Okay....you might want to grab some coffee and a smoke, 'cause this is going to take a while.
First, I want to say that, despite appearances, I don't want AO to fail. I just want you people to pull your heads out and make this game what it could be. However, in the last six months, you seem not only unable to do this, you seem hell bent for leather on doing the exact opposite of what your players want. So, with that in mind....
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This article will tell you something about the direction of the game, and how it will evolve through the setting and the story. First a bit of a disclaimer: I am by no means a literary or movie expert. There must be many of the players of Anarchy Online who know more than I do about literary genres and their definitions, or the trappings of Hollywood.
You are correct.
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It is summer (at least here in the northern hemisphere :), and a friendly – laid back – topic for communication is appropriate. (Not the hard, sometimes aggravating, balancing issues :o)
hehe....perhaps not the best choice...
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First off, let's talk about the current setting. When AO launched, and prior to launch, it was heralded - and marketed - as the first science fiction massive-multiplayer online role-playing game on the market (a mouthful!). This is true, but lacking a little in nuance. MMORPGs vary, but at least their methods of game-play are somewhat similar. Science fiction - what is that really?
Tread carefully....
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I've cut this here to save us all from your little trip through sci-fi.
Dune is what is known as science fantasy--an advanced society with technological advances (which are still central to the story), but are not explained; instead, these are left to the imagination.
Star Wars falls into what is called "Space Opera": the good guys are clearly defined, the bad guys are clearly defined (You don't really think that the fact that Darth Vader wears black is accidental, do you?). This sub-genre typically lacks all moral ambiguity, and few wrestle over the whether a given action is "right" or "wrong."
Neuromancer falls into the cyberpunk genre. This setting generally includes enormous, multi-national mega-corporations which operate outside the law; the "common" folk tend to live in squalor unless they have sold themselves to the company. Computers figure prominently into these stories, as do criminals (who are usually presented as outlaw heroes). This genre tends to do more to explain how the science works.
If you really want to keep at this sci-fi thing, you really should look up a few books, including "Terminal Identity" by Scott Bukatman and "Trillion Year Spree" by Brian Aldiss. The Aldiss is out of print, but you can probably find one in a library.
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My point is this: Science fiction is a multitude of things. It's not only Star Trek. It is everything from Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" to the neo-flower-power anime "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within", by way of "hard" sci-fi like Star Trek. I get offended when people tell me, "Why do people use swords in AO? That's not sci-fi!".
Funny--I get insulted when I see a world 30,000 years into the future and the best weapon someone can find is a stick. Fancy that.
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Well, the reason why is because it is cool!
No, it isn't. It's stupid.
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Just like the light-sabres are cool in Star Wars, just like Frank Miller mixing ninjas and swords with science and superheroes is cool in "Ronin".
There are huge differences here. First of all, you will notice that Luke Skywalker is not yielding a steel support beam--he is carrying a laser-blade, and is only able to wield it effectively against someone with a gun through the use of the mystical, pervasive "Force". You will note, throughout all the films, that Han Solo never once wields a light sabre. Why? Because he would get his butt fried.
I don't have a problem with people carrying a mace as a weapon. But you will notice that even in our backwards century, we have long since stopped equipping our soldiers (in almost every nation) with sticks. The reason is that soldiers with guns tend to last much longer than soldiers with sticks. Even cyberpunk often includes melee weapons--for up close, out-of-ammo last-ditch fighting or sneak attacks. But not for primary combat. If you want to mix the two a la Star Wars, fine--but make some sense. As it stands, there is little difference between sword and gun wielding, when in any kind of quasi-reality, there are times when a stick just isn't going to cut it.
And please don't drag out that "suspension of disbelief" nonsense. My disbelief is stretched to the limit.
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The contemporary label "science fiction" has progressed far from the old definition where the driving force had to be science, and includes many, many cross-over genres.
I think that today, the future, and science, is more of a canvas on top of which you can paint any story. That is actually one of the coolest things with sci-fi, the fact that you can play with the rules and make a different culture/reality that can tell us something interesting about the world, and about us.
The cardinal rule for sci-fi (or any writing/storytelling) is this: you can make up any rule you want--but you had better stick to it. If you change rules in the middle of the show, people will get upset.
If, in fact, we can create nanobots, and they are ubiquitous and easy to build/use, why has that not had much of an effect on what people use to hunt/defend themselves with? Why are nanobots not used to build cities in minutes? To clean pollution? If you can put nano-bots on clothing to be sure that (somehow??) only people of a certain political bent can wear it, why has someone not been able to hack that? How long do most popular encryption methods last in public?
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I am telling you this to set the curtain for explaining where we are going with the AO setting, especially with the Shadowlands expansion pack.
Okay...here we go....
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From being a "simple" story about the conflict between two sides (the clans vs. Omni-Tek), we're turning on the heat and expanding our scope.
This is some kind of inside joke, right?
"Simple" story about the "conflict" is an understatement. There is not conflict. At all. None. Zero. Zilch. Zippo. Nada. Nil. Clear enough?
This supression gas thing is ridiculous. Who controls it? ICC? Then why is the planet not blanketed with it? Because ICC doesn't wants people to kill each other? Well, that seems unlikely. Because ICC doesn't control the planet? then why are they there at all? Why is there *any* gas other than in OT areas? Why is there supression gas in the first place? Since death is not permanent, how does it negatively impact you to die? Wouldn't "I got killed" be a common and reasonable excuse for missing work? At least as common and acceptable as "I was sick" is now?
My point is simply what I said before--you can do anything you want. But once you have defined the rules, you have to play by them. As one instructor of mine once said, "If anything can happen, nothing that happens matters."
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With the Shadowlands, we're going to build on this platform - making AO a game with a setting where the battle will be for the future of humankind, body and soul.
What battle? We're told there's a conflict, but we don't see any of it. PvP areas are in effect wilderness arenas--clearly defined borders where you can hurt each other. Big deal. That is not a war, or even a conflict. It is, at best, a sport.
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But instead of explaining away the mystical (like what George Lucas did with SW:TPM), we're going the other way. We'll add mysticism - spirituality and inexplicable phenomena. And while there will be explanations, they might not be scientific in nature. We'll rewrite the history of humankind, and most importantly, we'll escalate the conflict. (Remember - and here be spoilers! - Isaac Asimov did this as early as in his "Foundation" series. Didn't it give you goose-bumps when the story finally returned to Earth, and finding a mind-reading robot on the Moon - directing it all? It sure did it for me!)
This, in essence, is the Shadowlands - a place where your character's true inner self will be revealed. It's not another planet you travel to, and hopefully you can recognise some of the old places you have been to before! It's a new shadow dimension, where all the rules change. Some technologies will not work, and others will change in the way they work. With future expansion packs, we'll be doing even more challenging changes to the rules. What is the point of rules if we can't break them a little?
Okay, what I was saying about the "rules". Up to this point, we've been playing a hard science fiction game. Even the mystics in the this world, the Metaphysicists, are explained with science. Suddenly, we have a spiritual component. Where was this mystical stuff for the last year (or last 30,000 years?). I suppose some answer is, "That will be explained in the storyline." to which I would reply, "You've got to be joking."
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With Shadowlands, the two opposing sides will become clearer. There will be no more shades of grey. This has been a true goal from day one for the AO team (at least for me personally), to make a true conflict where you can play two true sides - one light and one dark.
What shades of grey, exactly, are you referring to? Since every single aspect of this world is controlled by which side you choose, from the terminals you can use to the clothing that can somehow read your mind. Where is the ambiguity you hope to be dispelling with this expansion? I would argue that, by introducing a spiritual (and, apparently, a moral) component to a thus-far strictly science- and politics-defined world, you are in fact increasing the ambiguity and shades of grey.
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If you read some of my pre-release web stuff, this should be evident. I don't know how well we were able to portray this through the launch and the story episodes, but it has always been a goal.
I find it utterly incredible that, after the last year of "We can't do this," you think anyone actually listens to the pre-release claptrap. We can't even believe the information that was on the box or the web site now! And you want us to call up the past promises of pre-release mania?
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We'll also be introducing more elements from the rest of the galaxy. Hopefully you'll see what's happening on Rubi-Ka as something anchored in intergalactic politics. (As a reminder; notum, the blue substance from the Rubi-Ka mines, is the only substance that allows nanobots to be virtually perpetual, and to function outside the confines of the human body. It's only found on this one planet in the whole galaxy, making Rubi-Ka a unique, and crucial, resource, more important to Omni-Tek than their own solar system and their headquarters on Omni Prime.)
Great idea--but where, exactly, was this information? I may have missed it, but I have watched every animated episode and read all nine released chapters of the book (if you think I'm paying $20 for a novel to any game--especially this one!--you are sorely mistaken), and I don't remember that. The last chapter I read said something about the first nanobots being created, but that they could only live for a very short period of time. I will accept that the rest of this information is in the rest of the novel, but....)
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Now, as to why notum is only found on RK, this will be explained in connection with the Shadowlands! We'll also reveal where notum comes from, and why it has such "magical" properties.
I assume that by putting the world magical in quotes you mean to imply that, although the properties seem magical, they in fact have some underpinning of science, however fictional. I'm interested in seeing explanations of this. Or are you going to invoke that "we are free to do anything we want" claim to avoid giving any sort of cogent reason for what you do?
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Having told you this, you should hopefully more easily understand that the AO universe is not a sci-fi universe in the "techno-babble", Star Trek sense of the word.
This is quite humorous. Star Trek is anything but techno-babble. Inconsistent science and flawed logic do not sci-fi make (and see the above about this). Roddenberry himself discribed Star Trek as "a sort of western in space--spaceships instead of horses, zap guns instead of six shooters."
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(I know I am being a bit unfair here, but bear with me!). It's a free universe, not constrained by rules of narrow-minded labels.
It is constrained, however, by the rules it creates for itself. There is a name for science fiction stories that ignore their own rules--it's called "bad."
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This freedom is very important, because it means that we can also hand more of the reigns of the setting to you, the players.
This whole article could be an AO-centered comedy routine. You really believe that the controls of the AO setting are in the hands of the players? Funny, considering that community opinion and information are so steadily and constantly ignored by FC.
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Luckily, the label "science fiction" is so wide-ranging that we are able to contain the evolving AO universe within it - and we're still, at this point, the only big sci-fi MMORPG out there.
Yes, we can do a great deal under the "science fiction" label; there is one limitation, however, so listen up: You can't do it all at once. Got it?
Also, you are correct that AO is the only sci-fi MMORPG on the market (like you, I don't consider "Neocron" to be an RPG (and I don't think the makers do either). But this will change rapidly. There are many other games coming, and AO needs to shape up quick if they want to hang in there.
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