The 10th episode already of rambling on about the game. Well, this time it will be about battles. Not combat, we already did that, but battles, large scale events where two or more factions battle it out over an extended period of time. Let's dive in.
In traditional MMORPGs battles generally don't mean too much, because the opposing sides just keep respawning. A battlefield is often reduced to nothing more than a quest area. Kill 10 of those, kill 20 of those and the commander. And now the same is done by any other player who wants to because it all just respawns. Well, by now we know that in CoRE the world generally changes through campaigns, so it is only logical that a military oriented campaign would have one or more battles going on.
So what are battles in the game? From a high level point of view it is two or more factions battling it out until a victory condition is fulfilled for one of them. The simplest victory condition would be of course elimination of the other factions, after all, if one side isn't part of the battle anymore then the other has generally won. There can be other win conditions though, like holding out a certain time, capturing objectives or force victory in other ways. The important thing is, we have factions warring against each other.
So what is a faction in the game? Roughly formulated it is an alliance. For example the Citadel would be a faction, so would be the void, but there could easily be other factions introduced with their own agenda. Who knows what waits beyond the void veil, for all we could meet an orc tribe, political dissidents, green peace, you name it. The point is factions have their narrative agenda.
If we look past the narrative, factions consist of armies, which in turn consist of troops and fortifications and resulting from this have an overall strength. Armies are their own entity, they get damaged as they lose troops, they can reinforce or spend resources to build or repair things. For example an army on the defensive could use some wood to build barricades. An attacking army would have to destroy those fortifications to win a war. Attacks would damage it and the defender could spend resources for repairs. This is just an example to give you an idea what armies can be and do, generally lets think of factions as a narrative component and armies as the actual gameplay force.
The important thing is that armies are not just an infinite collection of troops, they can run out of troops, being beaten or forced to retreat in other ways than just being destroyed. They are able to reinforce, but this can be cut off. For example a void portal spitting out a couple creatures every day could be destroyed. There can be out of combat events weakening armies, like sabotage or natural hardship like extreme weather. Things like that.
So where do the players come in? Well, players can choose a faction to support. Of course not all factions actually allow that and in a conflict between Citadel and void there is not really a choice. Let's use an example which is completely random and not at all a spoiler for the Veilbreaker campaign starting probably next Monday.
Let's say the Citadel is attacking the void. In this case we are a bit cheating because I really don't want the Citadel to lose, so the void is simply just defending with its army of void creatures. It is now up to the players to harass and slowly whittle down this army, getting rewarded in the process. However, the void is not just waiting until its army is defeated and reinforces a fixed amount each day. We now created a battle where it needs enough player interaction to at least beat the army reinforcements each day and eventually break the defenders.
Yes, this is the simplest way a battle can be, but for a proof of concept it is enough. In the future the Citadel might have to field some regular humans and the void might retaliate trying to destroy a village, which may succeed if the players don't keep the defenses up which are worn down daily by void attacks. This is basically the way how the void can reclaim zones, destroying everything players may have built there and this is how the size of the game world will be regulated by player activity. If the void can't be beaten, no new zones are becoming available. If an attack can't be defended, a zone will be lost as a result.
So let's look a bit at the future, because a term that pops up regularly when people talk about future features are guilds and guild wars. A player guild is generally driven by a common goal and agenda, a group of players under whatever governing structure they chose, so the guild would be like a faction. A guild army could then be supported by the members, enlisting NPCs, constructing fortifications and generally building a power block. This army could join a war, providing its power to a faction, lets say, rush to the defense of a zone attacked by the void. It could also wage its own war against another guild in a fight over control of a valuable resource. And of course the players would participate in the battles the army is part of and try to tip the scales.
Now we could argue why players enlist NPCs and are not the body of the army themselves. Well, players are generally not always online and who wants to come back after going to sleep seeing that its time to claim another character because their army did poorly at night? Again this is future stuff and everything subject to change, but generally battles set a lot of the ground work for guild wars.
Either way, for guilds to make sense the game still has to grow its player base, so on that note, go play and recruit your friends, see you in Claimants of Reality Enclave.
BR,
thatclaimgamedev