the-saga-of-ryzom
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Choose My Adventure: Ballad of a teenage Zorai
Last week, the unthinkable happened. Or at least the unprecedented. Yes, after a dozen or so columns under my belt for Choose My Adventure, one of the "joke" choices finally won a poll. Either everyone thought that the paradise city was actually a thing in Ryzom or the impassioned pleas in the comments the week before had done the trick. For those of you under the misapprehension that this was, in fact, an actual thing, I apologize for the not particularly elaborate act of deception. My question to myself, at this point, was what I actually had to do at this point. Did this mean that I had to search through every city in the game to find a paradise, only to discover at the end that paradise had metaphorically been at home the whole time? Was I already in the paradise city, judging by the fact that some people would call the jungle a virtual paradise? The girls were pretty, the grass was green, and by almost any metric you cared to use, Corlede was as close to home as she was getting. But no, I knew what I had to do. Something I had known since I started playing. I went home.
Choose My Adventure: Mainland in black
One of the comments from last week's Choose My Adventure suggested that I must not be enjoying Ryzom all that much. That isn't entirely accurate, but it would be accurate to say that the charm of the starter island has worn out its welcome and then some, which wouldn't surprise anyone, given that last week's poll wound up in a decisive victory for leaving the island and heading out to the mainland. And while there may have been some business left unfinished there, I'm not one to ignore the rule of the polls. And so it was that Corlede obeyed the will of the people and headed off for the Zorai city. Once there, I set about the important business of getting Corlede outfitted, taking some advice, and assembling a team to plant an idea inside the head of a talking lion meant to represent a well-known religious figure. Or something like that.
Choose My Adventure: Craft it one piece at a time
Sometimes, a well-planned weekend turns into a complete mess. Case in point: This past weekend, which I fully meant to use to get more of a footing in Ryzom, wound up being almost entirely dominated by a mixture of other responsibilities and necessities. As a result, I didn't get nearly as much time playing the game as I would have liked. The plan is to spend more time crafting away over the course of the week, but this article needs to be written up earlier than that. As you can imagine, this results in a little bit of a hole in the narrative. Fortunately, crafting is pretty deep as a system but fairly thin in terms of a core narrative, unless you find "and then I made another set of light sleeves" to be engrossing. So while I didn't get several hours of story, if you're not familiar with what the system offers, there's still plenty of ground to cover.
Choose My Adventure: Atys refugee blues
Last week's polls were enough for me to get started in the world of Ryzom over the weekend, so I took my first steps back into the game that I haven't played for quite some time. I still remembered how some of it worked, thankfully, but there were a lot of elements that I'd almost completely forgotten. And while I'm still knee-deep in the starter area, I've played enough to at least get some starter impressions. But let's make this a full narrative, yes? When we left off, the group verdict was that I would be starting out as a Zorai with the Magic starter package based off of a female Shakespearean tragic character. And thus, with only a little extra effort, Corlede was born into the world of Ryzom. The character creator offers a variety of features, allowing you to select your character's build in fine detail but offering a strange lack of certain other options. There are also some odd constraints on character types -- you find yourself always locked within a certain general band of height, for instance, so there are no really tall Trykers.
Choose My Adventure: I fell into a burning ring of Ryzom
After an intensely close vote, the winner for my destination in this round of Choose My Adventure is Ryzom! And I do mean intensely close; up until the polls closed, it looked very possible that the vote would end in the favor of Lord of the Rings Online or even a straight-up tie. But the readers have spoken, and my destination is set to the world of Atys and its inhabitants. Meanwhile, Johnny Cash handily won the bonus poll, so it's time to spin up song songs by the Man in Black while I write this. For those of you who don't know what in the world Ryzom is, you can sort of be forgiven. It's one of those games that seems to be uniquely brilliant while managing to fall off the radar altogether, which is a real shame. So this week I'm going to discuss the game in an overarching sense, outline what I'm looking forward to, and of course give everyone a chance to vote on the character that I'll be making for the next six weeks of exploration.
The Daily Grind: What game would you like to see go open source?
For a game long known for its emphasis on player-created content, mods, and even skills, the big Ryzom announcement perhaps should have been expected. But the revelation that the game was going into the murky waters of open source, albeit with a few omissions such as height maps and sound files, is a far-reaching one for almost any game not wholly built around user generation (a la Second Life). And it naturally leads to the question: what other games would be nice to have access to from the source code up. It opens a huge number of doors, everything from private servers to full-on rewrites of the game as a single-player experience. For knowledgable coders, it turns every single patch and design decision into something that can be modified by the players. The breadth of options is almost overwhelming. Of course, Ryzom is a niche title with a strong emphasis on these kinds of innovations, so in a way it's to be expected. But it's the closest we've seen to a mainstream game going this route -- so what would you like to see? An older game that could benefit from the publicity? A newer game you feel could be improved? Or a sadly-cancelled game whose source code could be used as a resurrection?
One Shots: Hey guys, over here!
One of the things we really like to do with One Shots is to show off worlds that we don't get to look into very often. Take, for example, today's interesting screenshot from Ryzom that was sent in to us by Prisemy. It's certainly a surprisingly good-looking game for having initially been released in 2004! With a few of his own thoughts, here's what Prisemy had to say. I decided to give Ryzom a try after reading on Massively about the new update and whatnot. I have to say this is the most gorgeous MMO that nobody is playing. These Kami look as perplexed as I feel as I head off newbie island for the mainland. Where is everyone?! Don't they know there is a free trial?If you're playing in a small game that you feel is really underrated by the general MMO populace, why not find a great screenshot of the game and email it to us here at oneshots AT massively DOT com. Add your name, the name of the game, and a brief description - links to trials are handy too! We'll post it out here and who knows - you may interest people in coming by to check your favorite game out!%Gallery-9798%
