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Shards Online adds permadeath ruleset
Shards Online's Kickstarter campaign is on fire, having blown past its $50K fundraising goal and now plowing through stretch goals. With eight days to go on the campaign, who knows how far it'll get, but there's one thing for certain: Thanks to passing the $80,000 mark, the fantasy sandbox will incorporate permadeath into some of its server rulesets. For the stretch goal, the developers wrote, "We will add an extra official ruleset to Alpha One with increased skill gains and permanent death! Not only will we have this ruleset running on some of our official servers, but players will be able to run these rules on their own community servers."
H1Z1 floats possible server rulesets
A short Reddit post from SOE revealed a few possible server rulesets that the team has been discussing for H1Z1. While these aren't set in stone, it is an interesting peek into the possibilities of both official and player-run servers. The possible server rulesets include: Hardcore ruleset (wipes all ownership and recipes upon death) PvP vs. PvE Military weapons toggle Guns toggle (melee/bows only server) Roleplay (VOIP attracts zombies and other tidbits) World chat vs. area chat Hardcore ruleset #2: Starvation! (food and water consumption are much higher) Hardcore ruleset #3: Zombies and wolves are deadlier, faster, and hardier Base destructibility (easy, hard, not at all) SOE also indicated that it would be possible to create rulesets that mix-and-matched between these ideas.
Introducing Das Tal, a PvP sandbox where players make the rules
If your fun's been stunted by a sad lack of free-for-all PvP sandboxes, then might we suggest you're not looking very hard? Let us give you a start in this direction, at least, as Fairytale Distillery announced its upcoming project, Das Tal. Das Tal is a "fast-paced" sandbox that includes open PvP, full looting of players' corpses, a classless character system, and a constant struggle over resources and player settlements. Probably the most interesting aspect of this MMO is that each server will eventually reach a "climactic end event" and then restart, allowing players to vote on the rules and features for the next iteration. Das Tal is on Steam Greenlight, is currently in the pre-production stage, and will most likely be doing a fundraising campaign at some point. We've got a teaser trailer for you with the creepiest voice-over ever after the break. [Thanks to Skurvel for the tip!]
Star Wars: The Old Republic releases server details
On top of the exciting news this morning that Star Wars: The Old Republic has launched into its third guild phase, CM David Bass posted a healthy wall of text on the forums listing the server types and details associated with each. It will probably not come as a shock that SWTOR is sticking with the four core server rulesets: PvE, PvP, RP-PvE, and RP-PvP. In PvE, players have to toggle an option to engage in PvP outside of specifically designated combat areas, while on PvP servers everyone is automatically flagged outside of safe areas, such as the starting zones. The RP variants are similar, except that BioWare encourages players to roleplay in character on those servers. There's no word as to whether or not GMs will be enforcing such actions. Because RP-PvP was a very recent addition to the server ruleset list, guilds participating in the pre-launch deployment program will not be able to choose those servers for launch. Instead, BioWare says that players interested in this ruleset will need to manually form a guild on their faction's homeworld after the game releases.
Stay on target: SWTOR's guilds begin to align with phase 2
Star Wars: The Old Republic's release may feel like it's always going to be in a "galaxy far, far away," but at least BioWare is giving guilds something substantial to do in preparation for launch. Following up the first phase of guild formation, today the studio announced that guilds can now progress into the second phase: alignment. During this phase, guild leaders can establish up to three guilds as their Allies or Adversaries (depending on the target guild's faction). Not only will this help to cement friendships and rivalries, but BioWare says that these connections "will have the highest chance of being placed in the game together, allowing these guilds to coexist on the same server." This won't happen if the guilds have chosen different server rulesets, however. Another new feature that's come with this phase is the ability for leaders and officers to begin inviting people to the guild by email. The SWTOR website has a helpful FAQ for all three phases of guild preparations. The third phase, deployment, is scheduled to occur shortly before launch and will begin placing guilds on servers if these guilds have met certain criteria.
The Perfect Ten: Non-vanilla server rulesets
I've always thought that rulesets are a golden opportunity for MMO developers to get creative with their products and try something fresh and exciting. Unfortunately, most every MMO these days, new and old, adheres to the four "vanilla" rulesets that have been in place since Pong. You have your default PvE, your same-as-PvE-except-we-have-a-naming-policy PvE-RP, and the two player vs. player variants: PvP and PvP-RP. Those are all well and good, but... y'know... couldn't rulesets be used to create fascinating variations on these games? It turns out that yes, yes they can. While the vanilla rulesets are the vast majority, there does exist a group of fringe rulesets that dared to walk the different patch, er, path and made versions of MMOs that are a bold and refreshing flavor. Like blue! Sometimes these new rulesets were whipped up to inject new life into an aging title, giving players a valid reason to come back and see the game from a different perspective. In this week's Perfect Ten, we're going to check out just how wild 'n' wacky server rulesets can get!
Enter at Your Own Rift: The no-quest challenge
OK, I know you all probably want to talk about the news that addons are coming to RIFT, but the truth is that it's not that big of an issue for me. My feelings on addons are that I'm for them if they enhance the game and encourage player creativity, but I'm against them if they reduce players to mere statistics in the eyes of others (GearScore) or are absolutely necessary to tackle the game's content. So if you feel passionate about this topic, I give you leave to vent more about it in the comments below, but as for me and mine, we're going to look at quests today. More specifically, not doing them. Now, I generally like quests. They give me a feeling of accomplishment (as I am fond of checking off items from my to-do lists in real life), the stories are occasionally interesting, and they give nice boosts to leveling. But I've come to realize something interesting about RIFT that might run under the radar of most: Quests are superfluous to the game. Well, at the very least, they're optional and not the mandatory tasks that most modern MMOs make them out to be. So I had a thought. What about playing RIFT without questing at all -- taking on a "no-quest challenge" of sorts? Is it not only possible but fun too? Hit the jump and we'll examine this from all the angles.
The Daily Grind: Create-a-Server
In this day and age, it seems as though servers have checked their creativity at the doors. PvE, PvP, RP, RP-PvP come as standard as red, green, blue and yellow in a Crayon four-pack. Hey, if it ain't broke, right? These four server rulesets do their job admirably, and for most people, that's good enough. It's almost easy to forget that devs have the ability to create rulesets that strike out in different directions, such as permadeath servers (oh yes, I went there) and progression servers (where a server resets to the core game, with expansions added at a steady pace). Of course, on rare occasion you do see a game experiment with unusual rulesets, such as EverQuest's 51/50 server. More recently, Realtime Worlds announced that they're contemplating a slew of unique rulesets for APB, including newbie, Chaos and pure skill. So the potential is there for servers to branch out -- it's just that, for various reasons, the risk is seen as not worth the potential reward. But this is The Daily Grind, a place to unleash your imagination and engage the "What if?" in its full glory. So if you could create a unique ruleset server for your game, what would it entail?
