Friday, July 23, 2010

What's this diary all about?

Well having come off the back of my Neptune's Pride blog, I thought I'd write up some experiences in Space Station 13, a game by Byond.

I first came across this game by the all-knowing wonderful blog that is Rock, Paper, Shotgun and as I usually do, tried it out to see for myself. I'm a complete sucker for gaming diaries and love reading in-game stories. Here's Quintin's in-game diary, that first introduced it to me.

Unlike my Neptune's Pride diary. This blog will be more of a short story format where I can recount various interesting snippets of stories, rather than something ongoing over a long period of time.

So let me tell you a little about the game:

It's a free-to-play Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) (although massively might be stretching it a little bit as you generally don't get more than about 40 people play on a single server). It is set on a space station and your character can be one of about 25 occupations including captain, engineer, security officer, chef, barman and clown. You are supposed to remain in-character (IC) when playing but you can talk in the global-chat out-of-character (OOC) to seek help and advice.

The object of the game is different on each server and can change each round. Traitor seems to be the most common game mode where one or more players are designated as traitors and have hidden agendas, usually along the lines of killing a specific character, or stealing documents and escaping on the escape pod. As other players, you can just go along with your character's normal job. If you're an engineer, you can keep the space station functioning, if you're a botanist, you can grow plants etc. Saying this, it's everyone's job to watch out for the traitor and report any suspicious behavior to the detective or members of security.

If you fancy trying SS13 out for yourself, be warned; it's an extremely complicated game to learn and I'd say after playing for 3 days now, I've barely scratched the surface. It has a horrible user interface and terribly sluggish controls and a good handful of the players are just plain d*cks, out to mess up your experience. Saying all this, it makes for some hilarious moments and some fantastic story-telling opportunities. It's complexity is baffling as I hope to be able to express in the course of this diary.

There's a half-decent wiki available with a tutorial guide if you want to brave this bizarre world.

1 comment:

  1. Correction: it is a BYOND game, but it was not MADE by BYOND. BYOND is an engine.

    That said, this is a hilarious blog and I love you because of it.

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