MattAtlas

Because your post is huge with a lot of questions I'm going to divide my answer into sections, since I don't like spllitting my posts into 20 different quotes. We live in a very privileged era. Today, we can boot up our favourite internet browser, look up the Second World War, and get an almost day-by-day retelling. You can look at the aftermath of the bloodiest war in the history of mankind and you won't read a single positive thing -- and it makes sense. In a vacuum, it will look like the greatest disaster humanity has ever faced. You'll read casualty numbers that are unthinkable, with the greatest tragedies known to us happening exactly in that time period. You will read some things that will make you question how some countries even came back from the brink. You'll see numbers that you cannot even picture in your mind, and ask yourself how exactly people were capable of this much. And yet, people recovered, even in the most devastated of countries and populations. This is exactly the effect that is happening here. You are reading the Wikipedia version of the new setting - and I wrote the diary this way because it's my job to sell the setting and the changes to the players - so, naturally, you're going to focus on the casualties and on the dark tones. That's intentional. I want people to see this as a complete detachment from what Aurora was, because that's what it is. Naturally, when you read things such as "Earth blew up" and "Biesel blew up" in a vacuum it'll look like everything went to shit, but as I told people on the Discord, the setting isn't infinitely grim. It's overall more grim, yes; there are more grim stories than before, that much is true. But I've always been a proponent that it is adversity that creates the best stories and characters, and not prosperity. The setting is this way so that characters have a lot of adversity to face, which means that achieving their goals is that much more important, and has that much more impact. It's that contrast that I really want to capture - the fact that humanity (and aliens) can bloom even in the wake of the most terrible of disasters because that's just how strong normal people are. That's the true core and framing of Anabasis, the strength of the little person to recover from adversity, and not so much the disaster that just passed - that's just the backdrop. In short, the devastation is only focused on in the diary because I have to tell you what changed. Office workers, warehouse workers and the like still exist in Abasis. Society is mostly normal in a lot of places, just comparably a lot worse than during the golden age of the Spur. Not everyone's a gun toting mercenary and not everywhere is an anarchic shithole. In a lot of places, life is still stable to different degrees. Obviously someone is safer in Luna than in the pirate territories in Biesel, but life there still goes on. People aren't getting gunned down on the streets and neither is everyone a veteran. At the same time, there are places where life is truly shit. But that's an opt-in as much as playing something like San Colette is at the moment. Similarly, you can play someone from somewhere remote enough to not be involved in the 2IW, but I'm confident enough in the final product to think that nobody will do that because the alternative will be that much better. There will be short stories published in the future about the life of the little guy, because I want to write them to get the idea across. It is currently a little hard without spoiling some things that are still in development on the lore side, but I assure you that these will happen, and they wwill clear up a lot of confusion. Right now I need people to use their imagination still. It is a mistake to think that people are beholden to anyone external to the ship. The whole purpose of NBT2 is making a ship where the players decide what they want to do on their own terms. So long as they make money Avarizia does not care and will not care, this will not change at any stage of development. It is also a mistake to think that Avarizia is a corporation; it's not. It is explicitly a freelancer company which is not a corporation, this is a very important distinction to make because it will be key to understand mercenary states and the importance of mercenaries/freelancers in Anabasis. Tex-Mex hit the nail on the head here; you underestimate how important money can be as a deciding factor once it is properly integrated into development. We have a lot of ways in mind to achieve this that we think will do the job really well. In general, players naturally tend towards the morally good option, which is counterbalanced by the morally bad option being generally more convenient - that's one balancing factor that is very possible, just to provide one example. Having less money will always be a net negative for the players, both because you need to meet rent and also because you increase your quality of gameplay by having more money (better starting equipment, cleaner starting conditions, and so on). I disagree that this sort of choice does not create a compelling narrative. It only does not if your character has a completely white sense of morality, and I would argue that any literary critic worth their salt would say that such a character is a flawed character. One of my favourite professors - a woman with a Ph.D in scifi studies and with several papers who teaches a masters' course in scifi leature - repeated this to us once, and I quote, "good science fiction is a thought experiment and a moral dilemma". A good character in a science fiction universe will have morals that are troubled, because that is how you create conflict for your own character, and you can advance their arc. Your character making that choice which they did not want to pick for moral reasons is all the writing fuel a writer can ask for. You need to see the game system as the facilitator for your own writing and the springboard for your character, rather than the thing that feeds you your character progression. That's exactly the intent with the money and contracts system, giving players choices to make that will inevitably affect their characters. When a character is aiming a gun at a foreign mercenary during a high-intensity contract, I want them to FEEL that they are murdering someone. I want the ship to UNDERSTAND that their actions have consequences. And that character with white morals forced to abide this SHOULD feel troubled. They SHOULD feel like they have messed up. Because that's just the kind of universe they live in. This does not preclude you from writing a morally good character; this makes you have to write an interesting morally good character who struggles with reconciling their morals with a fundamentally unfair universe. How does that feel for them? Did they have any other way out? Did they pick the easy way out? Could they have done anything to avoid this? These are some of the moral problems I want people to have, And yes, this is a tonal shift that was necessary. Aurora has been a morally good setting for years now (with fundamentally no elements of corporate dystopia left; this is a universal truth now, and not really up for serious debate) and nothing good has come of it. Arguably, it's been one of the main driving reasons for our population troubles. This is why NBT2 shifts towards a more grim setting; we need one in order to really light the flame in terms of character interactions and conflict. A mercenary is not necessarily a paramilitary. An Avarizia office worker who handles the NanoExcel paid leave sheets is as much of a mercenary as the guy going planetside to explore ruins. In Anabasis the term mercenary just means "someone who works for money for a mercenary company". It is not necessarily militarized in Anabasis; this is different in the Horizon's setting as "mercenary" is exclusively used in the context of PMCG. This is just something that will change overtime as culture shifts to match the new lore. The ship being a Solarian destroyer is set in stone, yes, because it will allow us to have some pretty good lore elements that I don't want to spoil yet, and good lore justification to have ship weapons and other goodies that will help us a lot in space exploration and high-intensity stuff (like drop pods 😉). The setting becoming more militarized is something that's brought up often in developer chat. We all want to avoid it, that much I can say. What I can say is that conflict happening more often does not equal militarized. Naturally Anabasis will have more conflict and fighting because, let's face it, that's what drives SS13 population in the first place - it's what Aurora needs in general to have a true resurrection. This doesn't mean that it'll happen constantly and neither does it mean that the setting will become militarized. We're all aware of the risks and that we're walking a tightrope, but those fine margins are what makes this setting potentially so speciall. We think that that goldilocks zone will drive so much conflict and so many moral dilemmas that will make roleplay unique and really interesting. In short, all I can ask is for trust in your development team. Remember; the Wikipedia version of the setting is not the final product. It is a summary of changes; it is nothing more than the ingredients to the dish.

What is your Discord account? I can't find a banned account called "nikowskyy".

Sorry for the delay, but here are your answers: We are not going to fall into the trap of infinite growth for persistancy, you can read about why in the newer dev diary with the Tithe. Any player coming in at any time will be able to influence the game. The rough estimate is three years, but it's obviously not really easy to predict how much time it takes. Life can change a lot in this time.

Project Anabasis Development Diary #1 Sins of the Father Premise Hello, everyone! It’s time for the long awaited development diary that unveils the lore side of the setting we’ve developed for Anabasis. For starters, I want to apologize for this diary taking longer than I thought. We had to essentially group together and decide once and for all the general lines of what we were doing for the timeskip and the overall situation of the most important elements of the setting (megacorps, nations, starting area), which can be harder than expected when you have to get six or seven people on the same page. After that, I realized it was pretty hard to write such a monumental development diary. When you’re revealing something you’ve been working on for a full year, you can get kind of focused on small details and you want the delivery to be perfect. Okay, that’s all. Let’s get to the real development diary. Firstly, the timeskip we have decided on is twenty years. Originally, this was supposed to be fifty years, mainly because in the beginning Anabasis was a story mostly about just a different setpiece of the universe, but I later decided to change it for two simple reasons. The most important is that the closer a timeskip is to a certain event, the more intimately it is felt by the characters, and the more it shapes them. A fifty year timeskip would have essentially turned the event we plan Anabasis around into little more than a lore memory, and I figured that it would’ve been not only far less interesting, but we’d be repeating the same pitfalls we’ve fallen into up until now. Additionally, writing fifty years’ worth of lore is a lot! Either we'd be spending an insane amount of time writing up lore to fill those fifty years with, or we'd have to leave a large amount of blanks in the interest of time. One of the central aims with Anabasis’ setting is to give everything meaning. What I mean by that is that we want there to be a central thread that can be followed to understand why everyone is here – something that connects every character, intrinsically and unescapably, so that everyone feels connected to the setting. The gameplay mantra we’re following is that no character should be disconnected from the round. Similarly for the setting, no character should be disconnected from the main events of the setting. We want characters from different planets to be able to relate to eachother through their reason for being on the ship; something more compelling than simply “money”, something that gives everything we do a certain gravitas. In a twenty year timespan, this central thread has to be such a gigantic shake-up that it fundamentally changes the galaxy. We want to revolutionize the setting to be full of conflict and gameplay avenues, and that can only happen with a galactic change. All of this means that the sins of the father must come to an explosive conclusion. The Second Interstellar War “What have we done?” – Unnamed Biesellite Aspirant over the ruins of Earth, 24XX You’ve read that correctly: the central event that will fundamentally shake everything up is the Second Interstellar War. I chose something like this because the changes that our setting needs to become interesting are drastic and can really only be accomplished with international conflict shaking up the galactic order to a massive degree. The reality is that everything we have in lore is too static and too stable for us to really magic up any sort of other reason for things to deeply change to the level we want. The existing battle lines can be guessed by attentive article readers as this is something we’ve been building towards for a bit already. It’s important to mention that there will be no retcons to lead us here, everything that happens will happen canonically IC. This is also a good time to reveal that the final canon arc of the Horizon will cover the beginning of the 2IW and the Horizon’s involvement in the crisis, which will provide a neat avenue for any characters that you want to bring over to NBT2. The 2IW will last for approximately twelve years, which means that Anabasis will begin eight years after the war. This is particularly relevant because in the setting we imagined, the reconstruction process has begun, but the galaxy as a whole still feels the raw scars of a war where a previously unimaginable amount of people have died over human greed. This is also where what I mentioned about timeskip length comes on – a fifty year timeskip would have left the characters too far removed from the second interstellar war, barring very specific exceptions such as particularly old characters (70-80+) and IPCs. With a twenty year timeskip, you as the player have the option of playing a character that participated at any stage of the war: born during, or born before. These twelve years of war have seen no victor. The hegemons of the Spur sought to increase their influence and rule the Spur alone, but only ended up destroying most of what they held dear – no nation has been left as before. Earth and Biesel were destroyed beyond repair through weapons of unimaginable sin, and now stand in desolate ruins as grim reminders of a past that once was. All semblances of authority in Biesel collapsed, and it is now a system of pirates and mercenaries lording over the once-Biesellites that now remain in the various war-torn moons and planets. The Alliance reached the brink and tipped over, having been forced to retreat from its colonies to the Jewel Worlds, betraying its promise to Humanity and leaving them to fend for themselves as they try to salvage what is left. The Coalition buckled under internal pressure and finally broke through a bloody civil war, leading to the establishment of new nations, all eager to eke out their lordship over the ruins of the Spur. The Eridani Federation took advantage of external chaos to break free from the Alliance, and now remains as a photograph of a corporate order that is long gone, with corporate executives holding onto the grains of sand of a bygone age with everything they can, a futile race against time. Elyra is a shell of its former self, its collective identity traumatized by the longest and most bloody war they have ever seen, with a myriad of planets being reduced to ashes and its bloody fortune – Phoron – completely gone. The Empire of Dominia must reckon with its new existence under Priscilla after its own civil war, dealing with the remnants of its failed colonial past as it tries to survive in an unstable galaxy. All the while, the alien nations carve out their own empires out of the ashes of Humanity’s sins. The clearest sign of the fall of the previous galactic order is the fall of the megacorporations. Under the internal pressure caused by the greed of its members, the Conglomerate broke, with the various megacorporations scrambling about to find a nation to hold onto so that they could survive. This was a doomed prospect as the devastation of the Second Interstellar War reached extremes, and by the end, only scraps of the original megacorporations remained, divided and fractured; never to reunite under a single banner. While their “successors” may retain significant power in some areas - such as Eridani - they no longer have a stranglehold on the galactic economy, and while some are interstellar, most exist only in specific regions of space to fulfill a specific economic niche, rather than dominating entire industrial sectors. To be clear, we are not crafting a grimdark setting – that is far from our intention. In Anabasis, you will play the part of people who, against all odds, try to eke out the best life they can in the ashes of a new galaxy – all the while, lamenting a golden past that was denied to you by the greed of higher powers. The old international galactic order has now been lost, and the galaxy looks nothing like it does before. Phoron fields have all either been consumed to craft the weaponry with which various planets were blighted, or destroyed in the wake of war, leading to the irreversible loss of most phoron technology other than the smallest kinds for even the most privileged. No nation is capable of war any longer, but there is no more trust, and so a cold war between most nations falls upon the Spur as a whole. Freelancer and mercenary companies have risen to fill in the void that the nations have left, some even ruling their own speck of the Spur… and that is where you come in, the crew of a humble freelancer ship in the ruins of Tau Ceti – once a shining symbol of Humanity’s technological progress, now a lawless land. Regardless of the misery that has befallen your world, you – a freelancer or a corporate, nothing more than an ordinary person – are determined to carve out your own life, no matter what. The corporations and the old nations have taken your future away, but not your pride. The Setting “There has not been a just cause ever since the Dominians set fire to the galaxy.” – Unnamed Elyran mercenary from Avarizia, 24XX All names in this diary are placeholders, and not permanent. The ship the game place takes on, the Blood Diamond, is a Solarian destroyer that was refitted in Valkyrie’s shipyards. Its motley crew is made up of anyone from any corner of the galaxy. Whether you have lofty dreams to carve your name across the stars as a freelancer or you simply want to carve out an existence for yourself, it matters not for Avarizia, the freelancing group that you answer to… as long as you pay the Tithe. The Tithe is the central gameplay mechanic of Anabasis. Avarizia is kind enough to provide you – the crew – with a ship, the most basic of basic tools for you to work with, and a large web of contacts and contracts, so long as you provide a minimum return on their investment. The Tithe is the purpose of your voyage across the stars, your objective every month, and your sword of Damocles. For if you do not pay the Tithe, it will be your heads on the chopping block, and everyone knows it. You all know, however, that you are left to your own means, and you must fend for yourselves to reach this monthly payment. You will be paid in a percentage of the ship’s profits, assuming there is any left after paying the Tithe, that is, whereas the Captain is personally paid a large commission. In Anabasis, player freedom is emphasized by virtue of the setting. Avarizia does not place much scrutiny on who it hires or why. So long as you can be useful to them, you can be hired. Similarly, Avarizia does not care about what happens on its ships so long as the Tithe is always brought in, and thus you can expect more meaningful and more liberal in-character conflict. Of course, you will all still need to work together, under the surely benevolent guidance of your Captain, unless you want to incur Avarizia’s wrath. Not all crew on the Blood Diamond are freelancers, however. Avarizia often hires corporate contractors for very specific positions on its ships, often leisure positions or otherwise skilled workers that are unlikely to be fulfilled by reckless mercenaries, such as Surveyors – researchers of artifacts to sell for a profit – or some of its canteen staff. Freelancer crew have, however, never taken well to the presence of corporates among their ships. Most of Humanity still remembers the bloodshed that the corporations have directly or indirectly caused, and many of them think of corporates as unwilling or willing abetters in this misery. Regardless of your provenance, you must all work together if you want to make it in this galaxy. The Blood Diamond’s starting equipment is dynamic and will depend on the current amount of money collected for the Tithe. The lower the money, the lower tier of equipment that will be spawned on the ship. Expect to work with the scraps if there is very little money left after the Tithe, and if you have amply fulfilled it, expect to work with better equipment… before it breaks or is sold, and Avarizia is not kind enough to replace it with an exact replica. Most of this money will come from the contracts that the Blood Diamond will undertake, as decided by your benevolent Captain at the start of your shift. These contracts, graciously provided to you by Avarizia, can vary – from low-paying, but calm package delivery (so long as you don’t look inside the package) to high-risk, morally dubious recoveries of precise items from encampments by a well-paying pirate warlord. The Blood Diamond’s future, purpose, and morality are entirely up to you, the crew, who may be willing or unwilling participants in whichever expedition has been prepared that day to bring in some money for the Tithe. Conclusion “How can you guarantee that you’ll win? – We must win at all costs. Or there will no longer be a Biesellite nation, Miranda.” – Leaked conversation between Miranda Trasen and Ake Torvald before the start of the war I hope you all enjoyed the presentation of the setting to come! Many things are, of course, missing. I know that many of you are likely clamouring to know the fate of the Scarabs, the rest of the Human factions, or the aliens as a whole, but those have to wait for now. Much of this lore is in progress and still needs to be worked on, and as for the alien nations, I personally won’t be the one writing about them – those development diaries will be done by their individual lore developers when they are ready. As always, if you are interested in helping any of this become a reality, please consider applying for the Development teams, whether that be Lore or code/sprite/map developers. Feel free to ask any questions you have on the Discord or on the Forums. I will try to keep this thread updated with a FAQ.

Accepted!

Accepted!

I do not think so. The setting change will be so major that it will touch every single character in existence in all likelihood. I cannot personally think of any character that will have no excuse to change their allegiance completely. You will be for sure able to come up with a way to have any character end up on a freelancer ship, short of the 0.0000001%. Species lore is different, as there it will depend on what the species developer decides for their lore, but my goal is to alienate as little characters as possible. That may sound funny given what I've said about the setting change being major, but I am fairly confident in it. My plan is simply to trust the administration team and the players. I think in order to really reovlutionize our server we need to be bold and accept the risks. Aurora has been driven by riskless policy for too long - policies where we generally choose the safest route for the setting and nip most in-character conflict in the bud with rules and IC regulation intervention, and look at the situation that's gotten us. I think the server needs a big injection of freedom in general, that is my main aim. Of course if things end up lawless, which I personally doubt, we can make changes. I have a few backup plans for this. Maybe not with their current duties, but as a staff team structure they will likely stay. I have some plans for this but it's a bit early to talk about them.

On trial until 15DEC2025.

I don't know why any of what we're doing would alienate any characters, nor why what I'm proposing would be a reboot rather than an evolution of what we have. Everything that will lead to the new setting is canon and other than a timeskip (likely around 20 years) there will not be any extra requirements. The lore changes will make it fairly easy to port any old characters over if the player in question wishes to, the only ones that may take some additional rejigging are the particularly rich and posh characters -- but again, there will be avenues for that. Like I said on the Discord, if I thought that our problems could be solved without a new setting, I wouldn't have invested several years of my own and my developers' time. The truth of the matter is that what we have doesn't work and without iterating on it a lot our problems detailed in the thread and that have led to our pop dwindling are unfixable. As for the risks, there is a risk with everything, that's just part of taking big decisions. But if I were not confident in the product, I would not have presented it.

We don't have the development time to shift to an entirely new coding language, nevermind the infrastructure. This is a big project as it is.

Project Anabasis Development Diary #0 The Future of Aurora Hello everyone. It’s been a long time since the community survey that we made to collect player interest on various changes that we could make to the game. It has been even more time since the plans for the future of the server were formed, and we have now begun active development on both the lore and gameplay development sides. As we develop for the NBT, we will try our best to put out regular development diaries that outline what we’re doing, both as a way to keep players updated and engaged in the development process (for both lore and game), and also to collect feedback on the features and changes we make. Before we get into the details of the future of the server, however, I want to talk about present Aurora. More specifically, where we have failed, where the problems with our server lie, and how they can be fixed. This is because much of what we’re doing with NBT2 needs prior context to properly understand why we’re doing things a certain way. With that out of the way, let’s start with a problem that’s very familiar to us all. Lack of Gameplay Ever since our shift from the mixed MRP/HRP type of roleplay to strictly HRP with the removal of mixed secret somewhere around 2018, Aurora steadily had its gameplay eroded through many years. With the focus now on roleplay and character interactions, players lost sight of the game aspect of Aurora; the actual server became more akin to a sandbox with less of a game involved, where convenience outweighs the need for a game. A good example of this is the progressive erosion of inter-departmental gameplay and connections, how the hydroponicist until not too long ago was a job totally subsumed by the chef, because by that point it became a common perception that you should be able to do your job to its fullest extent no matter what. This is problematic because inter-department gameplay not only serves to drive interaction between character that otherwise wouldn’t interact with eachother, it’s also the fundamental basis of a cooperative game. Too much convenience leads to people having no reason to actually engage with the game, and thus they will take the path of least resistance – a path that involves them staying in their bubble. Other departments such as Science saw their gameplay loop become outdated with changes to the server rules or environment, so they fell into irrelevance and disrepair. With the removal of mixed secret and the shift towards permanent character development as the primary focus of Aurora, Science lost most of its raison-d’etre. It was fairly successful as the antagonist shenanigans department; players from 2017 like myself will remember Science mass printing lawgivers, energy glaives, energy shields, advanced energy guns… all of which were removed because of powergaming concerns, or simply because they no longer fit the more serious roleplay aspect of Aurora, leading to a deserted and ultimately pointless department. These problems were also compounded by unnecessarily draconian rules regarding the usage of much of Science equipment. All of this has led to a state where the game exists in a very tenuous way. As there is functionally no game to play, the only reason to join is to roleplay with your friends – but this is a case of whether the egg can be born before the chicken. How can we expect population to grow, or for people to join the game when there is no reason to unless there are already players online? In essence, Aurora works when the gamemode is Mercenary and when there is a minimum of population. If the population ever goes below that minimum amount, the game breaks completely, and people will no longer join. This is the biggest root cause of the spells of no population that we go through sometimes. If the planets align in a way where the population suddenly dies (exams is a typical one), then we will stop reaching that “critical mass” amount of players, and thus the server’s population will crash. The conclusion here is that Aurora must go back to being a game. This does not mean that roleplay should be deprioritized, neglected, or what have you, far from it – what I mean is that people should be joining the server to play a game, which will in turn provide them with roleplay. There should be a reason to join the round beyond your friends being online. Similarly, there should be a selling point to people. There should be enough action, enough palpable gameplay to get them to try the server and stick around – and this must be unique gameplay that they can’t get anywhere else. Insufficient Canonicity One of our biggest pride points about Aurora is our canonicity system, where everything is canon… or is supposed to, at least, unless it is an antagonist, an away site, an interaction with an offship, retconned… In essence, it’s fake canonicity. We want to pride ourselves on canonicity when nothing interesting (with an asterisk on interesting depending on personal interests, I mean it in the sense of Aurora’s gameplay) can actually be canon in the first place. This is a problem because one of our main pride point is essentially kneecapped by the rules, but there is a reason why this is the way it is. That reason is that canonicity must sustain the setting. A setting that’s meant to be corporate, smooth, and mostly similar to a 9-to-5 setting cannot have these things be canon. A corporate flagship setting has to apply a certain amount of restrictions to the characters played on it because otherwise it would be a plot hole. We already run into this fairly often with pirate characters. Realistically they would not be hired at all, but we all suspend our disbelief because they’re fun to have around. The point to understand here, however, is that a corporate flagship meant to be in a 9-to-5ish setting cannot have its crew dealing with dangerous pirates, massive greimorian infestations, crew deaths day in and day out. At that point you would not be a phoron research vessel anymore, it would be arguably breaking the lore, it would just not make sense to be doing those things when most of your crew is supposed to be scientists or otherwise civilians. A Stale Setting The setting itself contributes to this as well – the truth is that the corporate setting has become uninteresting. It is old, done to death, and no longer capable of attracting the standard SS13 playerbase that has now matured or moved onto newer pastures. We need to innovate, both because we are getting outcompeted by fresher settings, and also because our current setting is a ball and chain around our leg. It doesn’t let us do very interesting things, it constraints our development as everything needs to fit a static, mostly unchanging universe. It is hard to have interesting events happen not only because of the expectations placed upon us by the setting (the Horizon is expected to remain mostly safe as a non-combat science ship) but also because the universe as it is is lackluster in powderkegs and tension (the last major change was KOTW years ago, which arguably ended up stabilizing the universe even more). In short, the setting is too restrictive on what we can do. Aurora has a problem that its rounds are simply not interesting enough, and we can’t iterate on that without evolving or changing the setting so that we have more development freedom on what we can take the ship and its characters through. We also want players to have more room to play antagonistic or otherwise chaotic characters without running into as many IC or OOC problems, and for their actions to be canon more often than not, and we also want the universe to be fresher and give more opportunities for interesting things to happen, for different characters to be made and for players to regain that spark of inspiration that they once had. The Pillars of the New Setting With that said, what we aim to deliver is a less restrictive setting where characters are allowed to engage in more interesting activities, along with the relaxation of some rules to better allow for conflict to happen and flow in a round. As such, I have outlined some pillars of the new setting that will be respected for every step of the development process, and well into the future of the new setting. Unification of the setting. There must be a central thread that ties everyone together to some degree. Disconnection from the setting is not ideal as it leads to characters that are too “individual” and uninvested in the narrative. Removal of the reliance on lore events, and full integration of the players into the IC future of the game. The game must stand on its own two feet, without relying on lore events to give a breath of fresh air. They should still happen, but they should not be the main expectation of gameplay. Players should be free to shape the in-world narrative to a certain degree. More of this will be shared in a future development diary. As much conflict as possible must be canon. Whatever happens, it must be believable for the ship to have gone through it, and it should remain canon in accordance to the players’ wishes. Everyone must be involved in the gameplay loop. No one element – department, job, away ship – of the game should be completely uninvolved from the main gameplay loop. There must be a main gamemode that drives the characters’ motivations and actions. By giving the ship a real, concrete purpose, we can finally simulate the feeling that everyone is working through the same objective, adn create that feeling of camaraderie that was always lacking from the Horizon. As much gameplay as possible must be persistent. The next level in our evolution as a roleplay server is to strive for perfect persistence, wherein as many of the players’ actions are persistent as possible. Once again, this is how we will cement our status as a “true” roleplay server. The setting must be interesting, and provide sparks for long-term and short-term development, while also allowing for easy creation of gameplay elements. We want a universe that can be easily integrated into the game as much as possible for many reasons: better new player onboarding, more representation of lore in-game, and easy creation of gameplay elements. With that all out of the way, it’s time to finally present the second Next Big Thing – Project Anabasis! Project Anabasis To allow for all of these objectives to come into fruition, the setting will be changing accordingly. It should be very clear at this point that what we have now cannot work for what we want to accomplish with Aurora. You will be playing as freelancers in a freelancer ship, nominally owned by an independent freelancing group but at the same time entirely free to pursue your own goals. In the future setting of Aurora, freelancer and mercenary groups will have carved out a major place in the galactic order, and thus you will be able to shape your destiny as you see fit, to antagonize or help whichever corporation or government you desire – as long as you keep the money flowing! In this shattered, recovering universe, you can only rely on yourselves, and nobody else. This new setting will emphasize freedom for characters in both their actions and creation. The main avenue of gameplay will be away site exploration, which will feed all of the departments on the ship in a circular way – no department will be interdependent, everyone will have their way to contribute to the ship’s designs and the way in which they can do so will be varied. You may either contribute directly, or by making the work of another department easier. We want to stimulate as much active interaction with other departments as possible. One of the basis of this new setting is the loss of technology. While I won’t reveal too many details about this just yet, we are aiming for a large setback in terms of the general technology in the galaxy. Phoron technology will be rare, and most importantly, extremely powerful. Away sites will be filled with relics of a bygone age – a gilded age of prosperity, but also greed – for your characters to explore and find out more about a past that is now lost to time… or that they may have lived through. Departments will be redesigned with four technology tiers in mind, starting from rough, slower, less effective tools to highly experimental relic tools. This will allow us to segment and diversify gameplay, allowing for more dynamic interactions, the gating of resources or procedures, and so on. In general, we want the ship characters to have a reason to use worse or rougher tools. One good example of this is ghetto surgery – perhaps one of the things that feel the best and most exciting to do in game, yet there is never any reason to do it. We don’t want this to be the case, and as such we had to normalize the level of technology in the galaxy to a lower level. Speaking of technology, Science will be reworked from the ground-up into a Fabrication department whose purpose is to collect data, relics, and lost technology from away sites, and reprocess this data into usable semi-persistent technology for other department. This means that if an advanced design is discovered, it will persist for a certain amount of rounds rather than immediately fading away. These technologies will be powerful and use limited resources, so use them wisely! Away sites, and exploration in general, including combat, the medical system, and the ship combat system, will be redesigned from the ground up and become central elements of gameplay design. It will not be possible to progress past a certain tier of technology for your department without participating in away sites and extracting certain items or data from them, and neither will it be possible to complete the round’s objective without visiting them. Away sites will be turned from random shotgunned ruins into dynamic, major gameplay elements akin to dungeons with varying dynamic difficulty courtesy of a Director subsystem. We expect to build away sites with a gameplay duration of an hour to an hour and a half on average. Transportation to away sites will, of course, be facilitated to allow this. This also means that we will aim for a lot less away sites, but that are a lot bigger and have a lot more quality to them in scope. As many things as possible will be persistent. The ship we operate on will have its main persistent resource be money, which will be affected by the characters’ actions and by their success or failure in the main gamemode. Money is what the setting runs on! It is finite, persistent, and has sprawling effects on everything. It used for many things, such as resources, specialist tooling, and is passively consumed for ship maintenance. Money will affect as many things as possible on the ship – from general living conditions such as whether the floors and walls are dirty, to the starting equipment of a department, to the available food and drinks in the mess hall, to the starting situations of the characters. This all ties into the main gamemode and purpose of the ship: the Contracts gamemode, the pillar upon which everything is built. The ship (its Captain, failing that its Acting Captain, failing that still the crew by democratic vote) will be able to select a contract to fulfill that rewards a certain amount of money depending on the request and its difficulty rank. Different departments will be able to select sub-contracts to contribute to the multiplier of credits rewarded. Contracts is meant to be an evolution of Odyssey. Storytellers will be supported, but not necessary at all for the purposes of the gamemode. Away ships will be central elements of the gameplay loop. We will be cutting down on the amount of away ships that can spawn while making them higher quality, permanently canon, and involved in the gameplay loop. Away ships will be able to either interfere or help in the ship’s contract, with no more ambiguity to their purpose in the round. Will they decide to aid you in your objectives, or will they decide to claim the reward for themselves and stop you? That’s all I have to say for now! You are free to ask questions, of course, and remember that as each of these points are developed in depth, development diaries will be made to keep you guys updated. Lastly, if this proposal interests you at all, please consider contributing or applying to be a developer. To make this come true, we need as much manpower as possible, and every little bit helps. You can inquire about any information on this by messaging me on Discord. As for the setting… (credit to Sammy/Nauticall for the teaser image) Stay tuned for the next Development Diary!

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