Topia Online -> Inspired by Haven & Hearth

[btaylor]

I've posted my results on the Topia forum.

[Oddity]

Honestly Josh? Your best bet is to just let those of us interested into Alpha as it will save a lot of speculation and get you some down and dirty testers who have been there/done that. otherwise we'll ruin the entire experience for ourselves just through speculation and pessimism.

Yes, let me in plz

[sabinati]

I've updated the sandbox, can you try it now and let me know the performance?

i get about 15 fps with 500

[Frycu]

Well, I'm not sure what you guys are doing but when I tried it:
-500 people I got-45 FPS
-1000 people I got-15 FPS
It's Decent, I tried it on Chrome with the latest updates btw, plus I'm on my laptop.

[painhertz]

I am a Firefox man 4 lyfe. Fuck a Chrome.

[joshrmt]

Okay, I just deployed another update. I'm getting 40 FPS with 1000 humans in Chrome now. Satisfied tempwad?
I'm going to go work on the other sandboxes now so that you guys have some stuff to play with.

[painhertz]

I look forward to seeing how you guy's Kickstarter does. Kickstarter has funded some truly awesome games so far and I think will possibly lead to a huge upswing in PC games in the future. (Which makes me happy because I think console games are for children and...morons.)

[Amanda44]

Okay, I just deployed another update. I'm getting 40 FPS with 1000 humans in Chrome now. Satisfied tempwad?
I'm going to go work on the other sandboxes now so that you guys have some stuff to play with.

Better results for me too - posted on forum - good job.

I am a Firefox man 4 lyfe. Fuck a Chrome.

Ditto.

[ALWAYS]

This is looking very interesting, and I'm glad there's people like btaylor, and Jackard to ask the hard hitting questions. I'm only concerned about the implications of having players able to be "vampires", "werewolves", "dragons", or whatever other fantasy creatures you described. If there isn't something to force alignment of "evil", or a high reward for being aggressive towards other factions this could devolve into a silly game where people take creatures for X advantages and disregard how the game was meant to be played.

But in general there isn't a whole lot of criteria that I'm concerned about that this game has to be meet for it to be interesting to me, so here's a short list:

- In-depth crafting system; Haven & Hearth has (that I've seen) one of the best crafting systems. It is easy enough to pick up, and understand, but synergizes itself well with everything in the environment, and how the game functions

- RPG "levelling" elements. I want to feel as though I'm accomplishing something when I perform repetitive tasks, and the "quality" factor really did this for me. I found this game to also be 20x more rewarding with instant gratification of gaining immediate "experience" everything I did, which could then be turned in to experience into things that I really enjoyed doing.

EDIT: Here's a great example of how this applies: Minecraft. Minecraft has no quality, and limited levelling features. Though the emphasis is on free-building and massive-scale interaction with the environment (unlimited world, etc.), once you've got diamond, and you've made your base.. what is there to do anymore? The survival mode just falls totally flat here for me, you might as well just play on a creative server with friends, or a community you like, because while there is a good 30-50 hours of playtime in survival mode once you get to that top tier- that's it. This seems to be the defining factor that gives H&H 500-1000+ hours of gameplay time in a survival-based sandbox game (and Minecraft does have equally severe death penalties, if you haven't noticed), and Minecraft's survival mode 50+ hours. And this comes from someone who has still dumped roughly a year into survival mode, despite how totally repetitive it was. The only real joy was starting a new world, and seeing how quickly I could get built up again.

- Value in effort; When you do something, it should have value, and it seems like everything you do in Haven & Hearth can have a strong positive impact on everyone you're playing with. Even the simplest things like foraging, and gathering lumber has a high value, and takes effort. This is something a lot of games seems to disregard, and they want to cut this out, and make it so that early game efforts are only applicable in the early game.

And I also got 15 FPS rendering 500 "simulated humans"; 200 or less barely dropped me down from 60 FPS and I'm using Firefox, with a single-core Pentium garbageprocessor XXIV that I can't remember. It's like 2.2GHz and sucks balls.

[joshrmt]

1. The monster races are there to provide alternative playing styles and encourage more complex conflicts. You cannot just pick any creature you want to play, you have to unlock them and spend points on them. The only way to acquire monsters points is to successfully play monsters within the 'spirit' of the game. That is, complete achievements based on the creature. I will say, however, that there is no specific way that the game is 'meant to be played'. It's up to the community to decide how the game will be played. Thus the nature of a sandbox.

2. We will have a simple crafting system, but it's advancement is very, very unique. Rather than being rewarded based on what you craft, you are rewarded based on how often your crafts are used by others. Whether it's a chair or a sword.

3. We will not have many standard RPG 'leveling' elements. There will be an expansive achievement grid that provides constant rewards for completing objectives though.

4. As a 'game', Topia Online is about seeing how many things you can accomplish before you die. At the end of each life, you may receive account rewards and will be ranked amongst all of the other players.

5. We are working hard to ensure that the game is interesting from the first hours of play all the way to the 'end game' for veteran players that have played for many years. All activities will have value during this span, especially since permadeath causes a constant churn of 'new characters'.