VuHao Island is isolated in the ocean that separate the Empire of Filistegna and the Korghor Confederation had make it a common stop for merchant ship of both kingdoms. VuHao harbor developped thourgh this commercial activity, place of cultural exchange between two civilisations in the middle of the big blue sea. Most natives found a place into this caravanserai but some took refuge in the unhospitable mountains in order to keep their traditions.
66 years ago, a fisherman saw a monster from the coast, constricting a boat until it explode in wooden shards. Since any ship sailing near to VuHao since this day has been detroyed.
The Natives say that he is here to punish the corruption of the real traditions, that the true heir of VuHao, with the hearth as hot as the Sun that created the island and as soft as the sea that gave it life, will the only one that will be capable to end the killings. Other are more practical but are affraid of risking all they in a fight they don't think able to win.
Last night, someone was fish out. He is alive, first in 66 years. Is he the Heir ?
DestinedToDie wrote:
Your captain bought a treasure map from a suspicious looking fellow. Didn´t expect it to even lead to an actual island, but there it was, in the horizon. Suddenly a storm came out of nowhere and tore the ship in two separating you from the map. You wake up on the shore with no memory. But fortunately you find a journal nearby, which explains all this.
You discover a village. The locals aren´t hostile, but they aren´t friendly or talkative either. It´s like they´re hiding something. Strange creatures lurk the ruins in the forest, and something keeps stalking you. In the ruins you meet adventurers stuck on the island just like you. Randevu with a survivor of your shipwreck (he has the map) and find the treasure.
Turns out there was no treasure and it was a lure to feed adventurers to Cthulhu fishmen sleeping in the depths of ancient underground ruins.
Okay, so I went with Cthulhu in the end. But we could easily switch out the last sentence with the inhabitants of the island luring adventurers there to make some kind of a ritualistic sacrifice for their God. Whatever works with the assets that we can obtain.
psi29a wrote:"
Putting your pounding head between your hands, you try to make sense of your current situation. You look around and take it all in; shoreline as far as the eye can see and wreckage strewn across the beach. A book catches your eye, half buried, you pick it up and brush away the sand. Thumbing through what looks to be a waterlogged journal, you find it remarkable that it is still legible though missing many of its pages.
It suddenly occurs to you while reading through what look to be log entries, that you don't know who wrote them let alone who you are and how you got to this island. There seems to be some sort of table that maps to several entries that strike your curiosity: Dreams, Research, Contact, Location, Plans and Embarkation... going all the way to the back to Embarkation, seemingly the last entries detail chartering a ship to take you to an Island. The last entry details how worse the storm has gotten and that they should probably go topside to lend a hand.
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At this point... you as the player character are then tasked (quest) to look through the rest of the journal entries and to hunt down the rest of the entries to complete the story.
You don't know if the person in the journal is you or someone else. However as you begin to unravel the story, whatever that person was doing, it wasn't good.
I want the story to eventually let the player to make a choice, to follow through what was 'planned' in the journal or make up their own mind as to what to do.
The Island include forests, jungles, ruins, water falls, caves and at least three inhabited areas, two small villages and one large town/port. This needn't be implemented all at once, but one step at a time that can be built on as we gain more features in the OpenMW-CS. Each new page found gives more information and "quests".
DestinedToDie wrote:
Okay, so there are currently 2 ideas floating around on how to go about this. The number 1 option is to make a story draft and adapt features we want to show off around it. Option number 2 is get a list of features we want to show and adapt a story around that. Let me phrase this as a draft submission, as it will be included in the vote.
If we go with option number 2, all we need to do is open up the Roadmap https://bugs.openmw.org/projects/openmw/roadmap and start with the earliest version of OpenMW available. There we see:
Version: openmw-0.11
Feature #10: Journal
Feature #79: MessageBox
So our first release ought to display these features in use. We can thus make the story up 1 step at a time as we demo through features. A pretty neat idea would be that the Example Suite version numbering would match the OpenMW version features we are currently up to.
Last edited by DestinedToDie on 18 Feb 2016, 06:48, edited 4 times in total.
So this pops up on everyone's radar, the post above has been updated to include a poll. Please vote for the future of the "official" OpenMW game project!
It probably helps a lot that the person who wrote the current most popular was also the person who waited(/thought about it) the longest before posting.
I apologize for going through all that effort in the other thread and then not posting a story synopsis myself, but Psi' managed to get the basic feel of my idea any, just with far fewer weird details. In fact, my idea was basically composed of weird details and the hurdle I was procrastinating on was 'make it readable and short enough'. I will, however, write down one weird detail for protagonist's memory loss, just because I'm here right now;
You begin in a poorly lit cave littered with tools, supplies, and some notes-- not that you'd care at first glance, as many of these things are inaccessible, because what look a lot like crystal formations are flickering and fading in and out of tangibility and visibility, and there are a lot of them. It's bad enough that you have to be careful where you maneuver, or you risk overlapping with one, which causes you to black out in a flash of the crystals' glowing color, and wake to find yourself right where you started.
Right in the middle of the highest concentration of crystal in the cave.
Right where all the crystals seem to spiral out from.
Right where a careful look, or more light, would reveal blood splatters, some of which fade and flicker as the crystals do.
Later, it turns out that pretty much anything that injures you badly enough fast enough causes that same flash, and that same return to the cave...although, the journal and your notes do not come with you, and it might be tricky getting them back.
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I wanted to have it set up so that the reason maybe-you-maybe-not-you came to the island was suspicions of immortality, and whelp, you got it, and good luck, 'cause you don't have much else anymore.
The idea of 'costs of immortality' could make a lot of the inevitable things the player should be able to do but can't more palatable, and generally make playing the example suite feel less like playing a test suite.
You could even include the idea that the reason there are progressively more things to do and places to go is that represents either your mind and sanity recovering or that your slowly drifting back through dimensions to the land you once knew.
Maybe have a creature or creatures the immortality whatever was tested on first, and it turns out the creatures don't seem to be able to perceive|interact-with things too far from where the I.W. was used on them.
Also, we can add some hints of betrayal; where maybe there really was a method of getting around the shortcomings of the I.W., but someone specifically sabotaged it...and left?
Edit: Oh right, and remember to make it so you can pass through the crystals freely once you've died enough times. Dodging them once or twice might be an ok challenge, dodging them every time just gets annoying. Also it's thematic and such. Also might be an ok barrier-key; have a few early but useful places blocked by crystal, thus helping the players who might be having way too much trouble with the death thing.
World´s End is good because it doesn´t go into detail and allows for modder creativity. I think modders are more likely to contribute if they get to do what they want to do, not what someone tells them to do, all the while still having a goal to accomplish.
That's a difficult decision. Storywise, I like the first one the most, the third idea wins in terms of modding flexibility. I don't like the fourth one though.
I finally voted for the first concept because I like the narrative possibilities it brings: Economic (and technological) development vs. tradition, different cultural influences, "civilised" religion vs. indigenous mythology. This way you could keep the player interested - and show off the features along the way, making the player's experience much more natural and satisfying. Moreover, the story offers enough options for a modder's individual thoughts and style.
Has anyone considered taking an abandoned mod and rebuilding it as the Open MW example suite? The Big City Mod was abandoned over a year ago and is a project that already had interest, and already had workers although not enough, but more importantly the mod is already in some parts complete, also the large city part would be a nice show of the performance difference between Open MW and the iteration of Gamebryo that Morrowind uses.
I'd be willing to replace assets from Morrowinds asset pool so I'm not just some ideas guy not willing to put in work.
We tried doing something like that with AoA, but it turns out to use too many Morrowind assets. Better to start from scratch, small and on our own terms and license.
Now if you can get the author's permission and have them relicense their work under the CC-BY license, then we can probably use it.