Hello Realmers,
Our focus over the last few months has been on the development of a proper Player vs Player system, with the addition of new features, content and incentives to provide a satisfying endgame loop to players. We also got sidetracked in the best of ways by the OpenAI Beta, which we were fortunate enough to take part in and have since successfully leveraged to enrich in-game NPC interactions.
In addition, we implemented numerous gameplay and world editor improvements, and even added a new "Narrative Worlds" configuration option that makes worlds purely story-based, with no combat, classes or skills whatsoever.
The recent pace of Artificial Intelligence has been nothing short of breakneck, and when OpenAI announced their private beta for their general-purpose text interface, we jumped right on it. As a result, Edeus now has a resident Non-Player Character that integrates with GPT-3 to generate responses that could fool someone into believing that it is being controlled by a real human. If you'd like to learn more about how GPT-3 works and how we integrated with it, check out our blog post on the topic, Using OpenAI's GPT-3 to enrich NPC interactions.
One player being able to kill another has been a game feature since the beginning, but there was previously not much point to it, other than bragging or griefing. To address this, we've built a system of incentives and limitations around PvP, and have updated our flagship world Edeus to implement specific rewards tied to those incentives. We also opened the Orc core faction for character creation.
All of the changes are detailed in a in the following blog post: Cross-Faction Player vs Player. But to quickly summarize, killing players rewards you with Glory, which decays weekly into a currency called Medals. Medals allow you to purchase equipment, potions, and to advance in standing within the minor factions of your choice. In addition, unique weapons are awarded each time glory decays to the top PvPer for each class.
Though we spent a lot of time on PvP, and we also spent time on the complete opposite end of the spectrum: narrative worlds. A narrative world has no combat, classes, skills or killing. These elements are even hidden from the UI, focusing it on the storytelling elements.
Brimstone is a single-player narrative adventure that showcases all of those features, where a detective tries to get to the bottom of the murder mystery with rather unusual circumstances.
A number of new worlds are in the works, and we've been working closely with builders to define new ways to create interesting interactions, narratives, and satisfying discoveries.
Here's some highlights:
is_archetype mage or (is_archetype warrior and level_above 10) - will place a condition on an event to only occur if the actor is a mage or a level 11+ warrior.[say heads; say tails] will cause him to say 'heads' 50% of the time and tails the other 50%.find command takes a name as an argument and returns possible matches along with room numbers. All you need to do then is jump to that room number and you can take a look for yourself.Some gameplay quality of life improvements:
compare presents a list of items either in your inventory or in your bags for each equipment slot.Feedback? Questions? Here's the essential links