Beyond Alpha: Long Term Vision for Virtuverse — Part 2

Looking far off into the future, we wanted to cover more of our longer-term vision for what we’re building with Virtuverse.

A main focus of Virtuverse is allowing players to have deep customisation options and mechanics to allow them to find a niche for themselves within the universe without forcing anyone down a particular playstyle.

With player-to-player interactions being a core focus, we’ll be looking to build on and expand mechanics that let players find ways to turn their ideal playstyle into a profession that can benefit other players.

Evolving & Episodic Story:

• We aim to get to a point where we can release quarterly content updates that expand on the story, adding new quests and locations.
• With the addition of Community Goals, players will be able to help guide the direction the story takes.
• We want to move away from the development trope that any previous content release needs to be played through, any new players joining Virtuverse will be able to hop into the story and participate in the here and now.

Guilds and group play:

• We want to strike a balance between group and solo play. We acknowledge that many different types of players enjoy varying degrees of contact and interaction with others.
• A big challenge and aim for the team is to develop content that scales from one to many players, without penalizing either group for how they chose to play.

Buildings & land ownership:

Land ownership that matters and provides a specific function which synergises with its owner’s own gameplay choices:

• Mining quarries where players can influence what’s found within them (including mining-specific creatures).
• Crafting factories.
• Hunting reserves.
• Repairing Facilities.
• Player shops & markets.
• Guild buildings.

Professions as a service:

Baking specific player behaviours into the game as a service:

• You and a few friends like to run lower-level players through high-tier content for a price? List your service.
• A healer for hire — the system takes care of hiring and paying.
• Renting items? Again handled by the system.
• We want to streamline and support player-to-player services without devaluing the part that matters most (the communication and interaction).

For example, we don’t want to implement something like a Dungeon Finder as that implements convenience that detracts from actually interacting. And also mitigating requiring trust for interaction: i.e. no need to trade items to repair/modify, item loaning via a mechanic with recall.

Deeper Metagaming:

We don’t just want there to be one way to play the game or clear a dungeon efficiently. We want there to be tradeoffs between dual-wielding pistols and stacking attack speed, a crit-heavy ranged sniper build or even a patrol-skipping stealthy character. With having a range of different play styles we want the decisions, and discussions, on different ways to play to be a pivotal part of providing deep and engaging gameplay.

Softer professions & player content creation:

A huge challenge with any game is being able to produce content quickly enough as players are playing through it. We want to look into mechanisms for players to be able to author a form of content within Virtuverse.

There has been a number of times this has been done well in the past, examples such as the Foundry in Star Wars Online / Neverwinter.

There are, however, many ways we can implement this badly and want to take our time to design and consider the impact of player-made content within the game.

A few design points we’ll want to stress:

• Ensure that this content remains at the same quality bar we expect of our own content.
• Make sure the levels of effort are compensated fairly.
• Allow for safe interaction between the external economy and mechanics.

As the story of Virtuverse progresses, we’ll be announcing the main protagonists of the game. The story arc that comes from that will see players visiting several different, themed locations. From the expedition’s starting point on Temrance Island, players will be able to travel to atmospheric moons infested with strange monsters, visit other planets with existing sentient races, each with their own specific styles.

Wrapping Up

Thanks for sticking around! As always — we’re building Virtuverse for all our Colonists. Not just those who back us, or provide the most suggestions: we’re doing our best to consider everyone on our roadmap and long-term design decisions.

And definitely reach out to either Fin or Donathan in Discord! We’ll be aiming to do a round-table discussion over the Alpha-6 roadmap in the coming weeks.

— Fin & the Virtuverse Team.