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General Discussion => The Speakeasy: OOG/Off-topic Discussion => Topic started by: IzzyChan on 24 Sep 2010, 22:30
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CCP's world of darkness game story got confirmed officially
http://www.massively.com/2010/09/24/world-of-darkness-confirmed-based-on-vampire-the-masquerade/#continued
We already sorta knew, but now they have a video about it.
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That is an extremely bald head.
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thats pretty damn awesome.
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As long time WoD ( old and new ) player and a consumer whore I am very wary and cautious in my expectations. It's an interesting decision to base it on VtM although for the global needs of an MMO the VtM setting works much better than VtR. Despite the "not sure if want" that I have lingering about, there's and inner fanboy going *squeee* and bouncing around the walls. This could be something thoroughly awesome or it can be a boatload of fail. We'll see, I'm curious to see more.
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I dont know being an avid 3rd Revised VtM geek myself, I am very leary of how they are going to introduce certain disciplines and the story lines they are going to use.
I mean are they going to start where the red star first appears? The Ravnos anti waking up? It will be curious to see where they take it and how they develope it. But for some of the disciplines that need a personal flavor or touch to them, not sure how they are going to be able to manage that in a MMORPG.
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Are there werewolves involved?
If I get to be a werewolf and kill vampires I'm in.
If not, I might still be in.
... They don't sparkle and care about people's feelings, do they?
CAN I BE BLADE?! :O
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Will it have Kate Beckinsale?
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Will it have Kate Beckinsale?
^
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Off-topic slightly, but Kate has signed on to do Underworld 4.
Interesting decision to go with Masquerade.
Annoying for me though, since I've been reading all the nWoD books over the last few weeks to get up to speed on the lore.
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Heh, I called that it was V:tM a while back. The last straw was WW's decision to make conversion documents for oWoD-to-nWoD. While they might have decided to do that anyway, the timing et al was convenient. I prefer V:tR to V:tM for the table-top, but I can agree with this decision.
I'm cautiously enthusiastic. This could be amazing. I think the big question for me here is that whether I want to risk being passionate about playing the thing once it's all set for better or for worse, or if I should go an apply to have a hand in making it and ensuring it's that awesome.
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Meh, vampires.
Nothing a SPARTAN-II could take care of.
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Thank you, Seriphyn, for not being sucked into the vampire craze. First it was the 90s, now Twilight revives the craze.
I hate vampires. A lot.
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It will have my sword ONLY if there are playable Lich.
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That is an extremely bald head.
When I first saw the head, I thought it was Kane, about to turn around and give me new orders against the GDI.
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I actually dunno much about vampires. The only serious thought I have about thus is that I hope it makes a lot of money for CCP.
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That is an extremely bald head.
When I first saw the head, I thought it was Kane, about to turn around and give me new orders against the GDI.
I'm glad I wasn't the only one who thought that.
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^
Also, I hope they can create what they want and promise. If done well, this could get very interesting.
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The thing I'm most curious about is how they're going to handle death.
WoD vampires are even more vulnerable than capsuleers. Sure, there are only a few things that do them permanent damage, but fire and sunlight are serious and universal banes and you can get put right into the vampire equivalent of a persistent vegetative state with a shotgun blast or two. Furthermore, the WoD is full-- full-- of stuff that can write your character a one-way ticket to that great coffin in the sky (heh) in a matter of seconds, starting with another vampire (and you can be damned sure that other vampires know exactly how to make sure you won't be getting up again).
And they only get one body.
Working around all that is going to require 1. the most ruthless character-death system to exist in an MMO, 2. some credulity-stretching narrative license, or 3. a serious rewrite of how vampires get offed.
A partial solution might be to allow people to keep their "experience," or whatever, from character to character, allowing the creation of a new, equally experienced character each time the last one permanently snuffs it. But that's still going to result in tears, petitions, and canceled subscriptions.
As much as CCP wants this to focus on politics and social interaction (as it should), combat is going to come into this somewhere. Exactly how they approach that is going to be incredibly important to how this game comes together.
If they do a good job, I may have some hard decisions to make: I love Eve, but VtM is the first game I ever got into that wasn't sword and sorcery (like many, I started with D&D). If they include the Followers of Set, that decision's going to get even harder; it'll be damned difficult to resist the temptation to dust off that conniving old serpent Moebius and see whether I can talk my way onto the city Primogen all over again.
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They might employ a system similar to City of Heroes, where a mcguffin device teleports/shifts the near death player (technically 0 or 1 health) to a medical facility, where they recuperate.
In City of Heroes, this was how Villain/Hero players never experienced permadeath, even though it was quite frequent among the NPCs. Players were the minority that worked correctly, everyone else wasn't.
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You know, after reading Aria's comment, I thought about it for a while and realized its really hard to write a player out of death without hilariously elaborate means. >>
I'm not terribly familiar with the WoD universe, so I don't know if their technology is all super-advanced and whatnot. But in most MMOs its either technology or magic that keeps you alive. Not sure which would be more appropriate here.
Unless they go with an EQ-esque "body drag" system, which I was never a fan of.
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Well assuming there is an appropriate scale of you are small fish - you are big fish, it could be varied.
Small fish for instance could be whisked away at the nearest moment of death by any Dark Gods (don't know if WoD has any) for whatever nefarious reason. As you rank up in power, eventually you can whisk yourself away to fight another day.
I'm not one to talk I don't even know anything beyond what WoD means ;P
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WoD is technologically on par with us - Depending if you do or do not include Mage the Ascension and Technocracy - I have a feeling this will thoroughly Vampire centric. Since oWoD mages rivaled the level of Gods when they advanced with experience, lets leave the mages out for now and assume that we're going with what we have now.
So no teleporting probably.
Which brings us to Magic, that's a plenty in the WoD, old and new. In VtM, it was pretty damn potent force to dick around with as well. WoD is not sci-fi setting, it's supernatural, dark modern fantasy (minus the pointy eared elves, WoD have fairies but not as one would think) if you will. So that could be used to do something but, WTB Final Death personally to this game. Yes it will be a flow of tears and yes griefers will abuse it but makes things interesting don't it.
PS. I will be thoroughly disappointed if I can't play a Tzimisce and it's just a Camarilla circle jerk. I'll still probably play it though. There's always Malkavians.
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I guess if nothing else, there's always the classic of dissipating into mist or something prior to death, and reviving elsewhere in a weakened state, or some such thing. Cliche, but at least it'd get the job done.
I've always had mixed feelings on permadeath. Let alone how humiliating a death can be in PvP, now I lost my character and I have to start back as square one? Definitely not an appealing idea.
On the other hand, I've had plenty of experiences, IC and OOC, where wiping someone off the face of existence would be a satisfying end to the altercation. It'd certainly make people think twice before starting a fight.
But, solely to keep a player base of any size, I think they'll have to include a way to revive yourself.
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I'll probably take a peek at this to see what's going on, though I doubt there's going to be the ability to play an unenlightened mortal a la some of the old WoD MUSHes.
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random thought on deaths, and this is just me throwing ideas out there since I have no idea. But when you're killed, you turn into some sort of mist, which then goes, finds a random person, latches on and you take them over and they slowly turn into you. Not really accurate to the vampire lore or game lore, but CCP wouldn't just handwave it. No way.
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Yeah, WoD is modern horror. And vampires are not the nastiest things in it (at least physically) by a long, long way. Vampires die. They die from getting staked and beheaded by vampire hunters; they die from getting arrested and stuck in a nice, sunny prison cell; they die from getting shredded by werewolf claws (for which reason, I will facepalm if there is a "wipe out the pack of werewolves" quest that is anything less than the equivalent of a DED 10/10 plex. Werewolves are THE physical badasses of the WoD, and they rarely appear alone).
But mostly, they die by getting offed by their own kind. Vampire "justice" is brutal and unforgiving, and many vampire power games circle around manipulating a foe or rival (or said foe or rival's allies and minions) into violating the Traditions. Furthermore, a vampire can gain considerable power by draining the blood (and soul) of a more powerful vampire. That's a favorite pastime of the Sabbat (vampire bad guys-- er, worse guys?). The Camarilla (vampire slightly-better-guys), of course, bans it.
Politics in Vampire: the Masquerade is a matter of life and death. If this game doesn't have a PC body count, it will lose much of its sense of paranoid terror.
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Crazy Malkavian Voice:
"I asked them why the COLORS were ****ing SPINNING and all they said was 'Oh, the colors aren't spinning' and then the red was flying through the AIR AND THEY WON'T listen to the listening voices of the colored drapes that just WON'T SHUDDUP for five minutes because the wailing and the screaming and the OH GOD why are they not shutting up? They listened and they talked and now they just WON'T STOP..."
Translation:
Sweeeeeeet...
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Here's some notes from an interview panel thingy of people telling the devs what they wanted to see. A CCP dev wrote the list up and put it on his blog. http://jachilli.squarespace.com/journal/2010/9/27/after-the-grand-masquerade.html
So, with the Grand Masquerade at its conclusion and the debut of some news and an art-driven animatic, word is now out that the WoD MMO is going to be based on the Masquerade, built on three spheres of playstyle (cofeeshop, sandbox, and themepark), and highlight the ideals of Danger, Power, Romance, and Mystery. One of the panels at the Grand Masquerade offered players a chance to tell the devs what they wanted to see. I took notes like a diligent designer should, and here's the summary:
* Not a lot of quests. Org versus org. Player-driven faction content and conflict.
* Not a WOW clone. Repetitive quests are boring and unfulfilling.
* Concerns over how mental or social influence powers are handled. How to do this well and meaningfully? Players uncomfortable with a loss of control over avatar.
* Players want to control other characters, however.
* Territory control. An adult-only play space. Roleplayers want a space where the integrity of the setting colors the conversation. Don't want to suffer through Chuck Norris jokes and other immersion-breaking chatter.
* Content that reinforces themes that are the cornerstones of the WoD. "Shivers up the spine."
* An exploration of who a new character is, so that he's not just dropped tabula rasa into the world. Random backgrounds, connections to the world, hooks into world participation.
* Powers that cleave closely to the powers that exist in the game, but also expand into new directions for appropriate Disciplines. Making them work in tandem with the system, so that they make sense in the world.
* Finite numbers of the supernatural critter types.
* Permadeath. Server type preference?
* Allow social powers to be socially versatile. A character can be successful socially; not all advancement is tied to combat or traditional "leveling."
* Factional control of regions or assets. Benefits to controlling key areas or establishments.
* Live team events built upon a foundation of existing world lore. Real-time events, historical Masquerade characters, GM NPCs who can be interacted with or pull players into stories.
* Influences, boons, hallmarks of the social origins of vampires.
* Accessible to casual players. Low-intensity tasks to just pick up and do so players don't have to sit there idly.
* Playable Sabbat.
* Creation, building visible things that can be added to game. Ex. Toreador art, Nosferatu caverns. Some kind of crafting system.
* One big world with a dynamic power system that allows different factions to thrive.
* Stay true to the adult content. Blood, gore, darkness, tits.
* Present the themes of the World of Darkness as playable elements. Let the players participate in the things that make Vampire what it is.
* Allow players to participate meaningfully as casual and part-time players.
* Image and customization consultation -- players helping other players create their looks.
* Playable neonate-ancilla-elder model with meaningful play, all with impact on the in-world vitae economy.
* Status system -- how to represent and elder concept. Players that can participate as setting, a piece of the environment.
* Unique and empowering via rarity.
* Rarity of combat unless it's a character's focus.
* Severity and fearsomeness of combat.
* World that responds to the actions of the characters. Dynamic, changing, adapting to how players use the world.
* A system to allow players to form groups of their own design as opposed to just sharing commonalities like clan and Disciplines.
* GLBT friendly content.
* Rewards for advancement tied to tiered mastery of ability or chance rolls.
* Final Death.
* Bloodline characters. Seeing the effects of actions the players have taken in character selection.
* Use relationships with fan organizations to allow players to play their LARP characters and vice versa.
* Crafting +1 but not materials farming.
* Immersion as a priority. Reward the long-time player who's been into Vampire as opposed to the sillier players who are aggravating elements in other MMOs. Jumping goofball players break the mood.
* Non-unique names as a matter of character identity.
* Other WoD critters. The whole panoply of supernatural creature types.
* Cherry pick the strong parts of Requiem.
* Mortals, participate in the Embrace, etc. X2 X3
* Embrace. X2
* Diablerie.
* Ability to flag self for PvP allowability.
* Communication needs. Make communication happen in a way that's not as as intrusive as "global chat UI".
* Politics outside clan and sect. City politics, for example. Domains and territories?
* A sense of history imparted to elder characters. Flashback sequences, historical instances, etc.
* Narrative that's not wholly reliant on players to facilitate the content.
* Control the rate of character progression and provide content so that casual and time-constrained players can still participate meaningfully.
* Personal spaces like havens. Ability to damage or conspire against havens. Or help cultivate them.
* Torpor as a clone-type mechanic as a backup.
* Casual player rewards and impetus.
It was a pretty exciting panel to be on, especially given that the goals of the players represented here are very much in accordance with the things we've been designing and iterating. But what about you? What do you think?
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Final Death? Is that... a permadeath reference?
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I dunno, I find something interesting. You can clearly see three camps of people in that list:
1. Original OWoD players
2. WoW Players
3. Eve Players
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Meh. So far, I see nothing that really calls out to me (even the mentions of the economy, which is probably what you mean).
Well, except tits. Yeah, those are good.
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Final Death? Is that... a permadeath reference?
Yes.
A vampire who has "died" forever is said to have suffered Final Death. Causes: beheading, sunlight, fire, supernatural damage (e.g., werewolf claws), diablerie (which is especially bad-- body dies, soul is consumed).
Exposure to most of the common causes inspires "rotschreck," "red fear." If they do this right, vampire characters with lower courage statistics should freak out and flee in blind panic when exposed to fire or sunlight. And if their damage gauge fills entirely with damage from those sources, the character should be permanently dead.
Bit of a challenge. It sounds like they've got good feedback from the fanbase, tho.
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It's good that the devs are listening and considering things like this. Let's just hope they don't cause a giant mess to try to please everyone.
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The biggest problem with a WoD setting is the playerbase.
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The biggest problem with a WoD setting is the playerbase.
I think thats true in every medium.
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Well, from my experience anything vampire themed will attract certain spectrum of people.
While it will drive away a certain spectrum.
Thankfully for EVE and its sandbox there is something for everybody.
But a WoD MMO, it will attract even more dramaz than EVE.
It will be hilarious :D
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Well, from my experience anything vampire themed will attract certain spectrum of people.
While it will drive away a certain spectrum.
Thankfully for EVE and its sandbox there is something for everybody.
But a WoD MMO, it will attract even more dramaz than EVE.
It will be hilarious :D
and CCP will be making it....the tears and rage....they will be epic. :yar:
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Thankfully for EVE and its sandbox there is something for everybody.
Wat?
Um. Not ... really. WoW comes much closer to the "something for everybody" model. CCP is very unusual in that it doesn't enforce any kind of "play nice" culture.
Eve is highly cutthroat. Fair play is enforced only to the degree that all trickery must be detectable by some means. Some forms that can't be reliably distinguished from luck (log-in traps) are allowed even though there is no reliable counter. You can do stuff here you can't get away with elsewhere, notably scamming and infiltration.
And incidentally, my wife likes all of that, but I STILL couldn't get her to stick around because she's not that interested in learning the highly-involved combat system and she found industrial stuff boring.
And it's not really a game you can approach casually and do very well. Compare to, say, Star Trek Online.
Eve's a seriously "niche" game, played by a small-ish community of fairly rabid fans. The WoD is likely to be something similar.
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I am very excited about this. This is why I started playing Eve - to see what CCP can do. I for one, will be signing up as soon as possible. Praying for a beta sooner rather than later.
I don't mind what's in and what's out: I'll try it either way.
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Why is everyone so familiar with this IP.
Sorry, but I was only a kid in the 90s, care to fill me in as to why this isn't another emo vampire copycat?
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Why is everyone so familiar with this IP.
Sorry, but I was only a kid in the 90s, care to fill me in as to why this isn't another emo vampire copycat?
Because WoD leaves emo glampires beaten, broken and raped in a dark alley.
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Why is everyone so familiar with this IP.
Sorry, but I was only a kid in the 90s, care to fill me in as to why this isn't another emo vampire copycat?
Many things existed before you were born. Many of them were awesome.
These are facts.
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Why is everyone so familiar with this IP.
Sorry, but I was only a kid in the 90s, care to fill me in as to why this isn't another emo vampire copycat?
Back in the days of high adventure, when Conan was king and all that, D&D rocked the world by introducing role-playing and causing a fuzz, not least because it was branded a tool of the Devil. You could call that the first era.
In the 90's, White Wolf came out with Vampire and then a whole slew of product lines set in their World of Darkness setting. The games were different because up to this point you had mostly been playing the guys who killed/hunted monsters, but these games set you up as the monster itself. Now, I'm sure that was done earlier by some minor game or supplement somewhere, but the thing is that WoD got popular - really popular. You could call this the second coming.
Vampires make a comeback every ten to fifteen years and in the 90's we had a vampire craze as well. Each vampire craze is shaped by the current zeitgeist, so because this was the time when goths were still goths and nobody knew what emo meant, it was far more tolerable then today's whiny and sparkly vampires, with all the pre-millennial angst and Marilyn Manson lyrics you could muster. While Anne Rice was the thing in vampiredom at the time, WoD didn't only benefit from the resurgent popularity of vampires, it also shaped the craze itself in the end. Later, you'd have movies like Underworld to prove it's influence.
Oh, White Wolf brought girls into gaming en masse with World of Darkness.
So yeah, it's been pretty influential (at least as things spawned from role-playing are concerned).
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Why is everyone so familiar with this IP.
Sorry, but I was only a kid in the 90s, care to fill me in as to why this isn't another emo vampire copycat?
HA.
The funny thing is, it's actually copycat-ish-- possibly the first of the emo vampire copycats. It's heavily influenced by Anne Rice's first couple vampire novels, before her writing abilities turned back into a pumpkin. Basically, some of the White Wolf folks seem to have read Interview With the Vampire and Lestat and thought, "Wow, these would make a kick-ass RPG setting!" Louie and Lestat would both be members of Clan Toreador; they even lifted the ecstatic nature of Anne Rice vampire bites.
The game's broader than that, mind you, covering most conceptions of what a "vampire" is that you can find in fiction (short of sparkly) and then adding a few more. The sort of horrible, twisted, bald creature you'll see in silent film turns up as Clan Nosferatu; the manipulative business/political sorts who figure in the "Blade" films (and presumably comic books) seem to have either inspired or been inspired by Clan Ventrue; the nightmare "gang" of "The Lost Boys" turns up as Clan Brujah. Toss in the animalistic Gangrel, the vampire-sorcerer Tremere, the illusionist Ravnos, the infectiously crazed Malkavians, the corruption-worshipping Followers of Set, the necromancer-mafiosi Giovanni, the shadow-manipulating Lasombra, and the Dracula-inspired Tzimisce (sp?), among others, and you've got yourself a concept-party.
Naturally, there's a good deal of variety within each of the clans.
The Camarilla, the "not-quite-so-evil" guys most people start out playing, at least in tabletop Masquerade, are a bit angsty. They're trying to hold onto basically human ethics to avoid losing control and becoming true monsters (a vampire who becomes too morally degraded turns into, basically, a rabid animal). So, if you want to play an angsty Toreador, you certainly can, but even if you're in the Camarilla virtually every other clan will roll its eyes at you. (The stereotypical Tory is indeed angsty; they need not be, of course.)
Most of the other clans, to the degree that they angst, bury it deep. Ventrue are too busy with worldly matters to have time to be emo; the Nosferatu, Brujah, and Gangrel look down their noses at such self-indulgence; the Tremere will see it as weakness to be exploited; the Malkavians are more likely to be clinically depressed than "emo" (being nuts is their calling card). All of them have some angst of their own to deal with, but about a thousand reasons for not showing it.
The Sabbat, on the other hand, happily accept their monstrous nature and go for various "alternative" ethical sets, which range from seeing themselves as simply part of nature to seeing themselves as something like the guys in "Highlander," engaged in a fratricidal struggle for power in which diablerie (the drinking of another, stronger vampire's blood and soul) is a sacred act. Not very angsty. Downright cheery, actually-- the Sabbat are noted for doing stuff like playing "cowboys and Indians" with real bullets, in public, in Camarilla cities. They're a real fun-loving bunch.
So-- copycat-ish? Definitely, from all over the vampire genre.
Emo? A bit, sometimes. Seriously angsty characters are likely to annoy their peers.
Brilliant? Absolutely.
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*coughs out a cloud of dust*
Back when White Wolf was Lion Rampart it started to publish a story telling game Ars Magica, which is based in Mythic Europe, Europe during the Dark Ages where all the Myth was real.
Mages, Faeries, Demons and Angels.
Shamans and shapeshifters make an appearance as well.
The Mages were actually Magi (plural of latin Magus) that were part of a society called Order of Hermes (which is one of the factions in later Mage products) which comprises of thirteen different houses, from which one has been decimated earlier in a magical civil war. One of these Houses is Tremere which is later on driven out of the Order because most of them turn into Vampires (including the founder of the House.)
After doing couple of editions of Ars Magica they started publishing the Vampire stuff, because people find sucking blood as an immortal emo bastard more appealing than a magus it turned into the bread winner for the White Wolf in the long run.
There was a good try of making a series out of it by Spelling. Linky. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115232/)
But it did not appeal to the wider audiences enough because WoD is quite slow paced political machinations stuff with layers upon layers of subterfuge and back stabbing. If done right.
White Wolf have been very good at world building when they did their World of Darkness.
Take Sabbat for example, they think they are the wild boys embracing their vampiredom and kicking butt of the stuffy Camarilla, while they are yet another pawn in the game of the really old Vampires ticking away days towards the end of days when the Real Olde Vampires wake up and eat everybody.