#Tad williams otherland series how to#
"Players start in the Land of the Lost, a nightmare setting where the only thing he knows how to do is run. Senior Producer Kevin Bruckner described the game as he took us through a portion of it. A player avatar would jump on one and surf it like a fantastic roller-coaster ride. Then there are splines, which are lines connecting buildings or other worlds together. Another jump and we flew into a new building or a new world. From there, there were different choices and directions in which to go.
A base avatar - a humanoid devoid of features - jumped into a tube and "flew" through it to a node. These looked fantastic as we were taken on the walkthrough. Lambda Mall is the center of the neural networks, and it is from here that players will travel to other worlds by means of flight tubes and splines. Described as a theme park, a shopping mall and an entertainment complex, it is also a safe zone with no combat. Players must start somewhere, and, in Otherland, they start in Lambda Mall, a social gaming space and a game in itself. What manifests as chain mail and a huge sword may, if you learn to manipulate the code, manifest as spandex and a blaster in another world. Every world will have its own set of rules and what works in one world may not in another. There will be phases and world-changing events between phases, much like a new version of software.
"Special effects are pretty cheap for a writer," said Williams, "we just imagine them and write the words, but Otherland will be a zillion games rolled into one." Worlds will transform and change even as a character grows and changes. The gatekeepers of the worlds perhaps will remember the last time the player visited. Each player's character and presence in the worlds will have some persistence via the memories of certain NPCs that inhabit them. Diverse cultures and unique experiences will be found in each world, each created and run by a different entity or conglomeration, and it is up to the player to journey their own way through them. Like the book series, Otherland is made up of virtual worlds which will run the gamut of sci-fi, fantasy, contemporary, cartoon, etc., and limited only by the imagination of the designers.
0 kommentar(er)
