From the mainstream media article:

The key change in the terms of service appeared to be a new block from Unity on using its engine for cloud gaming services that do not have specific authorisation. Narula speculated that the change, and subsequent block was “probably either an accident or a negotiating tactic” on the part of Unity. “We’re waiting for someone in the west coast to wake up and make some ransom demands, basically.”

Obvious interpretation: They realize the value that can be delivered through using Unity as a server in this way, and want to update their existing licence agreements to extract more value (fair). But instead of being upfront about it, they're deciding to be assholes to set up a stronger negotiating position (dickish).

Worse interpretation: They realize the value that can be delivered through using Unity as a server in this way, and they're planning to develop their own Unity-as-a-server platform in place of SpatialOS, so they're blocking any possible competitors from using their own technology before announcing their own product.

Or it could be something else entirely. What do I know?

Fingers crossed guys! Hope this gets resolved with an updated licensing agreement sometime soon.

@xzoviac said in Bit worried where the Kickstarter is:

I backed Star Citizen in the past and it leaves me hesitant on the amount i want to back though

Not trying to do a hard sell on you or anything, basically just using this as an excuse to rag on Star Citizen.

I didn't back Star Citizen because it just reeks of being too ambitious to ever possibly succeed. They were trying to do way too much, way too soon. So far, history has backed me up on that prediction. I look forward to paying full price for Star Citizen after it is released.

One of the things about Fractured that makes me like it so much is that the scope of the project Dynamite is proposing is ambitious but also grounded in what could actually be achievable, and Dynamite has been very restrained when discussing which features will or won't be likely to be delivered on release. Also, the timelines that have been proposed seem entirely reasonable - none of this "We'll go from alpha to full release by Christmas this year." nonsense.

Having worked as a project lead on enough software projects in the past, you get a feel for when someone's estimates are grounded in experience and competent project management, and when they're a delusional optimist. Dynamite's plans pass my smell test.

However, the irony is that precisely because they're being so measured and responsible with their promises, that makes them underwhelming on the marketing front when compared against the kind of wild over-promising and subsequent under-delivering that is the norm on Kickstarter.

For example, Dynamite have stated outright that their stretch goals will not involve core features. That is exactly the right move to make if you want to deliver your vision on time. Kickstarter campaigns that involve core features are basically introducing scope creep as a marketing strategy, and scope creep is poison to project delivery.

The problem is that precisely because Dynamite are level-headed and serious, their marketing seems lackluster next to all the other projects that wildly over-promise. Many people have fallen for Kickstarter hype before and been disappointed. So when Fractured comes along and is making an appeal that is presented in more of a rational "thi-is-what-we-can-actually-achieve" style and less of an emotional "this-is-why-our-promises-are-amazing" style, it doesn't press the same buttons on the amygdala. So people have a chance to engage rationally - and the rational skepticism based on prior disappointment actually gets a chance to be heard, and executive function says no.

So the very fact that Fractured's scope and campaign strategy are achievable ends up working against Dynamite because of how many other game studios have poisoned the Kickstarter well with over-promised feature-creepy delusions.

To be clear, this isn't a criticism of the people that aren't investing in the Fractured campaign: It is reasonable to be risk-averse given the overall landscape that we're all being presented with.

It's just an acknowledgement of the underlying mechanics as I see them. It's a damn shame that the signal of Dynamite's professionalism against the background noise of unprofessionalism is actually working against them. Markets are weird.

This is an idea I had a while back over at Feature Spotlight #1: Three Races, Three Gameplays, but I thought I'd mention it again here to see what people think.

Firstly to get this out of the way: This would not be in the game at launch, and maybe shouldn't be in the game at all. It would probably require quite a bit of work to implement, it would only impact evil aligned players who choose to opt-in to the concept, and arguably we could sort of do this using out-of-game resources like discord to organize things. So it might be that the development time could be better spent on features that would benefit the whole playerbase.

But disclaimer aside: I think it would be kind of fun to have a Babilis worshiping human running around Syndesia that has an ability that lets them summon a demon from Tartaros. Which is to say, summon in an actual player character demon, controlled by that player and counting as a summon in the summoner's creature cap.

I'm planning on playing a hellfire demon, and I think that this could be really neat. It would take some work, obviously. But so many of the pieces of the puzzle for that kind of gameplay are just sort of sitting there in the game design, waiting to be implemented. It sort of jumps out at you as obvious once you've seen it - or, at least, it does to me.

So just some rough back-of-the-envelope thoughts from my original comment:

For example, an evil human can cast a summoning spell that will teleport in a PC demon. A demon can be mentioned by name, or can be left unnamed and mentioned only by race. The PC can opt in or out. Unnamed will jump around online demon players until someone decides to opt in.

The demon comes in and can fight for or trade with the summoner. If the demon does something illegal while under the 'control' of the human, the human carries all the legal penalties for the action as per normal Sundesian law.

The demon can opt to teleport back to Tartaros whenever they feel like it.

The human has a banish ability to try and force the demon back to Tartaros whenever the human likes it, but the demon has a chance to resist banishment based on stats and abilities.

The summoning ability has a duration, at the end of which the banish effect will automatically trigger. The human has the option to trigger the banish effect early if desired.

So long as the human doesn't banish the demon and the demon stays within proximity of the summoner, the demon gets to remain in Syndesia without the normal penalties. But once banishment happens the summoning effect ends, and if the demon resists then they begin to suffer the normal penalties.

Prometheus has already commented on it here:

@prometheus said in Feature Spotlight #1: Three Races, Three Gameplays:

@KairosVal that's a nice original idea, but it would take a considerable amount of work to implement it - so, as you've said, it's unlikely we'll consider such mechanics early on. For sure there's no limit to how deep and creative we can go when it comes to racial mechanics though, so never say never!

So I'm not really expecting anything any time soon. But I think it's a nifty concept that I'd really enjoy.

Thoughts?

@miffi said in Economy and PvE:

The devs have stated in some posts that the best gear will be crafted but that items can still be found on mobs, they just wont be as good. Certain materials can only be found on different planets so it seems like each will have its own economy but going on the demon planet comes with the risk of losing it all very easily but thats why anyone would play that race in the first place right?

Not at all, human. Come to Tartaros. Trade with us. There are riches to be had from trade.

You can trust us to keep you safe.

@darian said in Bear-kin on mount:

@esher A wolf mounting wolves is nothing new. A bear mounting a wolf is ... well, going to have interesting genetic consequences. I guess it's alright, as long as you remain loyal.

I think that's a different forum.

@finland said in Clarification on the target audience:

@kairosval said in Clarification on the target audience:

I used to play as a carebear miner in EVE Online, but even there the potential to get ganked in highsec meant that I had to stay alert and actually pay attention, and that made things more interesting. I think that mostly-carebear-with-some-spice is a good thing, and that if you give carebears the ability to opt out of the spice altogether then enough will do that such that opting for the spice becomes a disadvantage and no-one will pick it.

You have just summoned the worst game ever with the worst cancer community/player base ;). I'm wondering why none of the PvP players I met in this forum so far has never mentioned once to go kill players around Tartaros XD

I know EVE gets a bad rap, but I didn't and still don't see it. It's really not that hard to avoid the gankers in EVE if you just stay alert and keep an eye on local comms. And the gankers are actually pretty useful for taking out bots and discouraging inattentive and over-cautious miners from risky systems, freeing up those systems for players like me.

I think I got ganked once when I was just starting out because I undocked from a trade hub in a mining barge without checking local or mail to discover my guild had been wardec'd. This made it entirely my own fault. But I just scraped off the salt and learned how to not make that kind of mistake again. So I didn't. And I never lost another ship to player activity again.

So the ganking thing was never really a problem for me, you just had to pay attention to what you were doing. I've never really understood what people were complaining about. I always just figured it was themepark-MMO players complaining about EVE failing to be a themepark-MMO... But that's like criticizing a dog for failing to be a cat. It's technically accurate, but somewhat misses the point of having a dog in the first place.

I don't think that Fractured is setting out to be another themepark-MMO either, particularly given the forced-player-interaction-economy thing. That's a good move in my view because the themepark-MMO market is extremely saturated, and I think what the Fractured devs have in mind here is meaningfully distinctive in the MMO marketplace. Really looking forward to it.

@Tuoni said in Concerns related to the attributes:

@Gothix If gear is human readable or we can inspect other players, then you cannot keep anything as a secret. Furthermore, the streaming and video culture what we have in games nowadays also takes care of that everything can be analyzed afterwards. So someone needs to fight once against the team #1 and all the builds are revealed.

Armor skins are a thing in the Foundation, and will probably exist as cosmetic purchase items in the store.

I prefer human-readable armor, weapons and magical assets, but there's a tradeoff here between human-readability and a revenue stream to keep the servers running. Cashflow matters if we want the game to persist. It is what it is.

• Will spell effects interact with the travel system? For example, would I be able to get a burst of warmth for my character by self-casting an AOE fire effect?

• Assuming we have the resources to do so, can we create a campfire to respec skills anywhere on the open world map? Or will this only be available at predetermined locations?

• When travelling between worlds, how will the arrival location be determined? Particularly interested in this for demon characters.

Not sure if this is a Races/Planets question, or a Housing/Towns question. Will ask in both places, please ignore in whichever Q&A thread it doesn't apply.

How will NPC town defenders work on Tartaros?

In Syndesia and Arboreus it makes sense, they have a crime system and the NPCs can respond to the crime system. But Tartaros is lawless. So how will town defense work in the absence of a crime system?

@Phial said in VIP - Details?:

@Razvan said in VIP - Details?:

VIP membership is a monthly subscription planned to be priced around $10/month. It provides the following perks:

Discounts on Store items
Unique cosmetic rewards for accumulated VIP time
Other vanity rewards we might think of in the future
Additional study slots
Increased Knowledge Point gains

source

Wouldn't "increased knowledge point gains" be considered a pay 2 win since you'll have an advantage on the points you can attribute faster than others?

The short version is: VIP does give an advantage in power level. But it's short lived and not massive. It'll give the VIP an edge, but not neccesarily an overwhelming advantage.

I wanted to give a little more detail on top of what other people have discussed.

Suppose four players: Alice, Bob, Charlotte, and Daniel. All three have the same race and attributes. For simiplicity, lets assume they have the same gear, and they are all pursuing the same "standard loadout" build of skills and talents that their characters will use in the game.

Alice has done enough in-world exploration to unlock many skills. She has earned just enough knowledge points to learn a full loadout of skills and talents that she wants for her "standard" character loadout, but no more. Let's assume this happens at 10,000 KP for the sake of the example. Alice has also unlocked more skills though exploration than she's got the knowledge points to learn.

Bob hasn't played the game as much as Alice. He's only explored enough to unlock a sub-set of the skills Alice has learned. He also only has 5,000 KP to learn the skills he has unlocked. He hasn't gotten to the point yet that he can complete a full loadout of abilities.

Charlotte has played the game just as much as Alice, but is also a VIP. Charlotte has unlocked all the same skills as Alice through exploration, but because of her VIP she has earned (again, just inventing the numbers) 15,000 KP. Charlotte can learn more skills and talents than Alice. However: Charlotte cannot equip more skills than Alice at any one time, because Charlotte and Alice have the same number of memory points, so they have the same ceiling for the number of skills and talents that can be memorized at any one time.

Daniel has played the game just as much as Bob has, but is also a VIP. Daniel has explored enough to unlock only a sub-set of the skills that Alice and Charlotte have unlocked. He has more KP that Bob at 7,500, and he can learn a few more skills and talents than Bob can. But still not enough to complete an entire character loadout.

In that scenario, the power levels regarding the "standard loadout" are:

• Charlotte (VIP) and Alice (non-VIP) are equal in power for their "standard loadout".
• Charlotte has a flexibility advantage over Alice in the form of an alternate loadout she can select if she chooses to do so.
• Alice (non-VIP) is stronger than both Daniel (VIP) and Bob (non-VIP) for their "standard loadout".
• Daniel (VIP) is a little stronger than Bob (non-VIP) for their "standard loadout".

Charlotte's only advantage over Alice is that Charlotte can, during rest, choose to memorize a "non-standard loadout" of skills and talents that may be more situationally useful. For example, the "standard loadout" may not have a fire resist spell - but when doing PvE against enemies that deal fire damage, it may be useful for Charlotte to run away, rest, then equip a different loadout that trades off a combat closer skill from the standard loadout for a fire resistance skill instead.

So it's not exactly true that VIP doesn't give a power advantage, because Charlotte does enjoy the power that comes from greater flexibility in her choices. But it doesn't give Charlotte a higher power ceiling than Alice - they each cap out at the same power level. So if the "standard build" is an optimal PvP build, Charlotte has no advantage over Alice in a PvP setting, but she may have an advantage in that she can optimize for a wider range of PvE settings.

It should be noted that Daniel (VIP) does have a raw power advantage over Bob (non-VIP) though. But that advantage will be short-lived. Once Daniel and Bob have each done the same amount of exploration as Alice, and once they have earned the same amount of base KP as Alice, then Daniel and Bob will be indistinguishable from Charlotte and Alice.

So if you got through that Huge Wall Of Text then congratulations! The takeaway here is that, yes, the VIP system does give an advantage, both in terms of flexibility and in terms of raw power comparisons. The flexibility advantage is real. A VIP will have access to more options than a non-VIP for the same investment of time and player skill, which will let them optimize loadouts for a wider range of scenarios. However, the raw power advantage is only in play for as long as it takes for a non-VIP player to complete their first loadout. Once that's done, the non-VIP is equivalent to a VIP with the same race, attributes, gear, and skill/talent loadouts.

Now: Even with all that in place? It needs to be acknowledged that VIPs may still get access to increased power level in the same loadout due to their greater flexibility. Skills will be upgradeable twice (so three levels of skill) through exploration. So if a VIP has an easier time exploring due to their flexibility, that could give them an easier time unlocking higher levels of the skills in the "standard loadout" being compared. That would translate to an increase in power level. But it's a very nonlinear form of power advantage, it only lasts as long as it takes for the non-VIP to unlock up to the same levels, and it still requires the exact same investment in terms of the actual exploration requirements themselves from all players. Again, that is an advantage, but not an overwhelming one.

@Tuoni said in Death and what it entails:

@Farlander said in Death and what it entails:

I thought it was said there would be durability since we have been told upon death gear is damaged. That would indicate gear is going to degrade. No repairing and damage upon death means gear will rotate alot. If gear is horizontal as characters are then there would be no such thing as epic gear nor would that mean that gear degrades in stats. So I'm not seeing how improving your crafting ability really really "improves" your character as a crafter. From all I can rationalize "improving" in knowledge just opens up new options. Not necessarily better or more powerful just different.

So what am I getting at? If everyone is able to craft the same quality of gear right out of the box then I don't see much of a player run market. Everyone will basically be able to supply themselves since basic mats are probably going to be readily available. That said the only good vendors are just going to be the ones that actually supply goods. There's no competition in quality of goods.

Well said. This is my fear as well, and regarding to current information, crafting can be very underwhelming activity and because of that markets may end up to be quite poor as well.

Right now, the quality of an enchantment comes in tiers. In the state of the game as of the last playtest, we didn't have enough variety of reagents to unlock all the tiers of enchantments. The Tier II intelligence boost was a bit tricky to sort out. You can check out the enchanting guide here for examples.

There's also the quality of the materials that go into making an item. Exotic hides need to be converted to cured leather, and so on.

Pretty sure that what this means is that the key thing driving a lot of this will be getting the raw materials that best suit the desired loadout. So if you're going up against something that deals fire damage from spells, you'll want hide that gives magic resistance with enchantments that give fire resistance, that sort of thing. Getting all of that to the highest tier will take rare materials to construct and rare reagents to enchant, and will need access to advanced crafting stations in towns.

So with all that in place, the expectation is that not everyone is going to be able to have access to all of those at the same time. Everyone should be able to make the basic stuff. But if you want the best stuff, you need more. A single person could do it, but it's going to be very time consuming and will probably need a lot of travel to get to where all the rare reagents are - and I fully expect that there will be some reagents that only exist in specific contents, specific worlds, or asteroids.

With all that, I do think that there'll be room for trade. It feels like the game design right now implements the "dedicated crafter" archetype as players that have the time, player-knowledge and connections to pull on all of those resources to produce bespoke items at a profit.

Not sure if we're going to have the ability to unlock recipies for the kind of gear we can construct, but if we do then that would give the dedicated crafters a form or horizontal progression too.

That still may not be satisfying to people who want to be able to double-down in progression to make the "best stuff" - but given how limited the vertical progression is, and how wide the various scenarios you may need to equip for are, the notion of "best stuff" is a little bit context-dependent in Fractured anyway.

Just my 2c.

Right back atcha you glorious animal!

@Phylosophys said in Death and what it entails:

Hi @dj35 and all others that commented before,

About death, you can read the last announcement on this matter in the Roadmap to Alpha 2 – Test 3. As precised by the Devs, first you are knocked down when you reach endurance 0, after some time you come back up at the cost of Life points. If you reach Endurance 0 and Life 0, you are dead and you respaw either at your house or (for the time being) at the last tavern you rested in. You are asked to choose.
Consequence of being knocked down includes:

• Players can stole from your bag. The theft will have different consequences depending on the planet you are.
• Non evil monsters will stop attacking you.
• Someone can use a recovery/revive spell to help you.
• Evil monsters and players may keep attacking you, what will make you lose Life points, when you reach zero you are dead.

Consequence of dying includes:

• You respaw at a determined place, as explained above.
• You become full-lootable, meaning that players can loot everything you have on you.
• Before you corpse decompose you can come back to retrieve your items or give permission to party members to retrieve them for you.

That is what I got so far, more or less.

Hope it's not too big a derail: Do we know if that distinction between bag looting and full looting is really locked in? If so, have any planned mechanics been discussed around logging out or breaking connection as an escape mechanism?

I don't think it will. Adds a lot of complexity while (arguably) not actually making the game more fun to play.

That said, I'm in the group of players where I would prefer it if food was perishable so it was something else we had to trade off and play around with. But I just really like survival elements in games and not-so-secretly want every game to be a RimWorld clone. That's probably the wrong instinct here.

I just like it if things like, say, grain was perishable, but the rate of perishing went down if it was in a grain silo, and went to zero if that grain silo had a 'cats' upgrade to stop loss to mice. Makes cities more important for long term food storage, that sort of thing.

But pretty sure it wouldn't be fun for most other players, so no biggie.

Late, but eventually.

I've got a lot of confidence that this game will see both beta and release.

I think something really big and external to Dynamight would have to go badly wrong to stop this game from moving forward to beta and release.

Worth noting that we're going through something really big and external to Dynamight right now. So far the pandemic hasn't seemed to slow them down too much. But if something comes out of left field - such as Improbable's capex spending on Spatial OS drying up - then things could slam to a halt without any fault on Dynamight's part. I don't think that's likely at this point - but a pandemic in the modern economy is uncharted territory, so don't rule it out.

In terms of the internal risks that Dynamight does have control over? I'm not a game dev, but I've worked on really large business dev projects. With a bit of experience you learn how to smell pie-in-the-sky-software-bullshit. I've been consistently impressed with how grounded and realistic Dynamight's plans and timeframes have been to date. They've got the balance between ambition and what-we-can-actually-achieve exactly right.

Expect timeframes to slip: It's softwrae, timeframes always slip. But everything I've seen from Dynamight passes the smell test so far, and their community outreach has been above and beyond the call of duty relative to the size of their team.

I see no reason for pessimism and a lot of reasons for optimism.

@Tuoni said in Concerns related to the attributes:

Perhaps the human-readable part can be camouflaged behind skins, but if we have option to inspect then it does not really matter.

Still reckon there's a big difference between seeing it at a glance and having to click open an inspection menu then move it out of the way of combat then read it all while fighting and trying not to die.

Not sure if an inspection option is planned, but if implemented, would be interesting if the level of information revealed was linked to the perception attribute.

@Zidroc said in EVE Online players here?:

I've seen it on steam, never tried it. It sounds fun, but definitely seems like you need a group of friends to play with. I read that ganking is huge

The entire server is essentially a PvP server. In high security space there are police NPCs that will punish people who break the law, but they are there to punish criminals, not protect the innocent.

There's an ongoing back-and-forth on the EVE community forums around people who like PvE complaining about getting killed, and pretty much everyone else who thinks they're crybabies. Hence, carebears.

I'm a particularly odd strain of (former) EVE player in that I liked the PvE side of it, but I just accepted that ganking was a part of the game so adjusted my ships, fits and playstyle accordingly. And it was fine. Plenty of other hisec players who didn't do that and presented way more tempting targets. The trick is that you don't have to outplay the gankers, you just have to out play the other PvE players so the gankers go to them and leave you be.

@Tuoni said in Concerns related to the attributes:

@Gothix If gear is human readable or we can inspect other players, then you cannot keep anything as a secret. Furthermore, the streaming and video culture what we have in games nowadays also takes care of that everything can be analyzed afterwards. So someone needs to fight once against the team #1 and all the builds are revealed.

Armor skins are a thing in the Foundation, and will probably exist as cosmetic purchase items in the store.

I prefer human-readable armor, weapons and magical assets, but there's a tradeoff here between human-readability and a revenue stream to keep the servers running. Cashflow matters if we want the game to persist. It is what it is.