Citadel of Sorcery - An Introduction to CoS: Part One
The team at MMO Magic has provided us witha great Developer Journal that gives us all an idea of what their upcoming MMORPG, Citadel of Sorcery, is all about. Today, we provide you with Part One of this journal, the introduction that will whet your apetite for Part Two, where the devs go into more detail about their plans.
INTRODUCTION
We’d like to welcome you to a new type of MMO experience, Citadel of Sorcery. We would like to ask you to suspend your preconceived ideas of what should or should not be in an MMO game and give this new concept a chance. We’re attempting to create a new experience, one that we hope you will enjoy. In fact, one of our biggest hurdles will be to get you to try the game without thinking about other games you have played, and just experience this new style of game play. Give it a chance and we believe most of you will enjoy your adventure.
So what is so different? Many of the current MMOs are like some kind of Ground Hog’s day, repeating the same day over and over in a static world setting. No matter what you do, the world is the same the next day as it was today. The opposite is true in Citadel of Sorcery; each day is new, as time flows on and change comes about the lands. The game world moves onwards with evolving history like a true living world.
Let us give you an example: if you are in a village when it is attacked by evil creations of Morphael, you may choose to help defend the town. If you and your companions are successful in the defense, the town may survive, if not, it may be burned to the ground. Whatever happens…happens. The following day the town will not pop back into existence. It may be slowly rebuilt, or left as a ruin. It may become the haunt of evil creatures, or grow into a booming new town.
This is just one example of a changing dynamic world. Every monster, every Non-player character (NPC) has a purpose in the world, a life, goals, movement. Some of these NPCs become your friends and enemies… not everyone’s… just yours. Monsters in Citadel of Sorcery move through the world on their own agendas and logical tasks. They may be building up their forces along the No-Man’s-Land border for an assault on a Town, and the following day that assault will commence. Or, they might be a raiding party that is out burning farms and killing the local population. They might be abducting people to turn into their own kind, or building a foothold in Citadel lands. There are nearly endless agendas, and they keep working toward these goals unless they are stopped, or they are successful and then move onto their next goal. Time moves on.
;)
Then there are your adventures… your story. Within this changing world your character has their own unique story; no other player’s is exactly the same. The route to your destiny is NOT preordained, nor linear. You do not follow the same path and quests as every other player. You decide what adventures to attempt, what mysteries to solve, what castles to assault, what people to rescue, what fortresses to infiltrate, what revenge to take, what cults to destroy, what mark you will make on this world. You accomplish these adventures through action, not reading. We keep the reading to an absolute minimum, and the action to a maximum.
Quests are built using a powerful quest generator system that uses your past triumphs and defeats, your past enemies and friends, your past decisions and travels to create ongoing adventures for your character based on all you have done. It presents you with logical story progression… but you decide if you want to go down that path, or another. Your path is your own as the decisions you make shape your individual story. There is a vast amount of unique content since we use a generator to create variations and customizations on the fly, so to speak.
Our goal is to make it so that you will never know what is coming next. You may be standing on a street of the massive Citadel of Sorcery when a town crier runs past telling of an advance of Morphael’s army out in the Reflected Worlds. You could go to the Reflected World right then and take part in that battle, or not. It is always up to you.
Or… you could receive an invitation to a party by a mysterious stranger. However, that ‘stranger’ is a man who you thwarted in a past adventure, and now he is setting a trap that will send you on an adventure of unknown proportions.
Or… you could wander into a town about to be taken by bandits… and take over leadership of the town. You would control all the troop dispositions, and it will be your strategy that could save the town, however; if you fail there is no going back and trying again, if you fail the town will fall. In Citadel of Sorcery, time moves on and your success or failures shape the world. You can even pick your goal. You could research a forgotten and powerful magic weapon and then go on a quest to gain that very item. You can pick the goal; the quest is then generated to fit into your story.
How is this all possible? Well, Citadel of Sorcery has been in design for three years, and the game engine, technology and tools to build it for five. This means the game is far along in those areas, yet just beginning in art. The game art is in very early stages, but we’re expanding the art team at this time. The game test world server has been running for two years non-stop as we develop and test portions of this new MMO experience.
We are a small developer, though growing, and we have a lot invested in the game already. We’re committed, so to speak, so I can tell you that this game is coming. We’re taking a big risk in making a new type of game, and we hope that Citadel of Sorcery will truly be something different that you will enjoy.
