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 http://www.metroplexity.com What is Metroplexity? Metroplexity is a free to play browser-based RPG. (If you're familiar with Kingdom of Loathing, that might be a good starting point for comparison.) It's the brainchild of a dev who goes by Kinak. The gameplay is primarily single player, but you can interact with other players through in-game chat, competitions, player gangs and PVP. It takes place in a cyberpunk setting, where corporations rule the cities and gangs roam the streets. Meanwhile, strange creatures are creeping in through cracks in reality, becoming visible to people when they take a mysterious hallucinogenic drug called Eclipse. And in addition to seeing things, Eclipse and the Etheric energy it provides can fuel all sorts of unnatural effects... You'll run into all sorts of characters, from helpful NPCs  to dangerous gang members  or heavy corporate security  or, perhaps... stranger things.  How does it work? Every day you receive 25 Energy, 10 Hunger and 10 Body. Energy is spent on things like adventuring and crafting. Hunger and Body are used to consume food and drugs, respectively, which can provide additional energy as well as applying various effects to your character. While adventuring you can come across various encounters. All sorts of things can happen. Some will resolve immediately, others will require you to make a choice, and sometimes you just end up in combat. Your character also has four stats: Perception, Reflexes, Strength and Will. These can be used for passing checks in various encounters, or serve as minimum requirements for using certain items. They also play into combat, as will be noted later. In addition, each of them has a special function. Perception helps improve your item drop rate after combat. Reflexes controls your ability to run away from combat, and to get free runaways. Strength and Will add to your maximum HP, using whichever stat is lower. There will also be skills that can be learned and impact your character in all sorts of ways. Some of them will just be a bonus to stats, or to your attack power or defense. Others will provide buffs or items, or impact various gameplay mechanics. Combat Combat functions somewhat like a card game. You prepare a 'deck' of combat techniques in advance, and each round of combat you're dealt a hand of techniques which you can then apply. If you run out of techniques in your active deck, you lose. All of these techniques have numbers assigned to them. You can start with any technique in your hand, but then you can only follow it with a technique whose number is one higher or lower, and then you must continue in that direction. Here's an example:  In this scenario I have three of the starting techniques available. Dive For Cover(4), Single Shot(5) and Short Burst(6). I could do Dive For Cover, Single Shot, Short Burst. I could do Short Burst, Single Shot, Dive For Cover. Or I could do subsets of those chains. I could not, however, do Single Shot, Dive For Cover, Short Burst.  With this, I have elected to try to dodge, then shoot, then finish things off with a short burst. I then hit Strike...  I perform my three techniques, while my opponent only counters with one. I keep the two techniques I didn't use, and then receive another three from my deck. Unfortunately for me, Dive For Cover doesn't work against stealth techniques. Techniques are divided up into types, which include Melee, Ranged, Stealth, Fire, Etheric and None. All of them but None have power levels which can be modified by Power and Defense bonuses on your equipment. For example, a good gun might give a nice bonus to Ranged Power, while a bulletproof vest would provide Ranged Defense. The attacker's power and the target's defense are combined with the base power of the technique, to figure out what range of damage the target will take. In addition to a type, most techniques are also associated with a stat. For example, most Melee techniques are associated with Strength, though some are Reflexes. These act as a cap on the potential damage you can do. When you attack, the damage range is calculated as follows: Minimum damage = Attack Power - Opponent's Defense Maximum Damage = Minimum Damage + MIN(Minimum Damage, Attribute) So as long as your relevant attribute is higher than the minimum damage you're going to do, you're good. In addition to their most obvious effects, many techniques will also change based on circumstances. The equipment you or your opponent have, the effects that are active, where the technique is placed in a chain... Damage can be increased quite substantially if techniques are used to the best possible effect. PVP combat works much like regular combat. The defender will be a copy of some other player, using stats and techniques based on what they've been doing in combat while active in PVP. Why should I play Metroplexity? Let's use the Bartle taxonomy here. Diamonds: There are various forms of competition. There are speed run contests, where you reset your character and compete to be the fastest and acquire the most skills as you make your way through the main quest line, with special rewards for the best each season. You can also get bragging rights by completing resets with certain conduct restrictions, like not eating any food, or making it through the entire thing without ever getting killed. There's also a hacking competition where players compete to acquire the most data for a shadowy hacker collective. Every Christmas there's a snowman building competition with leaderboards and prizes, and each Halloween there's a world event where players all interact to try to influence the outcome. Spades: There's a lot for spades to do here. Very little in the game is straightforward, and almost every new content release requires people to figure them out. Discovering new items, techniques and effects, figuring out how various mechanics work... And if there's not new content at the moment that catches your fancy, there are still mysterious that have been lurking in the game for quite some time, waiting for someone to unearth them. Hearts: By joining a gang you can team up with your fellow players and help them out. Maybe your gang has a goal in mind for a world event, and you can help with that. You could join in PVP for the sake of helping out your gangmates by holding control of an area. You can socialize in chat, or send people gifts through the OmniMall. Clubs: While PVP is optional, there's good reason to join in on it. There's content that can only be unlocked through participating in PVP, and there are bonuses to be had for your gang controlling one of the game's PVP zones. Aside from those specifics, there's all sort of things to do. Various types of items to craft, computer systems to hack, there's fishing... In addition to the main quest line there's also a number of sidequests to complete, many of which have new skills as rewards. The main quest line itself is branching, with different options depending on what you do. Want to make it through without having to kill anyone? You can do that. Accidentally got one of the NPCs killed? It's okay, you can recover from that. Most problems have more than one way of solving them, if you look around enough. Unearthly Items The game is free to play, but if you donate $5 you will receive an unearthly coin. The coin itself is a piece of equipment with some useful effects, but you can also trade it in to an NPC named Zack for various unearthly items. These can do all sorts of things. Generally they'll provide some minor useful bonuses, but then open up considerably once you put some work into them, unlocking items, techniques, effects, new character avatars... all sorts of things. Only a certain subset of the total list of items is available each reset season, and as new ones arrive the old ones cycle out. However, that doesn't mean you've missed out on all the old items that are out there; each season two older items are brought back for one season. Useful Resources http://wiki.metroplexity.com - The Metroplexity Wiki and Forum. It can definitely take some time to get used to the game, and with all the things that have taken time and effort to figure out, the wiki is a valuable resource. http://www.metroplexitygames.com/?cat=315 - The Metroplexity devblog. Various updates about the game, as well as links to Kinak's podcasts. I recently completed a Let's Play showcasing the main questline of Metroplexity. I cover some more specific gameplay examples as they come up, along with providing a general walkthrough. This may help get folks up to speed, and seeing things in action will hopefully be helpful: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLara1DNQreZA8xwenSPj92fec028UiY8 If you give it a try, look up Cryptodynamic in game. I've been playing for a while, so I can help out with getting people settled. And I'm usually happy to invite folks into my gang.
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Jun 18, 2016 21:30
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