Otherland - a new MMO similar to The World!

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Coma
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Otherland - a new MMO similar to The World!

Post by Coma »

Mod note: This is a commercial MMO, not mine. I'm not advertising it.



Watch the entire video. It might be a little confusing at first and not apparent where it's similar to .hack, but about halfway through it should click...

This has great potential - throw in a few clever hackers (or maybe they'll even implement something to allow for it!) and you've got something pretty close to The World :)
It looks like they might have an AI(DA)-ish thing going on already. There's a weird virtual fish(?) invasion from the sky. Just watch, you'll see :p

Screenshots


http://uk.pc.ign.com/articles/118/1187781p1.html
IGN: Do you follow along with a main story in the game, can you give a few hints as to what it will be like?

Andrew Carter: Set after the events of the books, the Otherland game sees the player battling against the virtual offspring of the Grail Brotherhood, the originators of Otherland, as they manipulate the tattered remains of the Otherland Multi-Verse to rebuild their empire and resume their position as the terrible new Gods of Otherland.

IGN: Are the explorable areas wide open for all players? Or do you have to perform special tasks to access each new world?

Andrew Carter: All of the worlds are freely open to be explored by all players providing they have aquired the portal address needed to reach them via questing and leveling. The only limits are organic.
More The World and .hack-like points mentioned in the interview.
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nobodyknows
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Re: Otherland - a new MMO similar to The World!

Post by nobodyknows »

Seems pretty legit.
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Erranty
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Re: Otherland - a new MMO similar to The World!

Post by Erranty »

Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I have to make a call to SCE now.
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Aera
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Re: Otherland - a new MMO similar to The World!

Post by Aera »

Pretty sweet-- Although, the beginning was kinda creepy... A little bit of that Red Light District kinda thing going on that you see in that A.I. movie or Surrogates.
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Coma
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Re: Otherland - a new MMO similar to The World!

Post by Coma »

Otherland First Look

Worth a read.
In Williams' own words, Otherland is The Lord of the Rings epic of our era. In the near future, a group of rich and powerful people have created a virtual reality (VR) world for themselves. What they discover is that people can get trapped in this VR universe.
What happens to you in this VR universe is real and dangerous. So does this mean this is an MMO about playing an MMO?


[...]

Senior Producer Kevin Bruckner described the game as he took us through a portion of it. "Players start in the Land of the Lost, a nightmare setting where the only thing he knows how to do is run. There is no escape but death, whereupon the character is reduced back into a chunk of base code and pops up in Lambda Mall as a base avatar."

[...]

There will be Player-versus-Player on some worlds. Some PvP forms may be as simple as hack-and-slash, some may allow players to hack into other players, or to craft viruses to steal code. Fear not, viruses can be cured and players who are cured will develop immunity to that strain. Antidotes and immunizations can also be developed. Yes, there will be crafting in this game, which, in virtual reality, is coding. Code a better sword, a better blaster, a better boost, a better virus and you'll have a market for it.

[...]

Also, worlds will have their own sets of rules, and players can break these rules. However, the world systems do impose strict checks and a player that is caught breaking the rules can be evicted and even punished. Perhaps a virtual hand-slap or even maybe virtual death.
The eDNA leech/drain thingie is also more or less Data Drain. It's so similar to .hack I wonder if they ripped some of the concepts from .hack (stuff like eDNA didn't exist in the books), and if .hack took some from the books.
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Keyaki
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Re: Otherland - a new MMO similar to The World!

Post by Keyaki »

Meh, not really impressive.
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Code: Select all

You just sold your soul for a chance at a Walmart gift card...
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Re: Otherland - a new MMO similar to The World!

Post by 8HaseoTerrorofDeath8 »

This game looked stupid to me at first but... Oh my GOD! I read that entire article and my jaw dropped maybe about 5 times! This game HAS to be released soon!! X.X


Thanks for sharing!!!
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Re: Otherland - a new MMO similar to The World!

Post by Erranty »

Coma wrote:Otherland First Look

Worth a read.
In Williams' own words, Otherland is The Lord of the Rings epic of our era. In the near future, a group of rich and powerful people have created a virtual reality (VR) world for themselves. What they discover is that people can get trapped in this VR universe.
What happens to you in this VR universe is real and dangerous. So does this mean this is an MMO about playing an MMO?


[...]

Senior Producer Kevin Bruckner described the game as he took us through a portion of it. "Players start in the Land of the Lost, a nightmare setting where the only thing he knows how to do is run. There is no escape but death, whereupon the character is reduced back into a chunk of base code and pops up in Lambda Mall as a base avatar."

[...]

There will be Player-versus-Player on some worlds. Some PvP forms may be as simple as hack-and-slash, some may allow players to hack into other players, or to craft viruses to steal code. Fear not, viruses can be cured and players who are cured will develop immunity to that strain. Antidotes and immunizations can also be developed. Yes, there will be crafting in this game, which, in virtual reality, is coding. Code a better sword, a better blaster, a better boost, a better virus and you'll have a market for it.

[...]

Also, worlds will have their own sets of rules, and players can break these rules. However, the world systems do impose strict checks and a player that is caught breaking the rules can be evicted and even punished. Perhaps a virtual hand-slap or even maybe virtual death.
The eDNA leech/drain thingie is also more or less Data Drain. It's so similar to .hack I wonder if they ripped some of the concepts from .hack (stuff like eDNA didn't exist in the books), and if .hack took some from the books.
Now when they say you CODE a better sword, does that mean you're actually allowed to create in game item stats? Or is that just their word for crafting? Because I know a few thousand decent hackers/coders that could make the very first sword they craft kill the game's hardest boss in 1 hit.
Coma
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Re: Otherland - a new MMO similar to The World!

Post by Coma »

I think it'll be more than in-game stats. Code probably means literally writing code. Or at least, I hope -- I hope being good at it will have some point.

Who knows, they might even be friendly to real hacking, which could make things really, really cool. It's not trivial - requires a large skillset :p

I doubt it though... and a decent simulation of it would require a lot of effort on their part. What would be really cool is if they exposed a way to code stuff for the game (like weapons, MyLand), and then left vulnerabilities - maybe so you could run code in another player's MyLand. The only problem is soon enough there would be cheat sheets for exploiting these vulnerabilities.

Maybe if they sealed it tightly and allowed players enough freedom so that players would inadvertently create vulnerabilities in their code for others to exploit (just like real code). But this is really difficult to execute correctly... for the longest time, I've been trying to think of a way to make The World and allow skilled hackers to do cool things, without making it cheat-sheety or giving them too much power.
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Re: Otherland - a new MMO similar to The World!

Post by Azure Flame Knight »

Just watched the trailer. Looks awesome but reminds me of the epic anime movie SummerWars, with how you can customize your character with just about anything you can imagine. And with everything you can do in this virtual world.
Imagination, The stuff that fuels rainbows and DREAMS, Oh and also Nightmares

Two awesome vids here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpYc6KIiW2w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rp6f3sCJGdQ
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Re: Otherland - a new MMO similar to The World!

Post by azureeagle »

Hmmm. Seems interesting enough to me, I think it's worth a shot.
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