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Comments
- With sharp, crackling tones, Kyrra tells you, "The ladies must love you immensely."
- (Eleusian Ranger Techs): Savira says, "Most of the hard stuff seem to have this built in code like: If adventurer_hitting_me = "Sarathai" then send("terminate and selfdestruct")."
- Makarios says, "Serve well and perish."
- Xaden says, "Xaden confirmed scrub 2017."
And you won't understand the cause of your grief...
...But you'll always follow the voices beneath.
You get the hang of it easier seeing multiple maps as you move. 1st block of ascii (left) is how you would see it from the front/side, while the second block (right) is how you would see it from above or bird's eye view.
Funny enough, I once came up with an idea before Bal'met that I called Achaea 2.0, which came from the question of "What could the plot of a second Achaea if the first one had to end, but we wanted to give players a chance to keep playing with their existing characters?". It was a steampunk-ish mix between magic and science.
The idea was that some tragedy in the past of Achaea screwed things up, with the result of the Gods and Magic disappearing. Other powers and beings were left to fight and fill the void of their disappearance, and many mortals were lost. Centuries later, the Second Seleucarian Empire is failing, with the last Emperor handing over a seed to the heir. The heir seeks out and finds the "bones of the ancestors", where he plants the seed. The seed grows from the remains of Yggdrasil and relights the Flame. From the Flame comes the Reborn, ancient mortals lost from the tragedy before. Now the Reborn and ancient forces (including some of the Lost Gods) from before now have to struggle with the changes and new powers that have come to replace them. Welcome to Achaea, Clash of Tides!
Fun premise, but it was just an idea I toyed with. I do this all the time, and most of the time nothing comes from them.
Yea, that one!
In short, if IRE makes it, I'll play it and invest (but probably not enough to make it worthwhile).
So it'd really have to go out of its way to make this a fundamentally player-driven game to catch my interest. I think that would have to be the central aim with a certain willingness to throw caution to the solar wind and simply tell anyone who wants the game to cater to people who fundamentally want a single-player experience that they should play something else.
It would also have to be mechanically innovative. IRE-designed combat is already pretty innovative, so that's a great start, and text-interface ship control will probably always be more "sciencey" with coordinates and calculations and all that than piloting a fighter with a joystick, so that's another nice difference. But there are a lot of thoroughly unexplored mechanics that just can't be done with a graphical interface, but can be done with a text one. I'd like to see more of that - more risky, radical rethinking of what can be done.
If, mechanically, it's just Achaea in space, I would be less interested in it.
And, more specifically, more mechanics that involve interaction - a socially-focused game with mechanics that enhance and deepen the social interactions. I want a game that doesn't offer a language system, but give everyone effortless access to a common language anyway - rather a game that allows the language barrier to be overcome, but still leverages it to help divide and characterise factions. A game where things like unique, interesting factions with meaningful culture feel like the first priority. Which isn't to say that present IRE games don't do a decent job of this, but I think it could be taken much further and I think for a sci-fi game it would probably have to be to survive.
In general, I think a MUD that tries to be a text-based version of a sci-fi videogame is likely not very interesting (to me anyway). Sci-fi videogames with, you know, video, are already better at that. What I'd really like to see is a game that worries less about the "game" aspects and is foremost interested in immersion. Less starfighters (though certainly it should have starfighters) and more Fremen, with all the intrigue of learning about an alien (in the sense of "foreign") culture, but via players. That's what I love about Achaea and the other IRE games, but since graphical sci-fi games are already heading in that direction in a way that fantasy games largely aren't, I think a sci-fi MUD would have to be much bolder about putting immersion first.