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Starmourn!!!
Kayeil
Washington State
Now that they figured out the newsletter problem... check your spam folder, that's where I found mine. Figured it'd be nice to have a thread completely dedicated to this... what you hope to see, things we might hear (hopefully SOME spoilers), etc. Are you going to be setting aside money to spend over the year? Why are you excited, if you're going to try it out? Why aren't you excited, if you aren't going to try it? Discuss!
(Apologies to anyone who received a different version of this previously. We had an issue with the newsletter and most people didn't get it. I'm sending a pared down version of it this time around.)
I'm happy to announce our 6th MUD and first science fiction one: Starmourn! We're building it from the ground up in a universe I'm personally leading the design of - the first time I've done that for an Iron Realms MUD since Achaea.
I’ve always wanted a sci-fi MUD, and while we had one in the works years ago that we cancelled due to the whole project just being an utter mess, this time we’re putting some very experienced people on it. Namely, myself and Justin Walsh, who has been producer on Achaea for the last 6 years and is the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) for Iron Realms as a whole.
Because I have enough on my plate overseeing Iron Realms as a whole, I can’t be producer. Justin’s going to fill that role, with two other people taking over as co-producers on Achaea while Justin continues to exercise oversight on Achaea as executive producer.
Starmourn won’t go into beta until, at a minimum, the middle of 2017, so it's not right around the corner or anything, but we'll be leaking out info about the game between now and then on a regular basis.
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Want to see the trailer and some concept art? www.starmourn.com
Make sure to sign up for the mailing list while there!
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Best,
Matt Mihály
CEO, Iron Realms Entertainment
What doesn't kill you gives you exp.
0
Comments
Possible laser guns.
Space ships? I hope so.
Beta POSSIBLY in mid-2017?! Yes!
Tecton being the producer, so you know it has to be good.
Would be cool to have multiple planets to visit instead of continents like Achaea.
Looking forward to the leaked information, too.
Transhumanism. Can I play as a digitised consciousness, transferring myself between artificial android bodies? Or an artificial intelligence? Or at least a robot?
Cyberpunk. Neon noir, sprawling metropoli, hard-boiled types and loathsome scum inhabiting the inevitable dark shadow cast when the futurist dream meets reality.
Basically for them to do justice to a breadth of sci-fi concepts, more than just Mass Effect in text.
And jetpacks.
The rest, I don't know. It's interesting to speculate. For example we saw how hard it was to reconcile Seafaring in Achaea, the fragmentation of the playerbase among ships and farflung islands impermeable to communication, with the perception of activity and necessary quorum for multiplayer game systems to function. Having learned the lesson of that experiment, how will a game spanning a presumably galactic scope be executed?
Divine lore is one of my favorite things about Achaea, maybe even my most favorite. I'll be interested to see if they include Divine in this game, something else to serve, or just nothing of the sort at all.
Robot overlord.
Derem - Not much was given in the way of hints, but I am going to suspect they are an alien race given by the art on the page. They are clearly much more advanced than us, and likely go around conquering galaxies and giving these deals in exchange for labor. They take the lions share of our resources and we get to continue to live. Could speak to why they are thriving so hard. However it also appears that they are afraid of this common threat that both they and the humans are uniting against.
I imagine there are:
- Those who listen to their commanders and welcome the humans
- Those who wish to eradicate the humans as they are not worthy
- Those who have their own agenda
Few options for their Deity I'm thinking. A 'Prometheus' level creator, or even a misconception-god coming from Human times (think like an Apollo is actually an alien god, we just managed to get a glimpse)
Human - Spread few and far between. Whoever managed to get out of Earth is whomever is left. I still think the Earth stands -- and will be listed later. We likeley did our thing where we over zealously attempted to conquer the stars, not knowing how vast it was and assuming that we were the only ones out there. So while we were in space infancy the Derem -- and others saw this as a sign that we were advanced enough to warrant conquering.
Could viably have some cosmic related deity here, or a traditional "God" -- I would suspect that the agreement with the Derem is more one sided than they would like to be -- so while living, I would think you could subdivide the Humans into being:
- Happyish (or accepting that) they are there, and wanting to work with the Derem
- A series of freedom fighter sects whom neither want to be tied to the Derem or this third sect
- Evildoers who have taken their apparent power to less developed civilizations and appeared as false gods to rule them
- Converts to this third sect willingly
????? - I see the main threat as a hive-mind sort of cybernetic threat. Think like a Borg, or like an AI that we somehow decided would be smart to interface with our brainstem (Think the 100) -- and it controls us. In this case their prime directive would be to convert everyone, willing or not. The god would clearly be the controller of this hive mind and this kind of a robotic species would be really, really freaking cool and dystopian. I think as a show of their power the earth is likely mostly subjugated now, and only the brave go in for resources / to fight against them.
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General Ideas:
- I see something like ships from Achaea being very attainable, maybe even you start with a small frigate. You would use this to get from station to station, or planet to planet. This opens up really cool interaction possibilities in space kind of like we have at sea on Achaea, with the whole captain-bridge team thing going on. Bigger ships could afford a crew, frigates could have a single pilot.
- Moving of resources. I would think a job could be a freight-runner (and it's own ship class) -- moving resources from station to station / bringing resources to a planet. This also opens up:
- SPACE PIRATE. Ransom your ship for money, Steal your freight, redirect it to a planet of your choosing. Make the shipper explain to his boss why he lost the cargo. Or maybe the freighter has some silly space distortion engine defence that messes with the pirate and he gets away, on the run. Lots of fun possibilities here.
- This also opens up the job for fleets/mercenaries to run protection and secure systems/stations.
- Someone has to create/mine these resources and even create our ship and the weapons that get fitted on them. This opens up a wide variety of industrial based jobs.
- Someone will inevitably feel the need to get paid for telling all these people how to do their job. There are some enterprising big business roles that could come out of this.
- SPAAAAAAAAAAAACE! Lots of it. We don't know a lot about it. People will likely have to chart it so others will know how to get from planet to planet. Possible ability to sell their starmaps/donate them to their faction
This opens up a lot of really, really cool avenues for conflict. A mix of ship-based battles and ground conflicts (you poor, poor red shirts)
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Suffice to say, I am so very excited for this game, and will probably stop playing Achaea altogether or very minimally.
I envision a really cool starting human sequence as a ground battle on the last bastion of earth, as you fight said unknown force. The ground commander orders you as a grunt to grab a rifle/whatever you class uses, you learn how to kill a few things. You start to get swarmed and retreat back. The commander holds off the horde as you launch the last ship on the base, and he gets overwhlemed as you take off. You then learn how to pilot your ship and dock at nearby station.
Hngh. Need game now.
Sooo looking forward to this.
I was so disappointed when Polaris sank. To hear the involvement of long time IRE producers in this project is extremely encouraging.
Like a three way battle between humans, psychic aliens with advance technology, and a horde of space monsters!
...wait, it's been done before.
Okay! Maybe instead we'll have exotic drugs and religious fanatics with giant monsters!No? Okay, idea number three! This time it's the year 3000 and there are robots and mutants and aliens and it's going to turn out to be Futurama isn't it?
...damn it, I can't win can I?Yea, that one!
It'd be cool to have it based off of civilizations of different levels (based on the Kardashev scale) confronting each other for the first time. It looks like... judging by the preview... it's Humanity barely in the transition from Type 1 (a civilization that has harnessed all the natural power of its home planet) to Type 2 (A civilization capable of harnessing the energy from its entire solar system, including its own star).
However, while expanding and exploring the nearest habitable star systems, they ran into a hostile Type 3 civilization (A civilization with the ability to harness the energy of the entire galaxy) who do see lesser civilizations who are below Type 3 as mere pests that are only worth exterminating to preserve all existing natural resources in the galaxy to themselves.
Obvious when you're barely even close to Type 2 and you've just encountered a not-so friendly Type 3... it's not going to end well. Best option is to withdraw and hide your home planet, perhaps band together with similar civilizations who are under the same threat of genocide.
As for Gods... it'd be cool if they explained in a hard sci fi. Lesser Gods being Type 4 civilizations (civilizations who can harness the power and control of an entire universe) and Greater Gods, Type 4's who have ascended to Type 5 (civilizations who have power to create and control over multiple universes and dimensions).
Of course... no one can really fathom what a Type 4 or Type 5 would look like... they can be beings of pure energy combined into a single individual entity or a swarm that forms into a collective hive-mind.
On the last bit, I think it'll be fine. Achaea struggled a bit because it was conceived of a game where the motherloving PMP was the absolute centre of everything, and more and more off-plane and other stuff has been grafted on to that basic premise until it began to creak a bit. I would guess that a game that starts as a galaxy spanning sci-fi adventure will have solutions to that on day one.
I'll totally check this out, I'm still crying tears (of Polaris) for the last abandoned thing. I aaaaaaaaalways have a bit of nervousness about spreading out the overall IRE playerbase on to more and more MUDs, because it still feels to me like concentration of seriously invested players is essential to them really working (and under threat), but hopefully it will draw in more people rather than thin out the existing IRE wide playerbase.
@Kayeil - I doubt there will be divine, that feels like a genre no-no. Gods are for fantasy really. There's other options for sci-fi (cf the Traveller in Destiny) where you could fill essentially the same function (and I would guess they will).
I'm a sucker for SPACE KNIGHTS. That's a totally original idea right? They could have their own code of honour, and maybe like medieval weapons but with science (laserswords? Photonrapiers?). And there could be like good ones, and bad ones. And the bad ones always come in twos. And the good ones have younglings.
Also SPACE PIRATES. There is nothing not cool about SPACE PIRATES. Steampunk isn't really my thing, but I could live with it. I'm more about the mystic stuff, which I hope there's a bunch of.
It should be amazing. No pressure, @Tecton.
Many people I've spoken to about Polaris in other IRE's over the years have never really shown an interest in the sci-fi genre. I literally have very few friends who are interested in the sci-fi mud and are perfectly comfortable with staying in their chosen fantasy-based mud. And when I spoke to them about Lithmeria, a hundred people lined up in that mud's IRC channel waiting to log on during its opening day. So I'm pretty sure Achaea's, Aetolia's, Lusternia's, and Imperian's core playerbase are safe. If you are into hardcore fantasy, you are gonna stick to these muds as your home no matter what.
So I'm excited to hear about Starmourn. It's an opportunity to not only try out an IRE text game in this genre, but also to meet other sci-fi nuts out there.
What do you all think the endgame could be? Or what would you like to see? @Lucianus had some interesting ideas about different types of civilizations, maybe the end-game could be something about becoming one of those types? I'm not sure. It's an interesting concept anyways, with our without that involving the endgame.
@Vansittart -- yeah that's why I was wondering what they might do instead... cause some IRE games no longer have Gods, so will the admin and volunteers have a particular role where they're playing a character in the game (like Gods here) where they can interact with us in some way, or just mostly remain behind the scene.
I'll admit I'm not super experienced with sci-fi genres, especially in games. As a kid I really loved space and astronomy as a subject, but wasn't exposed to a ton of sci-fi stuff other than the occasional movie here and there. So for me it'll just be a completely new experiece to jump into, and I'm excited to see what peoples' ideas are and what actually ends up happening.
I think the end-game would be to become a Type 3 civilization without any opposition within the galaxy. A true galactic empire.
The civilization invading humanity in Starmourn sounds like a Type 2 advancing to Type 3, but they are aggressive about it by making sure no other potential Type 2 civilization gets in the way of that whole galactic conquest goal.
Perhaps the goal for players is to help humanity and their allies ascend to an advanced Type 2 to beat the invaders at their own game of war and conquest.
Hard sci-fi may spend paragraphs/pages elaborating on something like, "How do their spaceships work?" (Literally what is the technology powering their propulsion drives? Oh, they use frozen water as fissile material? How much, what mass do they need to sustain the reaction to reach their destination? How do they take that with them?) That's not problematic in a storytelling sense, it just requires scientific knowledge and engaging presentation of that knowledge, but it does need to be kept consistent throughout the story, which is much easier to do in a novel or movie than a MUD with significant content diversity and a long lifespan of ongoing development.
Something troublesome for hard sci-fi might be, for example, that it may take decades or centuries to travel to another solar system at sub-light speeds. So you can't have a single regular human serving as your spacefaring protagonist/player character - they'd be old or dead before they arrived. You'd need some other solution, like a generation ship, or virtualised/artificial consciousness, or advanced cryogenic technology. Or negligible senescence. Or faster-than-light technology. And then you have to elaborate on how that technology works too, sufficiently reconcile it with physics or biology.
But then any of those things are going to change the scope of your story, alter the nature of the setting in significant ways. If you have technological/biological immortals walking around, or easy FTL, that redefines the nature of human society. In solving one storytelling problem, your solution created new issues. That's fine - if you're writing a novel, or a single screenplay for a movie, which is short enough to keep it straight and cut things off before you get trapped by the logical progression of your own rules. If you're trying to weave together the setting for a game, though? Not just a finite, single-player experience, but an ongoing MMO...
This intimidates me, personally because I have no idea what I'm talking about when it comes to real science, and I tend to imagine the details being picked apart by nerds clever people with STEM degrees who know more than I do and aren't afraid to share. I'd be like, "The walkway is made of a transparent plastic as hard as diamond--" and they'd immediately say, "Pffwhat? Plastic as hard as diamond? Ignoring how irrelevant such a comparison is to more salient forms of resilience like shear strength, of what polymer is this miraculous transparent, diamond-hard plastic formed? Where did it originate? A space station? How could any industry in a society still grappling with scarcity support the logistical costs of inter-orbital transport?"
I think a bit of hard sci-fi is great because it lends credence to the whole thing, but keeping it on the soft side seems so much more manageable. Like ice cubes in a drink: a few bits of hardness to keep it cool, while the rest is fluid. Selectively picking sci-fi concepts (like the Kardashev scale, technological singularity, Dyson spheres, asteroid farming, time travel that can only travel backwards to the point of its technological inception) and using that veneer of hardness while exploring them in a relatively soft way.
@Tecton congratulations on your recent promotion.
And while there may be a market for a really technical sci-fi game out there... I have a feeling (strong hope) that IRE is going to make it more marketable to the general populace, so that if you have no clue what the difference between type 2 or type 3 aliens is... you can still join in, learn the game, and feel comfortable within a few hours of gameplay as opposed to having to read a full on manual before you get started.
Edit: I mean, I never read fantasy or cared about it until Achaea, and even now, I've read most of ASOIAF and like The Hobbit, and I've still devoted years of my life to this game. And I'm looking forward to Starmourn more than I ever thought I would, especially since Tears of Polaris didn't have the same draw to me that this does, just based on a very basic premise alone.
Also, I really hope there are gods. Imperian felt so empty and odd without them.