A Virtual Reality MMO Brought to You By Bethesda

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A Virtual Reality MMO Brought to You By Bethesda written Jun 10, 2019 17:30:23 GMT
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So, since this got some interest in the Quick Interest Check, figured a full Interest Check would be worthwhile.
A few years back I was looking for a VR-MMORPG site to play on but I didn’t quite like most of the ones around. There was still the tinge of SAO, so there was a tendency towards death games and player characters being purely human (or, like, maybe elves). Felt a little stale, was all.

At the same time, there was a meme going around for Skyrim and Fallout about “Is this a bug or feature?” and Bethesda responding “Yes”. So, it hit me: what if Bethesda made a VR-MMORPG (related, I feel vindicated by this idea due to Fallout 76)?

The central concept of the idea was that the stakes of a death game were replaced by some system of having threads and story lines glitched out. Who needs death when loading the game (starting the thread) risks everything from your character model failing to load, leaving you nothing by a floating set of armor and eyeballs? Broken quest lines, exploits, glitches, all sorts of fun things could be used to basically create a bit of a dark humor parody of the “trapped in a video game” setting, minus the actually being trapped. Heck, allowing for maybe some real life RPing as well offers new opportunities, like characters who play animal folks waking up to the real world and realizing their brain still thinks they’re supposed to have a tail and just freaking out about it not actually being there!

Sadly, other than getting a name, a Jcink forum, and some site design started, I didn’t actually get the site up and running (real life grad school stuff). But, I’m at a point where I can afford to get things going even if maybe not an admin in the long run (again, PhD student, job market and teaching and research is…yeah).

Here were some broad ideas on how the concept of “game still in development” allows for some interesting RPing potential:

1) Glitching: Players can agree to either build glitches into their thread or maybe allow for a randomization system of some sort (have a table of various glitches, people roll to see what one they get for that thread). Have to figure out how to balance between glitches being interesting and just screwing over players, though (oh the standard GM dilemma).

2) Site events and updates can be dealt with IC as feedback and the company tries to figure out the best way to market and “fix” this game, allowing for things to be rather weird compared to the standard stuff. Can call site updates "Patch Notes", which is cute.

3) Not having the “Trapped in a game” aspect allows for some out of game interactions, and I already offered an example of how things transfer over from game to real life, but this is something to work on more.

So, this is just to get things started up and looking for feedback/interest/etc.
last edit on Jun 10, 2019 17:30:44 GMT by Whammychu
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A Virtual Reality MMO Brought to You By Bethesda written Jun 10, 2019 18:16:18 GMT via mobile
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Billz billz billz
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got my money on my mind and my mind on my money
I’d be so down for this since I’m one to always look for glitches for shits and giggles. Also can there be like hella mutated characters if the setting is like fallout? And second to that, can there be hella glitched characters too? I’m like vibing one of my skyrim characters that had his whole file glitched in the most horribly awesome way possible. Like it broke him so bad that the only way I could fight was screaming all the damn time.
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A Virtual Reality MMO Brought to You By Bethesda written Jun 10, 2019 22:01:29 GMT
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So, just for reference, the "Presented by Bethesda" thing is mostly a catchy sales pitch: my plan was original setting so there's freedom to do things. Still want to do fantasy, though: magic systems offer so many fun ways to mess up. Plus, I already had character art for an OC at the time I first tried this idea. I've used it for some other places too (using the character in a Dungeon World RP), but it'd also be good to bring her back to her roots XD.

As for glitched characters, I think that would be one way to do it as well. I mean, corrupted files and broken characters are part of the charm as well (though not corrupted to the point of being unplayable, of course). Key thing here is figuring out how to organize the mechanic. Again, people could choose to incorporate a glitch from the get-go, or maybe have a roll table that has a low probability of maybe a positive "glitch" of some sort but a lot of bad ones.
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A Virtual Reality MMO Brought to You By Bethesda written Jun 30, 2019 10:01:03 GMT
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