Brain Dump: “Magic in Sci-fi”
Grid Online
Welcome to another Brain Dump. In this post I want to talk about magic in our sci-fi universe and a little bit about our mage-like profession. Magic, or other fireball casting characters play no part in our game and we believe that magic makes no sense in our sci-fi universe. Don’t get me wrong, I love fantasy games which magic or sci-fi where there is something like a different concept that allows for unnatural occurrences (The Force, for example) and there are many occasions where I play some form of magic wielding class. However, more often than not magic is misused to add features to a game without some scientific thought behind it. That isn’t to say we don’t like or don’t want to add some form of “mage”-like class to our game. In fact we do very much; just not in the classical sense. We want a professions that has the means to shoot, manipulate and cast abilities without the use of magic, Force or otherwise ungraspable concept. We are going for a certain level of (philosophical) realism and we try not to use concept that are simply impossible.
The Neuromancer
Enter the Neuromancer; a new type of profession that’s pretty unique to GO and doesn’t use weapons in the traditional sense. As I pointed in the Game Mechanics post I did a while ago, that each profession carries a weapon and the weapon contains ammunition. Players are free to fire their weapon at any time (no auto attack) and each shot uses up a bullet or some sort of energy ammunition. Ammunition can be improved through various abilities such as a charged shot by a soldier. Even though it’s a mage-like character we wanted to take this concept and also apply it to the Neuromancer. The Neuromancer carries a special type of pistol, but instead of bullet it’s fires special NeuroUplink(r) darts. These darts allows the Neuromancer to directly communicate with their targets neuro transmitters and implants. Using the NeuroUplink, Neuromancer have the ability to hack directly in to the various subsystems of their target Neurolink, delivery deadly shocks or hack optical implants, temporarily blinding them.
The darts fired by the Neuromancer’s pistol work like the opposite of the other professions. Instead of enhancing a shot and damaging your opponent, you fire a dart, which does no damage, and then use an ability which damages your target. The dart either lasts a few seconds or a few charges. We don’t know whether we go for timed or charges but the idea is that:
- Charges; the dart overloads after a few damaging abilities.
- Timed; defensive measures kick in on the opponent, disabling and rendering the dart useless.
Depending on which path we chose, there are some interesting perks/talents we could add to this. For example more charges per shot (reinforced darts) or an increases in time (counter measures). In any case it opens up for interesting game play, even though “real” magic isn’t present in our game we think that going about it in this way still gives you a way to be that squishy mage-type character but in a somewhat realistic way.
While I’ve only mentioned one possible profession that will use this system, it doesn’t mean that the Neuromancer is the only one. We are still very much scratching the surface of our profession system and we are hoping we’ll be able to bring you a full arsenal of interesting professions to choose from.
Stay tuned for more brain dumps!
