Basic game info
“Life is feudal” is an upcoming indie project of the sandbox MMORPG genre, set in a realistic medieval fictional world. Let me explain every word in the previous sentence.
Sandbox
Sandbox means that our goal is to design virtual world with its own set of mechanisms and rules that will let players to do anything within our world that their imagination desires. Like a real sandbox, with some sand, some tools and your hands you can do, whatever you want – dig a tunnels, shovel moats, build castles and raise hills.
These are the exact same things you will be able to do in our game: you can shape terrain in any way you like, such as raise ground, lower ground, flatten it for futher building placements, dig tunnels, even find ore veins and mine them. You can build whole underground cities, as you are not limited with width or height of your tunnels. You can make a huge pyramid with your friends and dig a maze inside of it just for fun. Only limitation is your imagination! Please watch our pre-alpha videos to get a look at these aspects of the game in more detail.
If you don’t want to dwell underground you can make a home for yourself, a whole village, town or even a castle. You can also make it sandbox-style. We will let you build whole castle walls with sections, allowing you to build it however you like. Who knows, maybe you will be the first one to build the Great Wall in our world. Same goes for buildings – you can either choose to use preset buildings (such as windmills, warehouses, keeps etc.) or design your own multistory building square by square and build them however you like.
MMORPG
MMORPG stands for massively multi-player online role-playing game. This means, that you won’t be alone in your sandbox, there will be many more other players that will be aiding you further your own goals, or working against you to further their own, all the time shaping our virtual world. It also means that there will be an RPG system, based on: statcap and skillcap concepts (UO style), alignment and a rich crafting system spiced with an innovative flash minigames concept.
Realistic-fictional world
This means that we are inspired by the medieval ages (since fall of Rome till gunpowder in Europe) and will be representing this time period with as much realism as possible, this will be our focus as we approach every aspect of our game building process. However on the other hand, story, race archetypes, some equipment and items are fictional. Religion is more powerful in our world, allowing some localized wonders to appear or giving powers to players to recall back home or protect their divine private property from vandals. So it’s neither a historical simulation game with 100% authenticity, nor we will have elves or orcs in game. It is a hybrid of the two, leaning more towards realism.
Realism also affects to the game balance. Middle ages were ages of strength, courage, steel and blood. Our melee combat system will not be limited by RPG stat counting, such as: strength + skill level + weapon damage – armor = damage received. We will also count physical aspects – type of damage (slashing, piercing, blunt), speed of weapon prior player hit and the body part hit. Players will receive wounds of several severity, even bone fractures, which will affect their performance in battle. Ranged combat is also going to be presented by bows, crossbows, throwing weaponry, and even alchemists grenades.
Only part of that sentence left unexplained is “upcoming indie project”. Currently we’re in alpha stage (closed alpha tests are going to start in December 2012). This means that we have a lot of different functionality done, but still we have a lot of work to do. We have grown from enthusiasts to indie state by managing to achieve few investments from non gamedeveloping/publishing entities, which allows us to work fulltime and with full force on our project, but withou influence on game desing and development processes from outside. And that's cool! Trust me ;)
