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Let's look into a reboot!
Hello and welcome to the interest check and feedback round for a reboot of "Save the Earth", tentatively named "Save our Earth".
What is this?
Save the Earth was a plot-driven DWRP game with elements of (reverse) memloss and AU. In a world that seemed to be just like ours, everyday people developed the ability to access a network connecting them with others who started going through the same experience at the same time: They started regaining memories, abilities, physical and mental traits, and even items from earlier lives that they lived in other worlds than their own. And soon they were pulled into trouble in the city, the country, and finally the world that turned out to be less and less mundane the further the game progressed.
Save our Earth would be a classical reboot: The metaplot and background meta would be revised, all characters would start fresh and the game would tell a different story with some of the same elements (partly because the development of the plot would, again, be reliant on player actions). There would also be a number of changes to the rules.
What would stay the same would be the underlying game mechanics (characters would start out as distinct from their preincarnations and slowly regain and more and more of their preincarnations' lives through so-called "echoes") and the base setting (Earth starts out as the very Earth that we know in the very year the game starts, with roughly the same developments continuing on in the background; only the addition of the city in which the game is centred and some supernatural events would set it apart) as well as the essence of game-play (for example that characters would be embedded in their social contexts and NPC their non-numbered social contacts).
Who are you?
Kira-mod, one of the people in the last and final batch of mods of StE.
When would this happen?
The current tentative launch date is mid-June 2018.
Okay, what do you need feedback on?
Please comment to this post (I'd say or on plurk, but I fear I'll lose your feedback there), answering the following questions (a hand-dandy textbox is provided below).
- Interest! Would you be interested in playing in an all new, rebooted StE? If yes or maybe, why? (I'd love to know what interests people about the game/premise!)
- LOCATION. How important would it be for you that the city that serves as the central location of the game would be situated in America? (The alternative location that I'm considering the most strongly right now would be a fictional city on the southeastern coast of England, somewhere between Brighton and Dover.)
- I'd like to hear any input towards things that you would love to see again from StE's original run, things that you would love to not see again, things that you think might be a cool addition...
Would you need help?
Yes! I'm not totally alone here, but the game would need:
- app mods! Task: Judging and processing apps.
- echo mods! Task: Processing echoes (there will be some minor modifications, but the basic process will remain the same).
What is this?
Save the Earth was a plot-driven DWRP game with elements of (reverse) memloss and AU. In a world that seemed to be just like ours, everyday people developed the ability to access a network connecting them with others who started going through the same experience at the same time: They started regaining memories, abilities, physical and mental traits, and even items from earlier lives that they lived in other worlds than their own. And soon they were pulled into trouble in the city, the country, and finally the world that turned out to be less and less mundane the further the game progressed.
Save our Earth would be a classical reboot: The metaplot and background meta would be revised, all characters would start fresh and the game would tell a different story with some of the same elements (partly because the development of the plot would, again, be reliant on player actions). There would also be a number of changes to the rules.
What would stay the same would be the underlying game mechanics (characters would start out as distinct from their preincarnations and slowly regain and more and more of their preincarnations' lives through so-called "echoes") and the base setting (Earth starts out as the very Earth that we know in the very year the game starts, with roughly the same developments continuing on in the background; only the addition of the city in which the game is centred and some supernatural events would set it apart) as well as the essence of game-play (for example that characters would be embedded in their social contexts and NPC their non-numbered social contacts).
Who are you?
Kira-mod, one of the people in the last and final batch of mods of StE.
When would this happen?
The current tentative launch date is mid-June 2018.
Okay, what do you need feedback on?
Please comment to this post (I'd say or on plurk, but I fear I'll lose your feedback there), answering the following questions (a hand-dandy textbox is provided below).
- Interest! Would you be interested in playing in an all new, rebooted StE? If yes or maybe, why? (I'd love to know what interests people about the game/premise!)
- LOCATION. How important would it be for you that the city that serves as the central location of the game would be situated in America? (The alternative location that I'm considering the most strongly right now would be a fictional city on the southeastern coast of England, somewhere between Brighton and Dover.)
- I'd like to hear any input towards things that you would love to see again from StE's original run, things that you would love to not see again, things that you think might be a cool addition...
Would you need help?
Yes! I'm not totally alone here, but the game would need:
- app mods! Task: Judging and processing apps.
- echo mods! Task: Processing echoes (there will be some minor modifications, but the basic process will remain the same).
no subject
Location: ....eh. On the one hand, not being in America would be very cool and different. On the other, I worry there'd be a lot of questions to be answered or other mod-intensive work as (and this may just be my circle of RPers, I will admit) I think DWRP is still very heavily American. I know the one time I tried to look up British schooling for a character I was completely baffled by how that worked, not to mention things like pop culture, snacks, politics, etc. I completely understand the desire to set it somewhere where the mods have home field advantage and it would be super cool to not have it be American, I'm just a bit worried there's going to be so much information and research to wade through for any semblance of accuracy when playing someone who possibly has lived in this city/country/region for 13+ years that it'll turn a lot of players off. (And like, obviously this hasn't stopped people from playing in AUish games set in other countries before but A, in my experience most of those games were like X-Men or otherwise Obviously Fantasy From the Start so who cared; and B, this is all just my first reaction to "we're looking at the game being set in Actual Real Life England, a country you don't know much about and the media you consume has not prepared you for at all whatsoever" and it is entirely possible that when there's information up about the setting none of this will be relevant.)
Unrelated to the location of the city, I'm also a little I guess baffled on one thing because while the one-city-for-shenanigans idea makes sense and when StE opened up other cities the game got messy fast, I don't like the idea of being trapped in the city if you want to retain your memories. Sure, it made for convenient hiatus excuses but it was also extremely limiting. Having one city be the epicenter/where the first and majority of echoes have to be gotten and Shenanigan Magnet like New York City or Tokyo makes total sense, but it would be nice for characters to be able to safely go to the next town over without dealing with psychic whiplash.
Anything else: StE's plot got convoluted and frankly absurd towards the end of my time there. It was just nonsensical to the point of being unfun. I'm not sure what prompted that, but at some point I just checked out of what was going on because it was just too much and made no sense. If this reboot happens, I really hope you guys take this into consideration.
Also echoes allowing people to regain buildings and places like them were just too much. Cool! But just impractical.
no subject
As you pointed out, experiences with DWRP demographics rely heavily on a person's circle of friends and acquaintances. In my experience, the DWRP community these days is roughly evenly split between North Americans and those who are not North American and/or do not live in North America.
Knowing from personal experience how foreign countries can blindside a player or mod with unexpected differences in culture or other elements of daily life is something we are intimately familiar with. It is one of the main reasons why we posed the question in the first place, as we felt it unwise to set the game in a country the mods aren't intimately familiar with but wanted to get the input of prospective players on the topic first. It seemed important to us that the mods have a good grasp on their setting; someone always has to do research because we are an international community, and from experience with modding StE (neither Kira nor Louise were American), we felt like it would be potentially troublesome if it were the people who provide the background setting.
Due to our personal experience with foreign settings and due to the feedback that we were given on the subject, we have included a page of resources about "British stuff" into our info pages that talks about a few things that we feel are important to get a feeling for the setting and then offers some onwards links. (Essentially, we used our own experience and tried to talk about the things that we wished someone had put together for us about America.)
There will also be more information about the localities than there was for StE. Feedback was pretty clear on the very vague nature of Locke having been an issue.
All in all it seems to us that prospective players would generally be happy with a British setting for a variety of reasons, and thus we will go ahead with that. But we will try to make it as easy as possible for international players to work with the setting; on top of the above, there will also be multiple opportunities to fit immigrants into the setting (among other things the town in question will include multiple international companies and an RAF station that is also used by foreign military).
Regarding the loss of echoes - as with the original StE, the first season will see characters confined to the Echo Boundary (that, in this case, will not be equivalent to a single city but a radius of six miles with a town at its centre). Later seasons will however change this in a way that is very different from how StE did it and, we hope, should address your concern quite well.
The reason for the StE plot happening the way it did was the metaplot that was inherited with the game from the original mod. The metaplot and background meta of the game will see a significant rewrite for SoE.