Stark on.
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I just looked at the character roster, and I see characters who are adults--experienced, realistic adults. That may be a first.
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So how are things coming along here? Still.. watching.
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My impression so far of Arx is that the staff are very friendly and responsive and by all impressions are working really hard to make Arx into what they want it to be. I've had suggestions implemented minutes after I suggested them.
The game is complete enough that it can be played in a social sense, but the mechanics that are meant to power the political aspect are yet to be implemented fully(Domains, tasks, NPC minions etc). What I've seen of their mechanics so far is interesting and if they manage to implement things in accordance to their vision they might create something really great.
My main concern about Arx is that I'm getting the impression that the staff rather then having a firm idea of what they want and how to achieve it, are kind of winging their game mechanics as they go along.
My suggestion would be for @Apos and the others to take some time to write out exactly how they'd like all their systems to work and interact so that they can more cleanly work towards that goal.
If you have a clear answer to questions like How long should combat last? What kind of armor do we want players to use? How large of an advantage do we want expensive armor to grant? It's a lot easier to figure out how to code the fatigue and armor mechanics for instance.
The playerbase itself seems to skeev somewhat to Firan refugees at this early stage which can sometimes feel awkward when everyone is talking about a game I've never played or know much of anything about. They also seem to skeev somewhat to multi-paragraph posing which is something I have mixed feelings about.
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I'm happy with how a couple of the major systems have been going in testing, and ideally they'll reflect on the web site soon. I intend to do write ups about them shortly and guides for how they'll work, but I've been extremely pleased with how much RP they've been generating in alpha and how they are working out so far.
The Journal system. I like there to be a heavy emphasis on asynchronous IC communication for how immersive it is, but I find a lot of other benefits. For anyone with limited time that can't do scenes I believe it tends to let their characters stay involved, meaningfully contribute to decision making, and engage in limited role-playing. But the biggest benefit is probably the amount of continuity it supports and how much it emphasizes interconnected stories. I look forward to it going on the website, so even someone not playing the game but vaguely interested in it could still following along the story can do so. Not anything revolutionary, but something that people more used to p2p and similar formats could probably sink their teeth into, even if the emphasis on interconnected stories diverges from the goals of the other formats except maybe tumblr.
Tasks I've been pleased with so far, in the most basic sense as an abstract representation of characters' influence off grid or during downtime. Though @groth has a very fair point that quite a bit is being developed as we go. I do have strong opinions about where we end up, in terms of having a vision, though I don't necessarily think it's a terrible thing to refine mechanics throughout- I worry about laying out something specific and sticking to my guns come hell or high water kind of invites the game developing in an aberrant path away from things I originally envisioned and thought would be fun, which are a lot more abstract. Like right now, I think the answers I'd have to those same questions would be understandably unsatisfying for a lot of more hardcore mechanical players, since it'd be more like:
Combat should be long enough to feel satisfying, and never long enough to be boring. Armor should be variable enough so there's no clear cut best option in all circumstances, to encourage more players pursuing different options that they feel best suits their characters. Expensive materials should be a clear cut advantage, but not overwhelming that it feels unbeatable... And so on. And I realize having things in that vague of terms is disappointing to people that really enjoy crunching numbers and having an extremely firm grasp on mechanics, but I think refinement through some testing is unavoidable to avoid painting ourselves in a corner with systems we aren't really satisfied with.
Though yeah I agree, having a clearer end point rather than more vague general goals would be a lot more efficient.
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@Apos said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
Though @groth has a very fair point that quite a bit is being developed as we go. I do have strong opinions about where we end up, in terms of having a vision, though I don't necessarily think it's a terrible thing to refine mechanics throughout- I worry about laying out something specific and sticking to my guns come hell or high water kind of invites the game developing in an aberrant path away from things I originally envisioned and thought would be fun, which are a lot more abstract.
Though yeah I agree, having a clearer end point rather than more vague general goals would be a lot more efficient.
I agree that it's not necessarily to stick to a design idea come hell or high water. Rather that when you're dealing with a moderately complex system, it's often a lot easier if you design from the goal to the fiddly bits rather then fiddle with things until you reach your goal.
By analogy, if you want to make a box for storing a litre of liquid, you can either keep changing the dimensions of each side until you find something that neatly holds your litre, or you can do a simple volume calculation to find out what lengths you need in one go. If you then decide that a two litre container would be much more convenient, you now also know how to get there quickly.
To talk about more specific things. I quite like how your vote and journal system works. By limiting your votes to 10 votes per week and journal xp to 7 xp per week, you effectively get a system very similar to the +beats system used by Requiem for Kingsmouth that most people that tried it quite enjoyed. The limit on the votes means that the main XP source isn't massive court scenes as can often be the case in +vote systems and journals provide means to flesh out your own personal stories and grant you more control over the rate you earn xp.
I also quite like the idea behind the Task system, which seems to me to be a way to encourage characters to take their organisations interests on-screen and convince other players/characters that they did a good job. However at the current stage it's very confusing and the selection of tasks is very limited. I think Tasks will benefit greatly from a web GUI, a step by step guide for how it works and possibly some tweaking of the syntax.
One long term concern I have is how you intend to ensure that the game is still approachable by new players in a year or four years from now, when a long term player might be sitting on many thousands of xp and more resources then they can feasibly spend. There's been many approaches tried to handle this with their own pros and cons like having a hard cap on XP spent (such as Haven) or giving catchup xp to new characters (like Fallcoast/Reach) or diminishing returns on spending XP (Like Requiem for Kingsmouth). Some might think that alpha is too early to think about such things, but I think you definitely want to have those things ironed out before you go 1.0 in order to avoid really vicious new vs old player arguments down the line.
Belatedly I noticed in your first post that you have noone on the team experienced with CSS. While I'm far from being a professional webdev, if you want some help with coding the web side of the game I'm happy to help.
What is obvious to you may not be obvious to me and vice versa.
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@Groth said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
I also quite like the idea behind the Task system, which seems to me to be a way to encourage characters to take their organisations interests on-screen and convince other players/characters that they did a good job. However at the current stage it's very confusing and the selection of tasks is very limited. I think Tasks will benefit greatly from a web GUI, a step by step guide for how it works and possibly some tweaking of the syntax.
I very, very strongly agree. I'm generally finding that most things are way easier in a web format, and we do want to support that, absolutely. I'm not at all satisfied with the current implementation it's not intuitive and difficult to use, and the walk-through guide that I'm going to do will really just be a stop gap until it gets cleaned up.
One long term concern I have is how you intend to ensure that the game is still approachable by new players in a year or four years from now, when a long term player might be sitting on many thousands of xp and more resources then they can feasibly spend. There's been many approaches tried to handle this with their own pros and cons like having a hard cap on XP spent (such as Haven) or giving catchup xp to new characters (like Fallcoast/Reach) or diminishing returns on spending XP (Like Requiem for Kingsmouth). Some might think that alpha is too early to think about such things, but I think you definitely want to have those things ironed out before you go 1.0 in order to avoid really vicious new vs old player arguments down the line.
That's something we've spent time talking about, and there's basically 4 different points that characters and organizations can accumulate things meaningfully and I think each has their own different approaches.
For Prestige, the social score, that's not really played up very much at present since we don't have the displays for it be near as visible as they will ultimately, but I imagine that'll eventually be a mini-game a lot of players enjoy. The trick there is we're going with percentage weekly decay, and flat+percentage losses on prestige hits, while only flat gains. So the idea there is as the base values increase higher they become increasingly unsustainable, and it'll tilt towards the players and organizations most invested in spending heavily to counteract decay and stay famous and dip away from anyone that loses interest. But at lower levels steady passive expenditures will keep increasing until they hit the point where the decay outpaces the flat gains.
I think of Dominion assets in a broad single category, since it'll cover holdings, the economic/social/military resources, influence level, agents, troops and so on. I think much like before there's two means to undercut the dinosaur effect, in that both most things are consumable in that they are consumed to yield a certain effect (which isn't reflected yet, but say social resources in order to influence a coded outcome), that acts as an incentive against hording or at least minimizes its impact. And secondly, to put a real cost on maintaining higher levels of growth which much like prestige acts as a push back against the highest tiers. But I think this particular point will become clear as we add in the systems where the points are spent, in that they aren't yet, and it'll probably be hard for characters to justify holding onto them versus the things they can do with them.
Similarly silver, I feel that the sinks are really where we counteract any gluts, and so far it looks good from that angle. I think we need to have several hundred times more capital income before the rare things would be considered commonplace, and that's ignoring them leaving the system through destruction/idled out removal. Still it's definitely something to watch, but I'm happy with it as long as it reinforces some feelings of scarcity that can drive RP.
Of the four, players would probably be most concerned about xp in the long term sense, since it's most relevant to their experiences from WoD games where huge dinosaur characters dominate everything. That's a very understandable concern. And I'm very open to catch up mechanics, and certainly have considered a few, though I'm not sure any are necessary just yet for a few mitigating reasons. I'm against lifetime xp carrying over vs unspent, since I think this tends to worsen the feeling of mass xp inflation, as it becomes more associated with stronger older players rather than just older characters, and is otherwise partly kept in checking with older characters being rostered/retired/etc. On one subtle but very distinct difference, xp totals and skills aren't as deterministic of character value in similar ways to systems like WoD, in that say in those systems every aspect of a character can be summarized with xp spends like in backgrounds. In Arx that doesn't really follow, in that a character with base stats/skills that happens to possess extreme political power could be overwhelming in the impact they have on the play environment compared to a commoner that has the greatest combat stats on the grid. That's the reason we give such a large xp bonus to creation of lower social ranks, in that it's disproportionate how characters in royal/noble social ranks have influence, and I'd rather counterbalance that with higher skills that make commoner characters much more effective specialists at their areas of expertise. That said, it definitely is a concern, and yeah I could definitely see us scaling starting xp in response if the average creeps too much, but I think 'too high' is a much higher baseline than in WoD by comparison so it might take a while for it to feel as similarly impactful/overwhelming to the play environment.
Belatedly I noticed in your first post that you have noone on the team experienced with CSS. While I'm far from being a professional webdev, if you want some help with coding the web side of the game I'm happy to help.
Oh I greatly appreciate that, and Tehom would for sure. It might be a little bit before we can enlist anyone, since almost all changes happening right now are backend that would make frontend changes a bit confusing (just about everything is being done in bootstrap off django, jquery, etc). Tehom will probably start asking for help when it gets closer to the point of others being able to pitch in.
