Gloria Victis - Groundbreaking MMO

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Aureilya
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Gloria Victis - Groundbreaking MMO

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http://gloriavictisgame.com/

What is Gloria Victis?

Gloria Victis is a low fantasy medieval FREE MMORPG that values realism in terms of game mechanics. Our game is set in a parallel universe of X-XV century Europe and Middle-East with the corresponding nations.

The fundamental difference that our development has with large game studios is the spirit in which we are making the game. Gloria Victis is founded on frustration and passion ‒ frustration at the lack of a game that is truly innovative and worth playing, and passion for the medieval period. As such, Gloria Victis is not driven by fiscal goals but actually the desire to create a game that truly belongs to gamers.

What Makes Gloria Victis Different?

Free to Play

The game is free to play. Though a cash shop will be implemented, it will only include "ethical microtransactions". Things available in the item shop will be cosmetic items, vanity items, having our graphics artists design a coat of arms for you to your specifications instead of customization in game and other quality of life items. In a nutshell the item shop will not give a player ingame bonuses that a person who does not use the item shop cannot get, both players will be on the same footing.

Low Fantasy World

This game strives for realism in a low fantasy, medieval setting. There will be no high magic and fireballs being thrown around. Magic is subtle, consisting largely of alchemy and the occultist beliefs and superstitions of the cultures during that time. A fulltime healer, for example, would be more like a alchemist combined with medic. So you will be doing potions and bandaging your friends. The low fantasy element could be for example auras or shouts giving some kind of buffs (for example expanding health regen). As far as other magic goes, there will be weakening curses, empowering blessings, charms, altering senses (blinding the enemy or sharpening ally’s sight), et cetera.

Cultures will resemble their real life counterparts, and will stay grounded in the grit and realism of their time. This means patriarchy and gender roles (although you can still do, game-mechanics wise, anything as a woman that a man can do, sexism and gender roles are a part of lore), the harsh realities of society, beggars, peasantry, hard battles and gruesome fates.

Crafting

Each player can buy basic, and common items from vendors. But the rest of the items have to be crafted by another players. What's more our crafting system provides 7 different states for each item, which means that even if you have one recipe you can create many swords. For example simple knife, can be Sharp, Common, Good, Great and etc and each type has slightly different statistics.

here are 10 selective crafts of which the character will be able to master only a two of them or know a bit about each one. Different crafts give access to different resources and different “craftable” items. Crafting items will be somehow based on real process of medieval crafting. It will consist of gathering required materials, their appropriate preparation and then crafting the desired item. Every such action will require tools and various “workshops”. Many upper class items will require resources provided by other craftsmen, so nobody will be self-sufficient and cooperation will be mandatory.

Example: In our game the equipment will be available to acquire only from certain enemies. We believe that there are numerous common-sense issues in modern games, E.G. boars carrying heavy armour, which drops ready to be collected after they are slain. In Gloria Victis the players will be the most important source of items, crafting them and offering them to other players. The very crafting process will be historically accurate and often enriched by mini-games. For example – to make a beer, the player will have to visit the malt-house and perform the following:

Soak seeds in the tubs
Fish the grain out and spread it on the threshing floor to make it sprout; player can speed up this process by putting heated stones between the seeds.
Next by shuffling and raking player will separate the sprouts from seeds and put malt up for drying. The drying itself will go much faster if we invest in a drying room.
Dried malt has to be then transported to the crushing mill, where it will be bruised.

In the brewery the malt will be soaked in water and left for a period of time for the valuable components to penetrate deeply. We can speed up this process by equipping our brewery with a furnace that will heat up the tubs. This process is called mashing.

Then we pour everything to be filtered in grain bed itself in a process called lautering. On the canvas working as a filter appears malt that can be used to create a low quality beer such as home brew. Now we have a high quality wort (they differ depending on the grain used) and a low quality wort. We can pour both worts into fermentation tubs and get a low quality beer or add quality hop to the better wort along other ingredients to try and create a true masterpiece.

We cannot forget about buying or acquiring residue from a previously made beer. It contains yeast that will allow the fermentation to begin. After the process is over, we can fill the barrels with beer and sell it to other players, inns or drink it ourselves to gain temporary attribute bonuses.

You will be able to buy them from players as well as hunt for them.
You are given 200 points to distribute representing the time a human has in his life to learn things, "Mastery" of a craft requires 100 points so you can be a jack of all trades / specialist.

The materials used to craft things esp high quality gear will require your cooperation with other craftsman, eg armour is not simply metal, it has leather straps, cloth surcoats and such. And for heating ores you need Charcoal etc etc will be very varied so yes you can gather yourselves but you also need to work with other crafters.
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Aureilya
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Re: Gloria Victis - Groundbreaking MMO

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Quests

As for today, we have a quite large quest base, of which a bigger part is multilayered and have alternative endings, depending on the way they are completed.

Multilayered quests means that the quests will be able to be completed in a few ways, e.g. when a quest tells you to poison a girl, you can accomplish your task, tell your victim about your quest giver’s intentions or tell the guards about the possible upcoming crime. Each way leads to a different ending.

In the game there will be quests of various difficulty levels. Some of them may be accomplished solo, however some of them may require help or cooperation with other players. It will also be possible to join groups and parties to achieve common goals. Additionally, we will implement “social quests” that will require e.g. convincing other players to make certain actions.

We are planning on implementing reputation system, which will determine NPC behavior towards the player. During the gameplay one can gain good or evil fame in various world regions. It will also influence various quests’ availability, e.g. if one is a respected member of society who saves damsels in distress, he will not be able to contact with inhabitants of demimonde. And so being a shameful bandit, one will not receive quests of protecting a convoy transporting goods, rather than that – robbing it.

Class and mechanics

The combat is based on non-target system, which is manual handling and striking blows. The combat will require good positioning against the enemy and attacking it in a right moment. The whole thing will mostly base on the player’s skills rather than character equipment, which potential one will have to use properly

There will be no such thing as character class. Everyone will start their game with a certain amount of points to spend and, during the gameplay, they will earn more as their character levels up. The way the points are spent will depend only on the player’s choice.

For players who don’t want to waste time spending points in the character creation screen there will be already prepared settings called archetypes. Each archetype will consist of certain attributes; each archetype depending on different ones. Picking an archetype will only determine the character’s start and can be ignored later by manually spending earned points.

Yes you can level up purely by crafting as well, in Gloria Victis we truly hope to make it that you actually can be who you want to be. If you think about it, logistics were a huge part of winning wars in medieval times, a nation with strong craftsman making high quality gear and such for those who wish to play as a fighter will certainly win.

And yes you can legitimately live as a woodsman there will be both some non-instanced and mostly instanced wooded locations which you can make your home.

As for injury, all that is still up for conceptualization, the rough direction we are going towards is you do not "die" in the game but more "You got knocked unconscious" and injuries will be a part of that.

PvP

There will be open PvP all over the map excluding certain areas described as Safe Zones. However, slaying allies will result in punishments and sanctions. There will be also duels, arena fights, guild wars, faction wars and bouts for dominance over certain territories.

Combat will be like Mount and Blade, where players can negate all damage in situations by blocking HOWEVER, there are some situations where blocking will not do and evading the blow completely that is the course of action EG heavy blunt weapon swinging towards you even if you do successfully parry it you will take alot of shock damage from the force of that weapon.

Some targets would be impossible to tackle alone, for instance the raiding of a caravan is no simple task as they are likely well protected by escorts so the player most often would have to enlist the aid of several others to succeed. Sieges also require teamwork and cooperation, where perhaps even warbands have to work together.

We're planning on implementing an innovative system which is a hybrid of sorts between Full and Partial looting.

Housing

There will be housing in game, both instanced and non-instanced. Buildings will have fix locations available to be used, but player will be able to choose parts by himself so he will be able to make unique structure on his own. Surely those buildings will be more complicated to build than just bringing wood and stones. The housing system we have is based on instances in which player could buy crafting equipment, grow seeds etc.

There are two forms of housing, non instanced and instanced. Non-instanced housing can be made into player owned shops on streets, so an avid crafter would want to purchase it to have a fixed location to spread the word of his skill in crafting. Housing also serves as storage as well as production facilities.

Instead of thinking about it as housing, rather think about it as a space where the player can do what they want with. Other things that non-instanced real estate can be made into are things such as taverns, farms etcetera, we aim to have as much player ownership of the world as possible for a sense of realism and as players set up shops we will gradually phase out NPC shops.

Pets and Mounts

Pets will be useful and will be able to do certain things for you, for example carrier pigeons can deliver messages. You will be able to tame various animals to make into functional pets that do things such as hunting dogs, wolves that fight for you and hawks for scouting.
To elaborate on pets:
Deer Hounds, Taming Wolves, Falcons, War Hounds and so on
Mounts:
Horses, Ponies, Mules, Donkeys, Camels, Oxen etc.
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Aureilya
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Re: Gloria Victis - Groundbreaking MMO

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Gear

Between players of same faction: tabards, heraldry and gear (we will have so much gear to choose from and due to the sandbox crafting system everyone should have an unique appearance)

Between factions, every faction has aesthetically different gear, there will be a marked difference between the gear of the faction modeled after central Europe powers and the desert powers.

Plate armour will be balanced in such a way that the realistic drawbacks of plate will be implemented into the game to discourage widespread use such as an extremely high stamina drain as well as movement penalties. Equipment on the whole will be balanced in a way where lighter armours will be just as good or close to the quality of heavier armours. The second constraint on plate is the extreme difficulty and expense of crafting a suit. In Medieval times Plate-Armour was only within reach of the very rich and were passed down as heirlooms and we hope to reflect that in Gloria Victis.

There will be heraldry for factions, for guilds, and the player's personal heraldry.

Trade and Factions

Between factions, once again nothing set in stone, depends what our community wants, there could be language barriers and players have to learn in game to commit skill points into speaking other languages to communicate with other players. Or there could be no language barrier and such, it all depends on what player wants.

And yes, there will be inter-faction trading, merchants using Oxen (slow but carry huge loads) will ferry good between villages and cities of their own factions to start with but the most lucrative routes would be inter-faction, but of course we will still need to work on conceptualizing how that would work in the context of war and such.

Weather

The lands in Gloria Victis will be graced by the presence of various seasons as well as weather conditions. However, a day and night cycle, the changing of seasons and dynamic weather are not just for show, but are intimately tied to the game and each have their own effect upon game mechanics. The time of day for instance determines the behaviour of NPCs, some retire to their homes to sleep and unscrupulous muggers will begin to prowl the streets.

The player in Gloria Victis would plan their adventures in accordance with the time of day, seasons as well as weather conditions much like how one would in real life. Gloria Victis will feature eleven different weather types and numerous parameters such as luminosity as well as temperature.

The weather will be as fickle as the gods themselves, changing constantly and affecting the lives of all. Weather will play an integral part in the day to day lives of players, with adverse weather conditions such as fog or rain obstructing the field of vision, hot summer rays that make fighting in plate-armour hellish to say the least or bitter winter snows that reduce the player’s ability to react and lower mobility. Weather will have an effect on certain weapons such as bows and the player will have to apply oil or wax to the bowstring to prevent breakage. Weather are affected by factors such as climate, season as well as random chance.

Depending on the season certain weather phenomena will be more common, rain for instance will be commonly seen in the winter months but seldom seen in summer time. The length of days are also judged by the seasons with summer hosting long daylight hours and winter shorter hours of luminosity. Like Medieval times, the seasons play a large part on the lives of people in terms of farming, certain crops and plants will grow better in different seasons and those that choose the profession of agriculture and husbandry will have to acquaint themselves with the optimal growing conditions of crops.


Mini-games

Mini-games will be implemented in Gloria Victis; these include things like a chess mini-game and playable instruments.
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Aureilya
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Re: Gloria Victis - Groundbreaking MMO

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Support Us

Gloria Victis is an independent project developed in the spirit of passion where every detail is meticulously crafted. We believe that players own a game as much as the developers if not more, as an independent project we can maintain control over creative processes of the game to put the interests of the players first as opposed to allowing fiscal goals and revenue charts take precedence. However, as an independent project it also means that we do not have a multi-million budget that studio backed games enjoy. Which is why we will be needing Your help.

There are many ways in which you can help, from helping spread the word to making a monetary contribution. Contributions are used on such things as purchasing of hardware, software licenses, data capacity and to turn more team members full time as currently most still work day jobs and are only able to work on the project during their spare time.

As Gloria Victis is governed by a strict set of ethics we feel that it is an obligation on our part to show what you are contributing towards and therefore extend Pre-Alpha invitations to our 10$ or more contributors to have a stake in this project.

Every dollar counts, we would like to encourage you to make this game that will truly belong to gamers, a game that puts players first a reality.

http://gloriavictisgame.com/donation
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Awatu
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Re: Gloria Victis - Groundbreaking MMO

Unread post by Awatu »

Neat! Reminds me a lot of Skyrim with a plethora of survival and crafting mods, but with less fireballs and elves. I am not sure the typical high-fantasy MMO player will find it appealing, but it does fill the niche of a "crafting-heavy" MMO so it could do well and garner some attention if it is designed properly.
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Aureilya
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Re: Gloria Victis - Groundbreaking MMO

Unread post by Aureilya »

I have a feeling it won't appeal to the average WoW player, but it will play up to people like myself who love crafting, as you said. I've been saying for a couple of years now that I want an MMO that's based a lot more on crafting and less on combat. I like the realism in this one- the detailed crafting system, the fact that you have to actually craft your house and gather materials- reminds me a lot of Minecraft.

The Trade Runs and Weather system are very exciting to me. I used to play a MUD back in the day that had trade runs, and it was probably my favorite part of the game. People had to form groups and escort a caravan on foot from one city to another, defending the wagons from specially generated mobs and other players. And there were weather patterns that made a difference if you got caught in them- to the point where you could take heavy damage or die. It sounds like GV is doing something very similar, and I love that.

I personally haven't played this yet, but my friend Eve is playing. Again, it's not even in beta- this is pre-alpha, so it's very rough in some places. The graphics and animations still need some work. But starting at the $10 donation you can have permanent access from now til launch, from what we understand.
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Inzema
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Re: Gloria Victis - Groundbreaking MMO

Unread post by Inzema »

Looks shiny to me. Will have to keep an eye on it.
"If I can't eat it, ssscrew it, sssell it, or ussse it to blow sssomething up, then what ussse isss it?" ~Inzema
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Anaie
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Re: Gloria Victis - Groundbreaking MMO

Unread post by Anaie »

This looks interesting.
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If the people raise a great howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war, and not popularity seeking.
Frygyd
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Re: Gloria Victis - Groundbreaking MMO

Unread post by Frygyd »

Huh very neat looking.
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Duskheron
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Re: Gloria Victis - Groundbreaking MMO

Unread post by Duskheron »

I like crafting!

<..< >..>
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Khorvis
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Re: Gloria Victis - Groundbreaking MMO

Unread post by Khorvis »

Looks cool! Stupid name, but it does remind me of low level EQ. Worth a shot
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