Hello everyone. As part of our buildup towards launch, we would like to start sharing some of the major changes we have implemented in Act VI to the Requiem Project, take a little time to explain why we have done it, and shed some light on what we hope to accomplish with it. We will attempt to post these on a weekly basis through our lead-up to our launch date as to give everyone an idea as to what is new and what we are trying to accomplish come Act VI. As we go through each of our major revisions, additions and changes we have made to the project and shard to ensure their stability and polish for launch, we’ll be taking some time to journal our development on these systems and help explain what was going through our heads in making some of these new and exciting changes to the shard and project.
Without further ado, I present to you guys our first Fireside Chat: The new Faction System, Part One of Two!
As the lead developer of the Faction System, I have been inspired and influenced over my 20 something years of experience with UO by the ingenuity, creativity and effort guild and community leaders have put into this game. Having played numerous MMOs over the past two decades, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that the amalgamation of features UO has to offer, along with its aesthetic choices and game design, has attributed to a very free-form and sandbox-like environment that lends itself to supporting creativity in terms of content creation in-game. I think that many of you that still enjoy the UO client, the game perspective and general gameplay of this ancient toy can agree that UO is able to capture imaginations and elicit a connection to both one’s own character and the community at large far greater than some other, more modern MMOs can. What we have attempted to accomplish with the Faction System builds upon this general sentiment through supporting elements of gameplay that have often been relegated to guild rules and community procedures rather than features of the game. We seek to accomplish this by providing a suite of tools to our players that, with a little luck, lets them set up organizations, guilds, families, businesses and even armies.
The Requiem Faction system is a multi-faceted system that offers a wide variety of world-building and role-playing tools to groups of more than three player characters. The Faction System is a collection of right around eight or nine separate systems, each designed to either supplement an existing expected feature from normal UO shards or add in a new level of gameplay to help enhance our project and lore. The first element of the Faction System is something that is critically important to any role-player out there; customization and aesthetics!
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Some of the very first options players get when browsing the Faction Codex ([faction in game or double-clicking the Faction Sigil) are the abilities to expend Influence (a guild resource earned weekly and through the completion of quests) to customize the looks and hues of their organization proper. I’m sure many of us remember the days of paging a GM to add a custom-hued dye tub in their castle or guild-keep and guarding it with their lives.
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For Act VI, we understand how critically important it is for our players and their communities to truly customize their groups, down to the very last detail. Upon choosing your guild colors, members of your Faction will be able to dye their clothing items along with leather and metal armor pieces for a small fee of silver. Additionally, all of your Faction Conscripts (more on this later) will be created with the appropriate color hues.
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Your Faction Sigil is also an important piece of customization and serves as your Faction’s identifying image, and it is shown off in many things such as flags, claims, and more. While we cannot account for everyone’s, we’ve been able add over 500 of these sigils to our files in so that the odds of finding something that might express your Faction are pretty good!
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On the right hand of the page you can also see our Logs. We wanted to make sure our players had the ability to keep up-to-date on their organizations when they’re not able to be around in-game all the time, because if your anything like us here on staff, free time is definitely a luxury and something we don’t take for granted anymore. Just about everything important your Faction does on a weekly basis can be referenced so you can keep up to snuff on all the important stuff whenever you can sneak in game for a few hours of fun.
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Our next element of the Faction System is our Roster page. We designed this system with two ideas in mind; first, we wanted to make sure that all of the most basic elements of traditional UO guilds were available to Requiem players – this is a must when you’re trying to get the posse together and role-play a group on a mission. Our second goal with this system was to give our players the ability to go a step further and customize everything! As you can see on the left page, the Faction System has ten “ranks” to it that give various different privileges to members’ dependent on their standing in the Faction. As you will see shortly, we’ve a lot of crazy things for the Faction system, and sometimes you as a guild leader might not want everyone being able to, for example, declare war on the local Blacksmithing guild.
On the right page, you can check out the Active Roster of your Faction along with being able to edit individual members directly. One of the newer additions we’ve added to this page was setting Tithes or Pay Rates for members on an individual basis. This allows Faction leaders to collected tithes and taxes from their members on a weekly basis, or inversely pay them. We wanted to give our players the ability to use the Faction system however they wanted it, and through the use of these features, players could run a business or mercenary company and pay each member a wage on a weekly basis, all automatically. Another thing we snuck in here was the ability for Faction leaders to add custom titles to their members. If for some reason you want to distinguish a member specifically from another and the normal rank titles aren’t cutting it, you’ve got a way to do it.
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Speaking of, the other feature on this page allow you to also fully customize all of the rank titles of your Faction, as any proper self-respecting RPG player would no doubt demand.
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Our Econ Page is the next element of the Faction System, and one that starts to broach into the “optional features” section of the system. On the left page, we wanted to provide Faction members an overview of the “big picture” economic stuff as it related to how much money is coming in, and how much is going out, as set through tithes and wages on the Roster page. The next subsection we added are the Taxes and Income category. Here, we allow Faction members to now track a new feature we have added, vendor taxes. For Factions that elect to take over areas of the map and institute trade policies, all player vendors set up in these areas can have their transactions taxed by the governing Faction, of which is tracked and deposited directly into the Faction stores.
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We also added a Donate function in here that allows members to donate Silver directly to the faction in a way that is directly tracked and logged. Everyone in the faction will see what other players directly contribute to the group above their weekly taxes if this option is utilized.
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On the right side of the Econ page is the Faction Stores information, and this is where we begin to make the transition away from customization and emulation of normal guild features and into the new nitty gritty. Requiem is all about trying to survive in a circumstance that is overbearing, unfair, dangerous and resource scarce. In any good survival movie or game, the accumulation of resources is a key trope, and for Requiem, we wanted to give players the opportunity to explore this facet of RP and gameplay as well. Faction Stores represent units of commodities that your organization, business, group or guild can utilize to help further their own interests in the world of Requiem. Some of these commodities are tangible, such as food and wood, while others are intangible (knowledge, influence and favor). With the exception of Food, all of these resources are gathered through participation in the Faction System’s Quests element along with the Conquest element, and as we stated before, participation is optional. While we hope that everyone delves into these systems, we understand that not everyone wants to seek world domination or looks to amass supplies and power. This is all perfectly fine and is also why we’ve engineered the system to allow for groups to simply use the customization and member management functions without ever having to toy around with the economy portion of the system.
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Our next page here is another optional element of the Faction system, the Army portion of the Conquest system. If your Faction has the interest in hiring NPCs to assist you in your goals, the Army element is here to help you accomplish that. When designing this aspect of the system, we’ve kept in mind that sometimes the scope of our players’ storylines, events and ambitions are often times limited by the physical scope of what they can accomplish in-game. On OSI, I loved the RP aspect of hiring NPC guards and having them follow me around; in reality, unless you were carting around a dragon on your 7x noxmage tamer, you were ineffective. On some private shards, we’ve seen hirelings done well, and on others, not so much; often times its’ extremely hard to balance “pets” out, and even when you do manage to balance them, they can still be unfun or unfair to other players, especially in an RP environment.
What we’ve done with Requiem is an attempt to balance the use and nifty features of hirelings without making them overly powerful or unfun for other players. Our Army system is split up into six different “classes” of hirelings, each with their own role and function.
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Hiring conscripts is a simple method of simply clicking on the menu option and ensuring you’ve enough of the required resources in your Faction Stores. You also need to remember that each conscript has its’ own Upkeep cost, a fee of food and silver due each week, which can quickly add up. Once you commit to actually hiring a conscript, they’ll be outfitted and spawned and ready for work.
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You can see here that our poor archer unfortunately was forced to wear these atrocious colors I chose for this Test Faction. Sorry buddy.
Fear not, my poorly dressed friend, for your fashion salvation may be at hand post-launch. Our NPC conscripts are created in such a way that we can edit and customize every last little element of their gear and aesthetics for each player Faction out there, so with a little bit of effort, your Faction can sit down with their liaison GM and customize every last little element of your conscripts, down to the clothing choices and hues, if you don’t want them drawing from the default Faction hues.
So what can we actually do with these guys once we hire them? Good question. As I mentioned before, we’ve had a lot of brainstorming and debate on how “hireables” should work in Requiem. Many of us can point to example shards and projects where it was basically the “meta” to have ten hireables or tames follow you around 24/7, and anything less was simply being inefficient. Taming is huge on some shards, and here on Requiem, we’ve always committed to straying away from it in order to focus more on individual player characters rather than their dragons and wyrms. Thusly, we’ve worked to keep our core values intact here on Requiem, and have worked to make these conscripts usable in ways that are atypical to that of normal hirelings.
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First, conscripts are used a lot in the Conquest system. Our Conquest system is a big grand strategy game that we’ll talk about in part two of this chat, but for simplicity’s sake, your conscripts are used to capture and guard supply nodes around the world that directly funnel Faction resources into your Faction Stores on a daily basis.
If these nodes are empty, or in some cases, you make them empty by making all the guards and laborers there not alive, you can claim these places for your Faction, as seen here (again, yes, I know I have horrible hue taste):
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And once we’ve done this, we can now access the node’s overview menu:
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Hopefully this is all coming together now. As you can see here, your conscripts are very important to the Conquest system as they directly help your Faction passively earn resources that allow them to purchase more Conscripts, activate abilities and fulfill Quests. Hecking yea! Why did we do all of this? Well, for starters, UO RP lends itself to Game-of-Thrones style grand conquest and subterfuge, and what better way to drum up some conflict than committing raids upon supplies your enemies hold! But even more important is the idea that Requiem has traditionally been a shard in which its’ staff has worked to be reactive as possible to its’ playerbase and the choices they make. With the Conquest system and the existence of supply nodes, our staff is able to simulate just how successful our own NPC Factions are doing in-game, and furthermore can create plots and stories centered around the struggle over crucial resources within the First Province. Perhaps players will rally forth and consolidate their efforts to remove a Faction from the game-world solely by cutting off their supplies and hence, their ability to feed their own NPC guards. Perhaps player Factions will work together with these NPC Factions, trading supplies and ensuring other players do not disrupt the economy. However these cases may turn out, the implementation of this system allows both players and staff members to create more engaging, emergent and reactive content, all while playing a meta-layer strategy game.
Before we go further, it’s important to touch upon how these NPCs react to players, and what you as a player can expect from fighting one. There are two general states in which these conscripts can be considered to be in at one time; a passive state, and a controlled state. Conscripts are most often used in passive states here in Act VI. Passively, a Conscript NPC is as powerful as a pretty well-equipped player character. They can use bandages and equipment, will use special weapon moves and skill abilities if they’ve the skill to do so, and they’ll actively attempt to punish you for messing with them.
An NPC used in a controlled state, however, is a different beast entirely.
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Controlling an NPC essentially makes them into an RP prop compared to their passive state. After a lot of discussions and in conjunction with our community advisors, we’ve come to settle on the fact that we want to avoid seeing players run around with armies of NPCs wiping the map of spawns and other players. This sort of gameplay is simply not fun. Whenever you end up controlling a Conscript directly, their combat effectiveness is nerfed into the ground. This still allows you to have a few guards follow you around in RP, and perhaps might even keep you a little safe, but you won’t be steam-rolling a dungeon anytime soon.
With that said, the other use of Conscripts is in the Law and Order system. Conscripts can enforce laws within your Faction regions, of which is all a bunch of stuff we will cover in Part Two. For the purposes of this part, however, we can show you what you’re able to do with these conscripts when you’re not directly controlling them:
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The Behavior menu shown here lets you customize conscripts to your liking. You’re able to change their names, and even assign them some quips and lines to yell at people depending on what they’re assigned to do. Setting these NPCs up in such a way as this gives you the tools to set up some cool RP situations and events. These basic behavior options let’s Faction leaders and members play around with NPCs in such a way that other shards simply don’t offer, and we’re excited to see what everyone does with ‘em.
Summary, and WHY!?
We’ve gone through a lot of stuff here in Part One of our Fireside Chat / Dev Journal of the Faction System. Some of it has been stuff we have teased in our Discord channel over the past few months. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to throw up a screenshot and ask people to get excited about it, so touching upon the context behind all of this is important. As I tried to portray to begin with, UO is a really special medium when it comes to MMO gameplay and RP. It’s got just the right blend of features and limitations that make it a really great medium to RP within. Historically though, many of the default features of the client have not capitalized upon the sandbox nature that UO offers, especially when it comes to small group play. With our Faction system, we’ve attempted to take all of the cool features players expect from us and expand upon them, offering a super customizable “guild” experience. We’ve also wanted to take things a step further and create a medium in which we can provide our players new tools and features that help the facilitate their own stories and events, with minimal effort and time investment. We want our community to be able to use our tools to make anything their heart desires, from a baking company based out of the starting city, to an aspirant new religious order hell-bent on taking over the entire First Province. We furthermore want to support small-group play and community building to a whole new level.
Hopefully we’ve been able to shed some light into this aspect of the Faction System and explain what we’re doing and what we hope to accomplish with it. We’ll cover the second half of features next time. Until then!