Relaunch FAQ now available here.
By Hicks_206
Howdy Y’all
It’s that time, it’s finally that time. I’m here to talk to you all about the always pending, looming-over-us-all “Update” that the dev team has been cracking away on.
The last time we spoke the majority of the work was built around enabling the character skill system, and ensuring we had a foundation to build upon. A great deal of additional work has been done since that last talk, and today I’d like to go over some of it with you.
We’ve concentrated on taking the player driven economy several steps forward with this update, focusing on both character skills (and a natural ceiling for how much a character can know), as well as shops and how they relate to the player economy.
Characters will need to focus on specializations for life post-update, with cross dependencies between gatherers, refiners, crafters, and consumers. Shop owners will depend on both the time and effort of other characters, as well as their output to drive said shops. A more in depth medical system, with meaning behind trauma that occurs to characters and drives the importance of doctors in the 5 states. Not to mention a complete overhaul on inventory and all systems that interact with it. Proper storage for wagons, and horses (assuming you equip a saddlebag), a complete overhaul of stables, savings deposit boxes, support for gun customization (post launch), and even tracking wear & tear on firearms.
All of that said – in addition to these new developments, there are some changes in how we’re going to be moving forward with the previously mentioned database wipe required of the update.
Nearly a year ago I spoke about how I supported the community desire (at that time) of not enforcing a full lore wipe with the update. As development has tracked on, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the focus of remaining lore friendly to the R* universe, as well as the returning question every time we pass January 1st in the real world of “Is it 1900 now?!” Without even mentioning some of the hurdles on the development side, all of these points continued to give me pause.
This is why I’ve settled on transitioning the time period that RedM RP occurs on TRP from 1899, to 1895. I feel it gives us a good deal of wiggle room to continue the stories we make together from date of the update, moving forward.
We can remain in the 19th century (which, ultimately is some of the most compelling roleplay I’ve experienced in years) while also allowing us to celebrate a proper new year when we cross over into January. Its true, we do butt up against some R* lore regardless of this, but I feel this gives us a good deal of room to breath, tell our own stories, and still celebrate 19th century New Years Eve.
With this change of year, does however come a full reset on our stories. The update brings a complete wipe.
If you choose to remake your existing characters, that is fine – as long as you understand that we’re starting fresh with them. Personally, I will be shelving all of my characters so far and starting anew. Hopefully, at least one of them will be as reviled as Carl Leduq.
The pay off, regardless of any changes for this update is huge. I’ve spoken a bit about these above but let me add a bit more detail so you know what we are marching towards!
Horse Taming: The depth of breaking horses from the wild has gone a step farther (or two!) with the update. Players will be able (with the appropriate skill) to find, break, and own any of the horses you find in the wild. Thats not all however, players who specialize in the taming of the wild beast will be able to *sell* their horses that they find, break, and train to other players. Finally bringing mechanical support to the RP brought by so many members of our community.
Firearm Maintenance & Customization: Developers have worked hard at finally saving, and restoring the condition of our firearms. Finally adding in the proper firearms maintenance loop, but that’s not all! Backend support for full weapon customization is included in this update, so that post-update we will be able to push out player driven gunsmithing without any additional backend changes required.
Work For Hire: Beyond your basic delivery missions, players can swing by post offices to look at current work for hire jobs, competing with others in the labor market. Drive supplies from Van Horn to Tumbleweed. Moving goods for shops, travelers looking for a stage to cross the five states, or even dangerous cargo sought by others!
Medical System: Tracking damage down to the region of the body that trauma occurs, characters will now take longer term damage when *severely* injured than just simple hit point reductions, driving players to seek out and interact with doctors and .. snake oil salespeople? From trauma to the head, to snake bites and venom – Doctor roleplay evolves from /me to a functional system.
Inventory Refactor: Moving away from the legacy inventory system we heavily utilized for our initial RedM launch to a more robust and dynamic grid based inventory system. This might seem like boring technofluff at first – until you dive in and start to experience the opportunities from lockpickable containers, to a crafting system rewrite, to future support for custom named items.
Player Shops: The first pass of our economy was fairly dynamic, but with the update we are leaning harder towards shops that players have proper control over. With the initial support focused on locations like General Stores, and Saloons – shop owning characters will be able to control what their store stocks, its prices, and even put out purchase orders for delivery!
This is all a lot to take in, and there will be more information to come as we move forward – but themost important thing to take away from this announcement is that… it’s coming.