Elderwrath

Scope

Genre: Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG)

Platforms: PC / Macintosh

Goals

• Gain power and prestige as you level your character
• Bring glory to your family and your clan by crafting, fighting, and sacrificing along the way
• Expose the machinations of a long-forgotten evil and prevent it from engulfing the world in darkness

Features

• A unique, group-oriented crafting system
• Fully customizable user inteface
• Dynamic world that responds to player actions and features both seasonal and semi-random periodic events
• Public works projects that affect the accessibility of world zones
• Epic quest lines that have a defining impact on the world
• Unique hash keys for each player that makes the world adjust to them.
• PvE (both solo and group-based) and PvP (instanced and open-world) content
• Consensual permanent character death in PvE quest content
• Player clans consisting of many families (analogous to guilds)
• Player social ranks that impact both PC/PC and PC/NPC interactions
• Player created content in the form of personal estates and new world zones*
• NPC hirelings that support the player and protect their estate
• World that supports 5,000 active players per shard with a maximum population of 15,000 players per shard
• Mouse/keyboard input

* Player-created content subject to approval by development team.

Core Overview

Elderwrath is a MMO RPG with a heavy emphasis on sandbox game play, it follows the following set of design philosophies.

• Players create content faster than designers.

Muti-User-Dungeons of the past were text based adventure games were players fought the content and then became creators of the content. The principle that a 10,000 players can create more content than 100 designers. To achieve this goal the game designers will design the core world and the outline for the rest of the world. Player will be able to edit a area and design content that then goes into a peer review process and final certification by game design. This allows the world to grow as fast as the players want it to.

Players select from a pallet of assets which define the theme of the area, geology, items, building, and quests are left up to the imagination of the players.

This principle is exposed in both the player able design world areas, but also in designs of their own estates. The estate designs facilitate PvP content by allowing others to break into the estate and challenge the defenses for rewards. The designer gaining experience and resources for defeating a 'thief' breaking into there estate.

• The world is dynamic and evolving.

A dynamic world involves the very towns, cites and landscape changing over time. To achieve this a simulation of the civilizations will run behind the game play. This simulation will take into account global trends by players and ajust the world as necessary. For example an Inn in town might catch fire one day, and burn down. The next month that lot will have a stables selling horses because the players have been taming all the horses in the area and prices have sky rocketed. Similarly a weapon shop may closeup because players have been raiding the iron convoy that delivered supplies to the town.

The world of Elderwrath has many places where player built community projects (qv.Horizons, Tale in the dessert) that need to be worked on to open access new areas, quests, and dungeons. Most new areas will require community works projects. Part of these communal projects will be shortening of travel times, or contested access, for example building a bridge across an impassable river shortens the travel time to the content by saving time traveling to the ford. Or destroying a bridge to deny the other faction access to an area.

• A user controls a family, not a person. Death happens, life goes on.

A user controls family of characters, as the leader dies, the next in line ascends to the leadership. This allows the player to play many classes and variations of characters over the lifetime of play. Each successful generation advancing the social standing of the family. Consensual death of a character allows for the player to sacrifice the effort put into a character for long term gains.

• A user defines what his character is, not a designer.

Each character will have a unique hash key that is used in conjunction with the world to provide a unique world. For example the best fishing spot on the river is a combination of location and the players hash key. This makes the content of the world not googleable. The same applies to some quests as well, making the path to complete the quest unique to the player in question. For example the players hash key combined with the quest step ID determines the city that the quest NPC is located in.

Group crafting is a system where the interaction between players involved hash keys determine a synergy bonus to the crafting. This makes a group of crafters able to produce Items that are unique to that combination of crafters. Crafters each will influence the final product, a blacksmith with a high synergie with a mage will produce a weapon that has either higher than normal damage, or higher than normal magic bonuses.