dothackers.net

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.

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.

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.