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A fresh take on Online Roleplaying Game (free)

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Ethnar:
Have you grown tired with what modern MMO have to offer? Do you feel there’s not enough role-playing in role-playing games? Do you dream of being part of and have an impact on massive fantasy world? To truly be a part of an epic story rather than have some NPC get all the credit?

I wanted something more from MMORPG experience - a living, breathing world, with players filling roles in all walks of life. A world not unlike those created by the game masters in the traditional role playing games. For a long time I struggled to figure out how this could be achieved and after much pondering I came up with a new, outlandish approach to playing MMORPGs. And that’s when I decided to create Soulforged.


The gameplay in Soulforged is nothing like your usual World of Warcraft. The main way of interacting with the game is issuing actions for your avatar to do and simply leave them to their own devices, where actions can take from a few seconds to hours. The world persists at all times and your avatar is always present in the game world - carrying out action you assigned. The game enables varying game styles which allow you to tailor your role to fit your daily life by adjusting how often you interact with the game. In the world of Soulforged you could take on any of the many roles the game presents:

* As an explorer traverse the world and survive the dangers all to find new exotic materials or locations;
* As a researcher you would collect all the different items and produce available and trying to work out how they can be combined to discover new recipes;
* As a crafter - be it a smith, leatherworker or one of many other - you will use your skills to produce useful items and, as your skill increases, you will get to make some really rare and powerful pieces;
* As a farmer your character will simply spend most of their day tending to the crops and while you decide what to produce;
* As a trader you can spend the time travelling between different player-made towns and provide the materials or gear that might be in demand, but lacking due to resources or skill;
* As an adventurer you will be venturing into dangerous and rewarding dungeons that reward very active and full engaged play style;
At no point you are required to commit to a single style, you can mix, match and maybe find new ways to interact with the game and other players. Whatever the case is, to fully leverage your playstyle you’ll want to engage with other players - who will be providing gear, nutrition, materials or other items, all of which will enable you to better perform in the aspects of the game that matter to you.

The game can sometimes be harsh, almost unforgiving. When taking the risks your character may end up suffering serious injury or dying. Death in this game has a serious impact - your character will take with them their skills and drop anything they carried. But that doesn’t mean no meaningful progress can be made - you will keep anything you have in your storage and any recipes you have previously researched. In addition to that, your future characters can be customized with various unlockable traits. And while death may look scary, there’s no escaping it - as characters grow old they all eventually depart.

All you need to play the game is having a Google account. As for the pricing - there’s no upfront cost, no fees, no credit cards, no subscriptions, no micro-transactions. In other words - there’s no way to spend any money on this game and there are no plans on changing that in the future. This is a passion project that is managed on a very low budget and that’s what enables this model to work.

Please bear in mind that the game is very much work in progress and it keeps evolving and improving fairly regularly. I’m also very interested to hear feedback, criticism or feature requests for the game - even with a handful of players who engaged with my game so far I already had a lot of useful feedback and many changes were made to the game based on that, all to provide a better experience.

Would you like to learn more? Check out the website and be sure to take a look at the feature list - https://soulforged.net/pages/#/about/featureList

If you’d like to play, then head straight to https://soulforged.net:8443/

I'd love to hear from you what you think about this concept and the execution! I welcome all constructive feedback, criticism (no matter how harsh!) and suggestions!

IndigoFenix:
Interesting premise.  It's basically like a cross between an idle game and a real RPG.  I could see this as growing into something quite fun!
I do think that the research system should probably be changed - not only does it take time to figure something out, it destroys the resources as well.  You're strongly encouraging the use of a wiki, which can spoil the fun of discovery.
How about some procedurally generated items that are only available for a limited time, and have their own unique crafts (example: magic plants that produce unique potions)?  Someone would have to figure it out, but the knowledge would stop being useful once the item stopped spawning.

Ethnar:

--- Quote from: IndigoFenix on May 28, 2019, 04:18:20 pm ---Interesting premise.  It's basically like a cross between an idle game and a real RPG.  I could see this as growing into something quite fun!
I do think that the research system should probably be changed - not only does it take time to figure something out, it destroys the resources as well.  You're strongly encouraging the use of a wiki, which can spoil the fun of discovery.
How about some procedurally generated items that are only available for a limited time, and have their own unique crafts (example: magic plants that produce unique potions)?  Someone would have to figure it out, but the knowledge would stop being useful once the item stopped spawning.

--- End quote ---

Hello IndigoFenix!

Thank you very much for giving the game a go, really means a lot to me!

Really appreciate the feedback as well! The research system can be somewhat controversial, I know, but I think it serves its purpose. The idea for the research is that while players go around and scrounge for various resources, it's entirely possible that a branch of technology won't be discovered for weeks or months, even thou players have access to all the materials. Or when it comes to extremely powerful recipes - these will require rare materials and I expect that actually finding a recipe that uses them will feel like a major breakthrough.
I am absolutely not opposed to wikis or exchanging information between players - it's totally ok with how the game is designed. If a player chooses to be self sufficient and research everything themselves - they can do that. And if they go for a wiki - chances are they still won't actually be able to learn every recipe, as more difficult recipes will have yet to be discovered.

Please don't get me wrong - I love procedurally generated scrolls/potions/etc. - the way they are included in for example ADOM. You get a red potion - you only know what it really is after you drink it or identify, and that changes between runs. The problem with having that in multiplayer game is that I really want players to be able to communicate with each other as to what they see and to trade the resources between. Simply put, however disappointing it feels to me sometimes, I don't quite see how I could make that particular approach work and keep the multiplayer/community aspect.

On the point you're raising - I actually like having resources available only temporarily and generated procedurally. I'll need to think this through how to make sure it doesn't get repetitive (it can't simply be a 1:1 replacement just under different icon and name). Thanks for the suggestion!

Oh, and please feel most welcome to join us on the Discord server! It's created to help connect players and let's be honest - it's better than any chat I could feasibly add to the game directly :)

IndigoFenix:
Here's an idea for generated items: the game has an internal "alchemy" and items (like minerals or plants) can be generated with particular alchemical properties that determine how they combine with other items and what effects their combinations have. The game would periodically generate these items, and there would be no way to determine the exact properties or uses of a new item without experimenting.

Example: A generated fruit has "acid +1" and "heal +3". A generated mineral has "acid -1" and "heal -1". For a potion to be beneficial it must have acid = 0, otherwise it just creates an "acid potion" or "alkaline potion". Combining the fruit and the mineral in a flask (perhaps after grinding them or some other process) gives you a potion with acid = 0 and heal = 2, creating a "moderate healing potion".

You would not know the properties of the items beforehand, but you could deduce them through experimenting. By giving the most potentially powerful items the most complex chemistry with the most elaborate processes to make useful, you could create a constant demand for researchers.

Once a player discovered a recipe that the item was useful for, they could inform other players how to produce it in-game, or keep the secret for themselves and sell the products for profit until it became common knowledge. Eventually the item would stop spawning and a new generated resource would take its place, rendering the old secret useless and unlocking a new one.

At some point every basic recipe will be discovered, but this would ensure that there will always be a role for alchemists and keep the sense of discovery fresh.

Ethnar:
Some really good suggestions IndigoFenix, thanks! I still want the players to have some level of familiarity with the game, but areas like alchemy could see some of the resources generated this way.

I have quite some plans on including some surprising, difficult and rewarding mechanics - what is a fantasy world without magic, right? And any kind of magic where you press a button and fire spouts from your hand - I find that quite uninspiring. I'm currently working through, figuring out how I could include something like this in the game while making it still mysterious and involved. :)

The awesome part about the engine for this game I built is that it enables me to do that kind of stuff easily and not only that - it also has built-in resilience against data mining, so there's only one way to discord how the game works - and it's to play it :)

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