So because Star Citizen is pushing indies far and wide to do awesome shit, look at what their partners at Illfonic are up to now: Revival. In SC tradition, you can help the funding effort by buying housing/property, and later on, ships (the ones with sails) will be available too. Because exchange rates and shit economy in Africa, I will probably looking at a small townhouse with a Cat Boat - that said, this game looks to be pushing buttons I didn't even know I had. What say you fellow Borfians?
Honestly, this looks bloody awesome. Live storytelling? Actual freakin' GMs doing shit in the world? Yes please. I'm definitely keeping an eye on this.
So am I - if anything, Illfonic's shown they have the chops for this thanks to the ultra-detailed work for SC, plus loads of other nice things I can get into (GM's, live combat as opposed to button-mashing and numeral sequence spreadsheet minmaxing combat, and finally a Lovecroftian/High fantasy setting that actually looks like the right amount of grimdark a boy like me could ever want.) And yes, player-owned EVERYTHING lends a certain appeal to me.
Reading a bit more about this on their forums, it seems there's a few compromises that need to be made in terms of the GM's. The game is split onto loads of servers - the distinction here is that the GM's are only active on the Subscription Servers (makes sense, they need to eat and pay rent as well). The F2P servers won't have that level of GM activity, and will be a sort of pure sandbox. Sort of more freedom, less interactive content? I'm not 100% sure, still trying to read through this all. Also, they're very uncompromising in terms of housing. Housing costs what it costs, and once it's bought, it's owned by the player (in the starting city of course). Once a player owns "land" - which is basically a Cottage upwards, you can kick off the whole political section of the game (think Game of Thrones but with EvEtards vs WoWtards as opposed to Stark vs Lannister - the butthurt will be present in Epic concentrations of course). They're ambitious, I'll give them that. And very much uncompromising in their vision. They will not go ESRB, they will not cut content to appease government content filters in other countries. This game will reflect the Dark Grimdarkness you'd expect, so there'll be fucking, sucking, whoring, stabbing, robbing, thieving, murder, sodomy, dark magic, rituals of all steps, human sacrifice and other family-oriented activities. And supposedly a skill-based mini-game for all the previously mentioned - which is now having my mind racing into thinking if the "blacksmithing" minigame involves pounding my mouse on my table and weather it's similar to the 'humping the hooker from the next corner' minigame in terms of how hard I pound my $60 Razer. And what's more! Your skills level with activity in that skillset - let your mind dwell on that for a bit. The Economy's live - good are perishable and expendable which means there's always work for players, always something to make and sell and always folks who need it. Blades will dull, armour will crack and split and rust without care and attention, and even with maintenance and regular repair, it will become completely irreparable once it's split too many times.
Looks very interesting, but as we saw in ArcheAge, open world housing does not work terribly well. The land filled up so quickly that unless you were on the server week or day one, you had no chance of getting any land. Not anything reasonable anyways. I like the live storytelling, and I really do not think it will be too expensive to maintain. As long as they can pay a GM, the could pay someone to run that server. There are a lot of potential issues, but it certainly looks like something to keep an eye on.
If nothing else, their release schedule gives me some hope for it. Rather than implement large chunks of the game at once, they're slowly increasing the scale over time with modules. That may help them avoid at least some of the day one bullshit most MMO's seem to have to deal with.
It looks like they are selling lots, with houses on them, as opposed to having people plant wherever they want. That makes it easier I guess, but I wonder how that will work for people later one.
From what I've gleaned on the Forums - the starting City's homes are being sold to founders only. You can rent it out, upgrade the interior, make spare keys for mates to live with you etc, but the 1500 homes on each server is going out to founders/early access buyers only. They're pretty unapologetic about that, which gives me hope that they have an overall vision and are sticking to it. For future players, there's the mainland. The overall "political" gameplay supposedly will extend into four main strata: 1.) Local Politics - Land owners in a borough will be concerned with this kind of shit. Basically the shit we're concerned with (those with a mortgage) 2.) State Politics - Shit you deal with at Governor/Mayor level 3.) National Politics - Hail to the king, baby? 4.) Global Politics - King among Kings Adventurers and Crafters will strike out to the mainland and seek out other surviving villages, hamlets, fiefdoms and kingdoms. The housing there will be available for all to buy with in game currency. As it stands, the first City has property that can only ever be owned by founders. This is intentional and completely by design - already the cries of P2W are resounding, but the Devs are resolute. As a non-founder, find a founder to rent from, rent from an Inn or GTFO and go find somewhere else to live. No really - they're a bit more diplomatic about it, but it boils down to GTFO of Founder City, Fantasy-Poors!
this sounds interesting. and I'm assuming GMs (at least on the subscription servers) will be paid? I love the real estate stuff "large floorplan" "centrally located" and the prices for the low end properties arn't to bad.
Considering they're measured in square meters? Multiple by 10.76 for the square footage, them's some spacious hovels!
cheapest I've seen so far is $33.96. if you go for the 96 square meter tenements thats only 35 cents a square meter. sounds good to me.
My only dilemna is... gold server sounds like the best deal in from the gameplay aspect, but I also expect it may be overcrowded as all hell and a bitch to get onto. I also don't know where the sub costs are going to be. But on the other hand, I'm not sure if I'd care that much about the others servers...
Also begs the question of how dedicated or casual you want to be in the long terms - is it worthwhile to get a nicer place on a gold server, or a cheap place on a gold server and a cheap place on a non-gold server, so you aren't married to a sub cost? If you do buy into a non-gold server, which one? I can recall more than a few mmo launches where the servers turned into such a fracas at launch that everyone I knew wound up hopping servers repeatedly before everything settled down... Buying server-specific real estate up front is a bit more of a commitment than just going in with subscriber/backer/patron benefits that follow you anywhere.
