And when I find the controls, I'll go where I like; I know where I want to be...
So there's this game, and it's called Seed. I haven't played it yet because I had to leave the patcher running through the night yesterday. Hopefully when I get home tonight I'll have a chance. So I can't say anything about what it is like to play this game. I can say, though, that as a game design concept this is probably the most intriguing concept for an MMO I've ever encountered.
Seed is a sci-fi MMORPG. The premise is that you and your fellow players are the members of a seed colony on a hostile planet. Basically, Earth loaded a ship with DNA and machines and shot it off into space toward a nearby inhabitable planet, Da Vinci. However, "nearby" in astronomical terms is relative; the journey itself took 250 years. The ship was fully automated, and it landed and started the terraforming process independently. However, Da Vinci has a mean streak. It just does not seem to want to be tamed. Since the arrival of the seed ship, natrual disasters ranging from violent weather to flash floods seem to be on the rise. The first human colonists, vat-grown to maturity and "dream-schooled", awake to a pretty harsh environment. And a series of near-catastrphes following their inception severely damage the ship and the swarm-intellegence AI starts behaving erratically. Rather than producing humans in small groups as the colony becomes able to support a larger population, it grows them en masse and educates them according to a curriculum plan designed for optimal colony circumstances. 100 years later (and 1000 after the ship originally left Earth), the population of the ship, which was never designed as a habitat, is pushing 250 thousand colonists, and more are being produced every day.
This is a highly atypical MMO. For one thing, pure-SF (without fantasy trappings like "psionic" magic, etc.) MMOs are rare indeed. This game has no combat. I'll say that again: you do not fight in this game. This is a game about survival in a harsh environment, about community-building and striving against impossible odds. You will not be beating space-rats with a lightsaber. The bulk of the gameplay is crafting-based, and your character advances through the development of skill trees like mechanics, electronics, biotechnology, etc. Everybody has a unified goal: to save the Da Vinci colony from destruction. But how that end is achieved is a point of contention.
Should the colonists push forward with terraforming efforts in the hope that they can develop habitable living space in time, or try to reestablish contact with Earth and get some help? Should they dig under ground and try to weather this climatic shift there, or rebuild the skyhook elevator to reach the orbital platform left when the ship first made landfall? And what should be done about TAU, the swarm AI, who is integrally linked to all of the ship’s vital systems but cannot be trusted to behave rationally anymore?
According to the developers, it is the players who will decide. Each of these ventures represents a meta-project, made up of multiple levels of smaller projects, which the player base could push forward with. By chipping away at the obstacles in their path, the players can make headway toward their goal. And the developers, meanwhile, are standing by, watching the progress of the players and crafting new content to bring into the game as necessary. Imagine a Choose Your Own Adventure book with the author reading over your shoulder and writing as you go, and you get the idea. This is an unheard of level of player influence on an MMO game world. Hell, I can’t think of a single-player game that tries for that level of freedom. Even games like Oblivion have a fixed amount of content pre-planned by the devs.
Reading the materials on the website (www.seedthegame.com) is exhilarating and frustrating at the same time. It’s maddening to think that ideas like this aren’t being used by more developers, but it’s thrilling to think that this game may change things. I feel right now like I may subscribe to this game regardless of how it plays. Bugs can be worked out and UI can be refined; game design like this doesn’t come along very often. I’ll be telling everybody I know about it, because I want this game to succeed.
Seed is a sci-fi MMORPG. The premise is that you and your fellow players are the members of a seed colony on a hostile planet. Basically, Earth loaded a ship with DNA and machines and shot it off into space toward a nearby inhabitable planet, Da Vinci. However, "nearby" in astronomical terms is relative; the journey itself took 250 years. The ship was fully automated, and it landed and started the terraforming process independently. However, Da Vinci has a mean streak. It just does not seem to want to be tamed. Since the arrival of the seed ship, natrual disasters ranging from violent weather to flash floods seem to be on the rise. The first human colonists, vat-grown to maturity and "dream-schooled", awake to a pretty harsh environment. And a series of near-catastrphes following their inception severely damage the ship and the swarm-intellegence AI starts behaving erratically. Rather than producing humans in small groups as the colony becomes able to support a larger population, it grows them en masse and educates them according to a curriculum plan designed for optimal colony circumstances. 100 years later (and 1000 after the ship originally left Earth), the population of the ship, which was never designed as a habitat, is pushing 250 thousand colonists, and more are being produced every day.
This is a highly atypical MMO. For one thing, pure-SF (without fantasy trappings like "psionic" magic, etc.) MMOs are rare indeed. This game has no combat. I'll say that again: you do not fight in this game. This is a game about survival in a harsh environment, about community-building and striving against impossible odds. You will not be beating space-rats with a lightsaber. The bulk of the gameplay is crafting-based, and your character advances through the development of skill trees like mechanics, electronics, biotechnology, etc. Everybody has a unified goal: to save the Da Vinci colony from destruction. But how that end is achieved is a point of contention.
Should the colonists push forward with terraforming efforts in the hope that they can develop habitable living space in time, or try to reestablish contact with Earth and get some help? Should they dig under ground and try to weather this climatic shift there, or rebuild the skyhook elevator to reach the orbital platform left when the ship first made landfall? And what should be done about TAU, the swarm AI, who is integrally linked to all of the ship’s vital systems but cannot be trusted to behave rationally anymore?
According to the developers, it is the players who will decide. Each of these ventures represents a meta-project, made up of multiple levels of smaller projects, which the player base could push forward with. By chipping away at the obstacles in their path, the players can make headway toward their goal. And the developers, meanwhile, are standing by, watching the progress of the players and crafting new content to bring into the game as necessary. Imagine a Choose Your Own Adventure book with the author reading over your shoulder and writing as you go, and you get the idea. This is an unheard of level of player influence on an MMO game world. Hell, I can’t think of a single-player game that tries for that level of freedom. Even games like Oblivion have a fixed amount of content pre-planned by the devs.
Reading the materials on the website (www.seedthegame.com) is exhilarating and frustrating at the same time. It’s maddening to think that ideas like this aren’t being used by more developers, but it’s thrilling to think that this game may change things. I feel right now like I may subscribe to this game regardless of how it plays. Bugs can be worked out and UI can be refined; game design like this doesn’t come along very often. I’ll be telling everybody I know about it, because I want this game to succeed.