I haven’t come up with the punchline to this joke yet. There is usually enough time between an idea and its implementation to gather your thoughts and talk about everything. Sometimes the implementation drags on or fails altogether, leaving behind only a naive description. That’s no reason to stop dreaming, but it is a solid reason not to rush public announcements. With Eventide, everything is moving so fast that I’m writing this introductory devblog much later than I should have, with the mechanics already up and running. But that makes it all the more pleasant to talk about something that isn’t just being planned but actually works. Soon you’ll be able to see it for yourself.
For several years now, in discussions with fellow enthusiasts, I’ve been pushing the idea of taking an existing game that is open to modding and using it to test the Breathing World concept in practice. After all, enthusiasm alone isn’t enough to build an entire world from scratch. Today large language models are trying to argue with the little guy’s reasoning, and things really are changing fast, but I still believe there are plenty of interesting worlds around us that the Breathing World game model could transform.
So how did it all start for me? With a piece in which I invited readers to imagine how much New World would have changed if the Breathing World concept had been implemented there. And although today we’ve chosen Vintage Story for our experiments, which looks much closer to Minecraft, Eventide’s mechanics will definitely remind you of New World and Ashes of Creation.
More than Minecraft
I came across Vintage Story itself completely by chance this spring, even though the game has been available and in active development for ten years. At first I thought it was some strange gap in my gaming knowledge. Perhaps it has to do with graphics that look a lot like Minecraft. If you’re feeling the same way right now, don’t rush to judge. I’ve been where you are.
Then I made a few discoveries.
First: Vintage Story remains in the blind spot of most gaming media. That’s hardly surprising, since the same blind spot holds, for example, Eco, with the most advanced and deepest mechanics in the entire games industry. So if you think Eco is unfairly overlooked, perhaps you’ll take comfort in the fact that SLG’s project isn’t alone.
Second: Vintage Story’s crafting mechanics are developed to a level I haven’t seen in any other world I know, Eco included. And if Minecraft captivates kids with how incredibly easy it is to get into, Vintage Story is called “Minecraft for adults” for good reason.
Third: this world is built from the start around a struggle against the very grim Rust World and its spawn, which gives us the foundation we need for the concept of collectively conquering and holding territory within the Breathing World idea.
And yet, in Vintage Story you will see the outward look of Minecraft and its voxel nature, a whole world made of malleable blocks. Which is fair enough overall, whether you like it or not. That’s why, with all due respect to Vintage Story, it’s the Minecraft part I put in the title.
No less than Minecraft
Although I believe Minecraft’s undisputed leadership in reshaping the world is long behind it, and we now have examples of far more realistic-looking worlds with greater possibilities, no one has yet fully matched the complete freedom of its approach. Here you can change anything, anywhere, to almost any depth and height.
And if you compare what Minecraft offers with what players had in New World and Ashes of Creation, it’s easy to see really strict limits at the settlement level, right down to instanced personal housing. Clearly, both of those projects had other strengths. But who says the sacrifices in reshaping the world were truly necessary there, rather than dictated by the obvious limitations of the chosen game engines?
Who says settlements must be limited in size and architecture, with their territories and surroundings marked out on the map in advance? Who says a resident’s options must come down to choosing from rigid architectural templates? Every approach has its strengths and weaknesses. And if you’re not a fan of building, who says you can’t rent a unique building created by someone who loves architectural experiments? All of this is already in Eventide.
Finally, Minecraft has proven many times over that you can build any kind of project on top of it, with plenty of its own mechanics. Vintage Story grew out of Minecraft mods and turned into its own engine, made by people who started out with mods themselves. That’s why it’s open to any kind of modding, and the project’s internals are carefully documented for exactly that purpose.
Taking the essence of New World
As someone who considers New World the most interesting project of the past decade, destroyed by its own creators, I find it hard to confuse it with anything else. I understand how important its visual style was to New World. But if looks were all that drew me to it, I’d have found a replacement long ago.
What mattered most to me was the feeling of standing against darkness, against a curse, and the idea of growing and defending settlements. There were parallels with the never-realized concept of Salem, where knowledge and technology (light) stood against fear and superstition (darkness).
Out of the box, Vintage Story gives you the grim spawn of the Rust World, the rifts through which they break into our world, and global invasions in the form of the Temporal Storm. These aren’t yet the magnificent PvE sieges of New World, but they’re an excellent foundation for building them.
The only thing missing is people coming together around settlements and growing them. But Eventide already has that. Not as an idea, but as a working mechanic. And unlike New World, you can found your settlement anywhere you like in the land reclaimed from the Rust Fog and start growing it, moving up through the levels from Camp to Metropolis. Remind you of anything?
Adding Ashes of Creation
The Node concept in Ashes of Creation won me over immediately, and I’ve talked your ears off about it. It has “People as the main resource”, an answer to the question “Why do you need other players in an MMO?”, and a settlement progression system far more thought-out than New World’s. And of course, I was captivated by a very simple schematic video that visualizes the very idea of turning any action by an individual player into Node progress points.
Everything you see in the video above already works in Eventide: defeating monsters and any crafting activity inside a settlement or its surroundings earns experience points for its progress bar. How far a settlement can grow, up to one of six levels, depends on its residents’ activity. And even after reaching the maximum level, progress can continue. It all comes down to fundamental differences from the Ashes of Creation model, for all their basic similarity.
I had, and still have, plenty of questions about the Ashes of Creation concept. Above all, I think it strongly encourages an initial land rush. Imagine: in front of you is an entire world already carved up into Nodes. All you need to do is pick the one with the best potential and develop it faster than the others to bring your neighbors under your control. Then, for anything to change, the strongest Nodes have to hit some kind of crisis and start to decline. In theory, only that scenario gives a chance to those who lost the initial race. And there are always far more losers in that race than winners.
Beyond that, I never fully understood how territory develops at the level of each individual Node. I saw what the settlement’s own growth looks like, but I never saw how monster levels change or how other transformations happen. Overall, I think the character level system, which progressed separately from the Node level, got badly in the way of the whole concept.
No, Eventide is not a salad of borrowed mechanics
Although I have nothing against borrowing successful mechanics, I don’t want this to look like a mix of different ideas tossed together in a new world. Many of you have known me for a long time, and there’s no need to explain that New World and Ashes of Creation resonated with my long-held ideas about where multiplayer worlds should be heading. And although these projects didn’t fully live up to my ideas, I had immense respect for their creators for moving from ideas to implementation. Because I personally had nothing but ideas. Until now, as they say.
None of what I’m going to describe next would have happened without the first attempt, which arikuza initiated two years ago. Back then we decided to try adapting the Breathing World concept to the world of Atlas. Xornet, Rigeborod and Ingodwetrust joined that initiative.
The great thing about any practical experiment is that, unlike abstract ideas, it forces you to work out concrete solutions, and that’s exactly what the five of us did. And although our initiative in Atlas fell apart, we came to the second attempt far better prepared. It was initiated by DdeMorf, who invited anyone interested to join. In the end, the same team came together again.
Our roles and level of involvement change over time and may well change again more than once, but I know for sure that without the actions of each of these people there would be no end result. Eventide is focused on much the same thing.
So, although I plan to describe our approaches in detail in separate devblogs, right now I want to clarify the basic model while the comparison with Ashes of Creation and New World is still fresh. The world of Eventide is not carved up into predefined areas whose ownership becomes a race, with everyone elbowing each other out of the way.
The whole model is built on the principle of a non-zero-sum game: one settlement’s achievements expand the options and opportunities for others. You can’t be too late, and you can’t lose a race. And although there is competition, of course, it’s a positive competition for residents and their activity on your territory specifically, which in no way changes the total amount of land reclaimed from the Rust World.
- The world is covered by the Rust Fog, which prevents interaction with resources or any other objects. Visibility in it is also extremely limited.
- The world’s starting state is a single initial settlement, with its surroundings under a protective dome, in the middle of a world shrouded in Rust Fog.
- Every settlement has its own territory protected by a claim, plus surroundings freed from the Rust Fog under a dome within a certain radius of the settlement’s center.
- The territory under the dome gives access to resources and allows any changes on plots not protected by a private claim.
- Any player can settle either within the settlement itself or in the surroundings under its dome, on their own private claim.
- Any crafting or PvE activity counts toward the settlement’s progress and helps the dome resist the pressure of the fog.
- Each settlement level increases both the settlement’s claimed territory and the radius of its dome, freeing up new land. If activity falls short, the level can drop.
- Any translocator found and repaired under a dome opens a path to a separate area of fog-covered territory, activating a dome over a small patch called an “enclave.”
- Any player can found their own settlement either under another settlement’s dome (under certain conditions) or on the territory of an enclave.
I realize that a quick overview like this raises more questions. But I hope it answers the main ones about the principles. We’ll talk about the rest later.
Still, Eventide is a world built on Vintage Story
Even though we’re trying to add a fundamentally new layer of interaction to Vintage Story and thereby change its short-term “survival” nature, we rely on the foundation of its mechanics. Sometimes those mechanics fit our goals nicely, and sometimes they can get in the way.
Later I’ll look in more detail at our goals in the context of Vintage Story’s possibilities and limitations, and at our ability to overcome those limitations. For now it’s enough to note that a project like this will inevitably have its limit, and going beyond it will take far more effort than what it takes now to bring the Breathing World into it.
For example, Vintage Story is clearly built around the classic model of crafting self-sufficiency, which makes many principles of broad MMO interaction hard to implement. We have no plans yet to break what works, but we do have ideas for introducing further crafting tiers built on new principles. All of this will only make sense, though, if our project catches your attention in the first place and gives you powerful new experiences.
Will it work? No one can know for sure. What will happen to us in a day, a month or a year in these troubled times, no one knows either. But I think it’s always worth trying. You’ve probably noticed that everyone who has joined the project is a longtime member of MMOzgoved. We all ended up here because someone took a risk, someone gave direct support, and someone answered the call. After that came a huge web of impulses and responses that is hard to trace by now. But one thing is clear: each time, someone decided to give it a try. After all, the whole of MMOzgoved is a non-zero-sum game too.