The Eye of Ba‛al

The The Eye of Ba‛al is a multi player online game (MOG), in active (but slow) development.

Thank you for your interest in The Eye of Ba‛al. Unfortunately The Eye of Ba‛al is not even close to ready. So don't get too excited about it right now. This is going to be a long slog.

DISCLAIMER: The following descriptions are dreams, not promised deliverables. We may or may not deliver on any of these.

Here is a list of the features we intend:

Sand box: There will be no plans, paths, or quests coded by the developers. That is not to say that they won't exist, only that they are considered meta-level content rather than part of the game engine. We expect most content to be player and community driven and GMs will comprise a core element of the community providing a lot of lore, history, and quests on an ongoing basis.

As a sandbox the progression of play is not linear or well determined. You are to use your creativity and see if you can't find something fun to do. Alliance vs. alliance is expected to be a major part of this game, so if you get bored consider helping out the war effort.
Open Macroing: We don't forbid macroing. We plan to include many server side macros. In our book, macros are not cheats, and we feel that allowing them and making them available levels the playing field.
User controlled NPCs: Users can control NPCs as pets, guards, merchants, or whatever purpose you can think up for it... perhaps even whole armies (depending on what the server can handle).
Multi login: You can login multiple characters from your account at the same time. This is useful for passing objects between characters. This functionality actually extends from the user controlled NPC functionality, as NPCs (also called bots throughout this text) are no different from your regular or main characters.
No levels: The goal of getting to level 20 is too linear for us. We have a very divergent skill tree that you can take in whatever direction you like. The nice thing about the non-linear play is that each player has the opportunity to distinguish themselves as unique and useful. More is said about skills below.
PvP: There will be full unrestricted PvP. There won't even be a player-killer flagging system, but the tools to write one for your characters will be there (see details below). Full looting of corpses is allowed. While this may seem disheartening to those who come from a theme-park style game, keep in mind that we are quite different. Dying will be fairly hard to do if you aren't looking for trouble. More often you will simply be chased off and lose access to resources. You would have to have a number of people who want you dead or go somewhere someone else has secured in order to be easily killed.
Dead and gone: When you die that character is gone. But death is fairly uncommon, escape is easy, and thus killing is quite difficult. And even while death is the end of the character you don't lose everything. If you amass assets and have NPC bots protecting them they remain in the world wherever they were. All skill knowledge is retained, although the skill experience is wiped, so you will have to retrain the skills, but you won't have to rediscover and relearn them. Skill techniques, knowledge, and various science and discovery information is keyed to your account and not to the character, so the things that you learned are not forgotten, can be carried over to the next character. Attributes and skill experience, and the character itself of course, are what is lost when you die.
24 x 7: (undecided) Your avatar stays in the game 24x7, even when you log out. You need to write or borrow some A.I. macros so he/she can remain safe. There will be many ways to remain safe and this will hopefully not be a big issue. Death in areas pre-configured to be safe will be rare to impossible and killing people in zones that they configured and you didn't configure will be difficult. This is different than if you wander around in places you've never been, in which case death is much more likely.
User defined organizations: We intend to provide a flexible group/clan/guild/alliance building system, and a banner/standard flag system for your organization so you can identify yourself as a member of an organization by showing that banner. This will be much more involved than a simple guild. You can belong to multiple organizations, and organizations can belong to organizations.
User defined classes: Call your particular combination of skills and play style whatever you want. You can be a Naughty Nurse, we don't mind (although some role players might be a bit disturbed). Setup a guild of Naughty Nurses; make up your own rules and setup NPC bots to administer them; setup banner flags for it so people can prove they belong; Jealously guard certain skill tree information, and burn anyone who breaks the code of secrecy. Do all that, and you will have a fully user defined class.
User defined recognition flagging: Recognition flagging substitutes for player-killer / murderer / tresspasser type system-enforced flagging in other games. Recognition flags are purely user defined, but can be updated automatically according to script rules. User- and organization-defined flagging rules are inhereited down the organization tree so you know who is your enemy and who is your friend, and under what conditions to automatically recognize an action as hostile and automatically define them as an enemy (and post upward so your guild knows). All these complex flagging actions happen by macro so once sane rules are written, they just work. Basic rule system will be available, and can be modified to your taste. You can base your rules off of visible standards and banners displayed by characters (which are actual in-game objects, not to be confused with the recognition flags themselves), or off anything you like.

GMs and the player community will provide various guards and flagging systems for various regions. These guards are limited within the hard and fast rules of the simulation, making them helpful but far from perfect.

You can choose to display a banner/standard, or multiple ones, or none. Users may recognize you by that banner, but they also may just recognize you as an individual (automatically through the recognition skill). Flagging rules are completely user editable. Flags seen by you are just for your information, for your own macros, and otherwise have no effect in game. Flags seen by your NPCs can be acted upon in a scripted manner however you like. You will be similarly assessed by your peers.
No Safe Zones: There are no developer provided guards or safe zones, but GMs and players are expected to set these up (see User Defined Flagging above).
GM/player quests: GMs and players playing the game may provide quests using NPC bots and scripts. But they are subject to the hard and fast simulation rules and get no special treatment. Quest givers may run out of rewards, or get killed.
Deep Simulation:
- As a simulation, many things will be possible that the developers never even imagined. The rules will be low level ones. That means there are tremendous possibilities for creativity here. You don't have to play in a style that the developers pre conceived of.
- Nothing is ever created or destroyed, things only change form. Form changing rules are complex and deep, and discoverable via research and science. Some knowledge is player keyed, so you can't just look up the information on the Internet, but have to play it out for yourself.
- Recipes require certain amounts of certain forms. You can get those forms in many ways via the form changing rules. So for instance, you could tear down your ship's sail, and use the cloth to make bags.
- Everything can change form. You can chop trees down and they stay down. You can mine a hill until it is gone.
- A deep A.I., where plants and creatures both multiply and evolve. If you don't play carefully, only the most difficult to kill creatures will remain and proliferate, as the easy ones get killed to extinction. Then the world will be that much more difficult. Due to the tragedy of the commons, this is even likely.
- Everything you can see is an actual game object (except perhaps bedrock terrain and sky). There is no art just for art's sake, no trees that can't be harvested, no ground that can't be mined, no bags that can't be picked up because they are just art.
No Cheating: Obviously this will depend on being bug free. But we are designing a new game engine from the ground up with security as a primary goal.
- The server does not trust the client for anything, except to be authoritative for what your character is trying to do.
- The server does all the physics that matter. For physics that don't matter (visual effects with no game importance), clients do it more efficiently. We have the server doing physics to prevent the common wall hacks and speed hacks.
- The client will not know much more than it displays to you. As objects and terrain are discovered, they are incrementally revealed to the client.
- Even recognition is coded safely. If your character can't recognize something, when it goes out of scope and comes back into scope, it's handle is changed so your client software doesn't even know it is the same thing.
- The network protocol will be open. People will be able to write their own clients if they want to. The design of the game will be such that this will not give anybody a particularly undue advantage.
- We put in fast and provably secure encryption and message authentication
- Many game companies take an FPS engine (designed for FPS games and which works well in that environment) and use it for a MMORPG. This is often wrong. FPS engines are architected in a way that relies on the client to do much of the computation, opening a huge security hole that simply cannot be closed. I am rather suprised that suchly designed games can survive in the marketplace at all; Many of them have a huge exodus of players fed up with cheaters. While the community of gamers has been disappointed by this countless times now, these bad games continue to perpetuate in the market, mostly due to the marketing efforts of one engine which I will not point out by name.
Natural equilibriums and chaotic states: The game as a simulation will be designed for some things to fall into natural equilibriums, and others to continue to evolve through chaotic paths (such as arms races and "red queen" style evolution). The game will balance itself. This is important, because developer tweaking after the game goes live will always piss off a lot of people who were relying on the existing mechanics. Dynamics that come into play of group interests vs. individual interests will not be impinged (prisoner's dilemmas, tragedies of the commons, subterfuge/mutiny, etc).
Deep skill tree: The skill tree is deep. You won't know a skill even exists until you have recognized it. The cognition system is unique and we hope it will be fun. The amount skills improve is selected from a random distribution, but they always improve, so you can maintain a constant feeling of progress. It is possible for everyone to be quite unique and useful to their clan/guild/alliance by diving deeply down a skill tree branch.
Skill Facets and Techniques: Every skill is broken down into facets. For instance, "axe combat" contains at least the facets "axe grip" and "axe follow through". The value of the skill "axe combat" is a mathematical combination of its facets. Each facet can be realized via a technique. For many skill facets, you will start with a technique called instinctual, or a technique called intuitive. Every race has certain skills they are better at, and their instintual techniques will be better. If your intuition is high, your intuitive technique will be good. However, instinctual and intuitive techniques are the bottom rung... better techniques are to be found. You can select the technique you choose to use through the skill interface or via macro. Nothing will indicate which technique is better, you'll just have to try them. And in some cases there is no clear-cut "better".
Skill Knowledge: Every skill facet technique has two values: knowledge and experience. Except for instinctual and intuitive techniques, your knowledge of a technique starts at zero and the technique doesn't even show up in the list until you first discover it, read about it, study it from a trainer, or if you are very lucky and focused properly, by epiphany. For example, you might find a book in a dwarven archive describing axe combat, and detailing techiques for two facets of axe combat: dwarven technique axe grip, and dwarven technique axe followthrough. There may be several other axe combat techniques not in that book, and if you don't have something better, they will have to be set to instinctual or intuitive. You can also discover technique in the wild by observing the animals, perhaps the badger open claw technique for hand-to-hand. Or you can contact a battle training organization and train more quickly with the help of a willing (hopefully) expert teacher. You can train by reading books as well, and you can write books which include the skill knowledge that you yourself have. With good writing and language skills, you can communicate most of what you know, but with bad writing and language skills your book will be a pale reflection of your knowledge.
Skill Experience: Use of the skill increases your experience. You need both knowledge and experience to maximize your skill. When you die that character loses all skill experience, but skill knowledge is retained by your account.
Focus: Success in the game is mediated by focus. Whether it be a battle you are engaging in (focus on killing this person), the chance of picking up a skill that is happening nearby (choosing to be alert), the chance of seeing something otherwise hidden, or the chance of realizing something about an experiment you recently did (focus on concepts), it is all mediated by focus. Everyone gets a fixed number of focus points, and you are free to distribute them into whatever you want to focus on at the moment, as long as you know about such a focus target. Focus targets comprise a shallow tree, akin to but different from the deep skill tree. Focus is all about trade-offs. If you focus entirely on killing someone, you will have no chance to learn from their technique.
Player keyed logic: Many recipes, spell invocations, battle strategies, and some other things will be partially player keyed. That means that you cannot go look up the answers on a web site somewhere, because what worked for a different player won't quite work the same way for you. While this does not mirror the real world, it makes the game better.
Experimental architectures: We intend to experiment with a few exciting architectures:
- P2P: Player to player gaming with the server intervening only where it's absolutely necessary
- Commit reveal simulteniety: simultaneous actions (e.g. roshambo) can be coded with secure commit reveal protocols, preventing cheating without the need for a server to intervene
- Off Server objects: objects, such as a sword you created, and all of it's details, might be stored in your client only, not the server. It is recognized authentic by other players because it is digitally signed, and a single bit is stored on an object server indicating it is still valid (if it changes, or is transferred to someone else, it goes invalid and a new object is created to replace it). So you can't make valid copies, and there is no point keeping it after it breaks.

Is this another MMORPG?

The Eye of Ba‛al is a MOG, not a MMORPG.

That first M in MMORPG stands for massive, and we don't intend to be massive. It is not that the code will be written with any slack... it should scale massively. We just don't have big ambitions. The Eye of Ba‛al is intended to be more of a proving ground for our game ideas rather than a live, massive, and actively maintained game world. Although it could potentially develop into such. We're leaving our options open.

What happened to Role Playing? Why not a MORPG?

In most games that claim to be MMORPGs, the RP part is optional. Many RPs want RP to be enforced. Other gamers think that is crazy and even go to great lengths to not RP, such as naming themselves IPwnU or TommyGun. We don't plan to enforce RP, so we are not going to put it in our acronym.

Why did you decide to write a game? Aren't there enough MMORPGs out there? Do we really think you have a competitive advantage in that market?

The basic reason I started writing this game was that no game in existence includes the combination of features that I find most exciting. And most features in current games are not structured well enough, too simple, or map poorly to how life actually works. So I wanted to try out some combinations of features to see what happens. I don't think anyone has written a game that delves as far into the realm of open Sandbox as we intend to.

I also believe that I have been playing games long enough to have abstracted quite a lot of answers to the question "What is fun?" This is a question that belongs to the field of psychology. If you understand who you are, and why you like playing games, then you can begin to derive the particular things about games that work, and the things that don't work. We've got some ideas but we won't know how they will pan out until we put them into a game.

Additionally, I am a big admirer of the beauty and complexity of well designed dynamic systems, and I wish to play with model simulations to see what happens.

I also like hacking, and I think the macro system, flagging systems, and complex skill system will create a very wide open set of possibilities for people to go nuts with, if that is their thing.

I didn't start writing The Eye of Ba‛al to make money. I'm much more interested in developing a game that I would personally enjoy. The game is more like an open source project than a startup company, but we haven't open sourced it. We are leaving our options open.

What are your influences?

Colossal Cave Adventure, Zork, ZorkII, ZorkIII, Ultima (III, IV, V, VII, VIII, underworld), Multiple MUDs and MUSHs and MOOs including Achaea, Doom/Hexen/Quake, Diablo, Diablo II, Ultima Online, EverQuest, Neverwinter Nights, EverQuestII, Vanguard SOH, EVE Online, Guild Wars, Lord of the Rings Online, Mortal Online, Atlantica.

Of all these games, EVE Online has impressed me the most. I love the corporation vs corporation battling for star systems. I love the complexity and skill that goes into outfitting ships. The skill system is interesting. It almost has a true economy which balances itself, and the market window is quite nice. Markets require a lot of information to operate, and work best with both bid and ask prices, and many other games simply lack the infrastructure. I like the manufacturing. I like seeking out objects deep in space. The quests and DED areas are pretty silly themeparky things that don't fit.

Mortal Online has some impressive sandbox features and goals as well, but they still miss the mark of what I am trying to achieve by a fairly wide margin. I like the first-person view and the combat is pretty good. Crafting is deep but certainly doesn't have the depth of material transformations I'm imagining. I'm disappointed in their screwed up economy, plethora of dead art, simplistic flagging system, and slot-based inventory, among other things. Despite their beta trailer, you can't really change the world. You kill animals and they respawn. Of course it remains to be seen what they can do, since they are still in beta. My biggest concern is that they are using an FPS engine with deep and hard-to-resolve security issues.

Achaea had a great role playing community that I haven't seen bested anywhere else. But any game could have that. I don't think the design of the game itself brought that about.

UO was the first graphical MMORPG as far as I know, but it had some (arguably) fairly major PvP and space problems, at least when I was playing at the very beginning, and it is quite old now. Many people in the Mortal Online community loved the original UO days, so my experience may have been atypical.

EverQuest was very exciting in its day, breaking through barriers as the first (?) FPS MMORPG. We had all dreamed that was possible, and it was vindicating and exciting to play it for reals. I loved getting drunk, and dropping copper coin excess to lose weight.

EverQuest II took a number of huge steps backwards. You could no longer drop things. You couldn't get drunk. You could no longer be taken over by spells (one of my best experiences in EQ was being taken over by a GM spell during an event with Fiona Vie and killing my guildmate -- it was fun because I had no idea such a spell was even possible, so I thought my keyboard was broken). Learning languages disappeared.. something that should have rather been expanded upon. Quests became all laid out for you with popups and quest logs... so you didn't have to jot down all the things you wanted to remember, and you knew too easily what the next step was. No more figuring it out, just click and run like a dumb slave. And I could go on. Very disappointing. Unfortunately my closest MMORPG friend is still playing EQII, has a great community and won't leave for a better game.

Vanguard SOH is massive and pretty, but it doesn't have any truly impressive game mechanics to speak of that hadn't been done before. And diplomacy is pathetic. But many of the end-game areas are really well done. Nice art, nice fun mechanics.

LOTRO is a nice story if you are a Tolkien fan. But way too linear.

The only thing nice I can say about Atlantica is that it appears to have a lot of complexity. Just a kiddie game.

I have resisted playing WoW. It just doesn't seem interesting to me.

Many MMORPGs have a 'grind'. Does The The Eye of Ba‛al

I think we will have less of a grind than any MMORPG I have played to date.

I personally am not excited about grinds. Many MMORPGs are primarily a big grind. Over the course of game play, most of it is so boring that many players watch TV and chat with friends while they play MMORPGs because the game is just too predictable. If there was no social atmosphere in the game world, it would be completely pointless.

Is doing what is expected of you thrilling? I don't think so. "Go kill 10 kobolds, and come back here and I'll give you a reward." this is tedium. If doing what was expected of us was fun, we'd be hanging around our Mothers all day long hoping for guidance or a task. Pathetic.

In a great many games, most activities required are real drags. Quests that make you run to point A, then back to point B, then back to point A... how is that fun? To me, it is not. Maybe if PvP was allowed it would be more risky and thus more exciting. Or at the very least, if you had to run through a camp of goblins and dodge them maybe that would be fun. But just running through safe area because the game makes you, that is just a boring grind. So is slaughtering monsters that are not challenging and require no thought. But I've been in many situations where the next harder monster would predictably kill me, and the one's I'm killing are just boring. It's the gap that makes this a grind. And the predictability.

Some games are not much more fun than seeing how many mouse clicks I can make, or how long I can wait... I'm into month 4 and I'm up to seven million mouse clicks, I'm so über (consider Facebook Mafia, for instance).

I think we can do better.

But, for all its malignment, some amount of grind is not really such a bad thing. Engagement, even at low mental effort, is important to any game. A game is something that engages your mind. It keeps you busy. Whether it be a crossword puzzle, solitaire, or a MMORPG, playing a game is mental exercise. It allows you to pass the time, and it allows you to procrastinate things you don't enjoy doing. How many days have you just wanted to press buttons because you were tired and didn't feel like thinking? How many times have you pulled up a game that requires more active thought, like chess, and then just killed the window because you just didn't have the mental energy to devote? How many times have you played 18 hours in a row? Were you mentally sharp for all of those hours, or was a lot of it in a half sleep daze? Well, during those times, you're going to want to have something to do, something that progresses you. That's what a grind is for.

But if that was all, I would halt development right now. I don't want to create just another grind. We have enough of those. There needs to be paths of progress that require real thought, real engineering, real partnership, real insight. Different paths... not all of them will require all of these. Some paths will be soloable. Some will be entirely grinds. Others will be very challenging mentally. And remember, the devs are not making up paths... I'm speaking generically here. And much of what will keep you occupied are the actions of other people. Those are very dynamic. You can choose from a huge smorgasborg of things to do. I think it will be clear which types of things are "grindy" and which are mentally challenging fairly early in your game play experience.

How is battle not going to be a grind?

Consider the following games: chess, go, sokobon. These games have quite simple rules, and yet produce very engaging game play. We are aiming to completely break free of the D&D battle model, and move towards a strategic battle model that, again with simple rules, is quite engaging. We don't know if we will achieve that, but we are trying. This is not about pressing buttons quickly, but about solving a puzzle. We are also incorporating game theory concepts such as prisoner's dilemma type situations among multi party play, encouraging possible subterfuge and deception between grouped players, rather than players always cooperating within groups against the mob.

How else will the game not be a grind?

For one, there will be PvP. So you cannot just run from point A to point B if other players might ambush you... you must be on guard and ready. Venturing outside of your home territory, protected by your NPCs and your guild and alliance members, will be very risky and likely to get you killed if you don't take a few members with you (but staying home is quite safe), so there will always be the goal and challenge of pushing forward and claiming more territory, or of exploring without getting caught.

Also, there will be scripting (see question about this below). So if anything does turn into a grind, you are welcome, encouraged even, to script it. This might include things like harvesting.

There is going to be PvP?

Yes, there will be PvP.

I've talked to a number of people who don't like PvP, and it seems to me that the main concern is that there will always be quite dedicated players who intend to kill you for sport, and thus if you want to play casually, you will frequently be killed and the game quickly becomes frustrating.

I think this sort of situation is entirely avoidable. Consider a homeland and front lines of battle. If you don't feel like being particularly dedicated, then perhaps you never venture into enemy territory. If all you want to be is a crafter, I think it will be quite hard for an enemy to get so far into friendly territory to kill you.

People who don't behave within their own kingdom (kill their own kind) will not last long.

And it's always more profitable to farm people, rather than killing them. So the traditional griefer (if it is even possible) who repeatedly kills newbies, while he can and will collect a lot of beginner loot, will never achieve the power of the person who farms people instead, supporting them and growing them, but taxing them... and so these more powerful leaders have a strong incentive and ability to wipe out that traditional griefer.

Also, in most games I've played, griefers often rely on cheats. We are going to great lengths to prevent such cheats.

I think PvP has been implemented somewhat poorly in most games and so it has gotten a bad rap. And many games actually tack PvP onto a theme park game, where it just doesn't integrate well at all.

PvP can be done well.

EVE Online does a fairly good job of managing PvP. In EVE Online, you can live your entire existence in safe zones and still become quite rich and successful. If you join any decent corporation, you have a social network which provides safety for those risky zones. Getting ganked doesn't happen too often. Large powerful ships are not necessarily unduly powerful against small weak ships (most of the firepower flows right past). If you are on guard you can almost always escape. And since space is so damn big, hiding is easy (people can search you out, but it takes time). When you do get killed, it can often escalate into wars or diplomatic negotiations, so the PvP ends up sparking exciting social situations. And you can save yourself in a clone.

We are not going to do PvP the same way, of course. Our world is vastly different. In The Eye of Ba‛al, defense will be much easier than offense. Methods of escape will be common and various. Defensive strength increases towards areas you have pre configured (protecting the homeland). And the goals of achievement in this game are not all about PvP. PKing will be a difficult specialty.

I find PvP to be necessary in order for a game to be truly engaging. If you are playing against a computer, you can never be truly challenged, nor can you ever be truly emotionally engaged. A computer controlled skeleton has never excited fear in my belly the same way a known to be human PKer entering the room has. It's really another whole dimension of engagement.

PvP creates communities. It's hard to solo with large PvP groups roaming the lands. PvP creates heroes. Without villains, there can be no heroes. When you kill a player villain, the sense of satisfaction you achieve, and the social community support and fame you win, are palpable. There is no comparison.

So there are a lot of mechanisms to make PvP available, but much less of a big scary deal than you might think. I don't expect it to be a big issue, although I cannot predict what will happen.

What classes are there? What races are there?

We want to have a large set of races. But classes are intended to be role played, not defined by us.

I never liked the fact that at the beginning of most RPGs, you are forced to chose a class. And that decision affects everything. While you may research it as much as you can, and distribute various points optimally, you will always inevitably learn things during game play that may make you regret certain decisions, or wish your character was just a little bit different ("ah... I wish I had a priest, not a cleric, that's what I was going for... but damned if I'm gonna start over now"). In my view, a necro spell should be available to everybody, but just much more difficult to achieve if you are presently, for instance, a paladin which cannot have necro spells (you'll have to unpaladin yourself first). We are developing a complex spider web of skills and abilities that, while some are mutually exclusive, all are always available to every player if you put in the effort. You simply must be willing to lessen some aspects of yourself in order to get better at other aspects.

As for races, there will be permanent differences, limits which you cannot exceed in your chosen race that other characters will exceed due to their different race choices. But these will be clearly laid out, and will have much less of an impact as class does in other games.

Are there levels? What is the level cap?

The concept of levels takes a complex world and simplifies it into a singular goal. Some games have realized the folly in this and split off crafting (and now diplomacy in Vanguard SOH) as separate leveling spheres. But I never understood why there should be a generalized level separate from skills and abilities.

When I think of a level 42 cleric, I don't think of a player who has chosen the role of cleric from the outset, and then killed monsters to get to level 42. I think of someone who has done enough healing to get to level 42 skill in clericmanship. If you do a lot of killing, conversely, you get better at killing, and it doesn't improve your ability to heal. Killing, clericmanship, or whatever we come up with, will be skills anyone can acquire, not classes you are pigeonholed into. But be aware, some races will be better at some skills than other races based on underlying characteristics of those races. So, instead of a level, there will be hundreds of skills, each with it's own level.

What sorts of cool things can I achieve?

As players progress down certain paths, their character models will change markedly. Your achievements will be no secret. You may be surprised when a player comes into view who is much much larger than most everybody else, or who shines bright white light across most of what you can see, or who is so dark you can hardly make them out, or who causes the landscape around them to warp in their presence.

Most MMORPGs throw in all the cool effects right at the beginning. They differentiate between a few classes and races ; you might see another race and think "wow, that thing they do, that's cool". But as players progress, they don't really get that much different. Perhaps better looking armor. But really, the spell particles all look about the same, confusingly so. Even the things people fight are the same. I was surprised to be fighting beetles and spiders at level 40.

In The Eye of Ba‛al there is a clear and marked difference and progression as you move along the achievement path towards any particular end. The game may start out pretty bland, but with time invested, it becomes epic.

In fact, it starts out so bland, it's just a black screen. You can't see. You can't walk. You can't even rotate. And you only have one skill: the ability to adjust your focus. Everything must be learned through focus and skills. The only game commands that are not tied to skills are the options menu and the quit command.

That's another point of distinction between us and a commercial outfit. With a commercial outfit, they have to throw all the cool effects at you from the beginning to try to get you hooked. And then as time progresses, you learn they don't have much else to offer. We hold back the lions share of effects, art, and even the best lore for the advanced play.

Is there any game lore I can read?

The only lore that we are admitting to at present are the few sentences at the top of this web page. At this point, we aren't giving any more hints.

Lore may have coded messages in them, and we want people to get excited about and study the lore. Studying the lore will give you definate advantages.

Game lore will be quite integral to this game.

Game lore in other games has consistently disappointed me. Several times I have gotten myself really excited and worked up about a new game, studied the lore, hoping to have an advantage, hoping to solve some hidden riddle, hoping I could get into the game and take advantage of the lore I studied. No such luck.

I have heard from lore writers and role players who have become rather dissatisfied and jaded by the gaming community. Players don't bother to read the lore. The lore writers out there have produced marvelous stuff. And it's not the fault of the content itself. It's the fault of management.

Game lore, rather than being integral, has been pasted on like veneer over MDF. In most MMORPGs, game lore is almost entirely separate from game content. I don't blame players for passing it over. The lore is pointless, unrelated. It just slows you down. The game puts at odds the goal of achievement (race on through) with the goal of having fun and immersing yourself by reading the lore. Those goals should have never been put at odds.

We believe that lore needs to be on the critical path, such that it is at least more difficult, and perhaps impossible, to progress along certain game paths without reading, studying, and possibly even solving the lore.

What about realism? Is the game going to be as phony as these questions on this web page?

(Nobody submitted these questions, this is not a FAQ, these are just a way for me to organize my thoughts)

I've always been fond of realism. Of course you can only take this so far, but it must be taken far enough to fool your lower mind, in order for the game to grab you. The lower mind does not comprehend time, nor can it distinguish fantasy from reality. That is why you feel emotions when you watch a movie, even though you know it's not real. So the fact that the game is clearly known to be a fantasy by your higher mind doesn't normally interfere with your ability to pretend and enjoy. But if your lower mind detects too many inconsistencies, you will lose your fantasy in a harsh and displeasing way.

Consider a game with a wall with a picture of a switch on the wall. Perhaps you think "aha! maybe this switch will open the gate" but for all your trying it turns out it was just a drawing of a switch in the graphics. That kind of thing really irks me. What about fighting a skeleton holding a long sword, and when he dies, he doesn't have it in his corpse? What about a rat that drops plate mail? How could a rat have carried such heavy armor!? Ridiculous. What about taking a big bag and sewing it into several smaller bags? What? No such recipe? But I'm sure this is enough leather, and damn it I'm a master seamstress!

Inconsistencies like these are not only irritating, they make it impossible to devise strategies based on discovery and creativity. If your creative ideas are constantly dashed against the rocks, and you are forced to do it the way the game designers intended, then you are just a slave playing a grind, limited to the theme park attractions that are currently being made available.

In most MMORPGs you can't be creative like turning a bag into smaller bags because most games require a designer to specify exactly what can and cannot be done, and there are just way too many possibilities that can be imagined.

In The Eye of Ba‛al we take a different approach. We specify the low level physics of the game, conservation of matter and energy, chemistry rules, object size and containment rules, material rules, etc. How they get applied by you as a player is up to you, and your creativity can be unleashed. Things will progress unpredictably to us designers, but we are not afraid, because with consistent underlying rules, we know that we can constrain most (hopefully all) possible melt down scenarios. So we don't fear the unknown result of what our alterworld will develop into, but rather we look forward to being surprised by what people come up with.

However, some things will be not quite so immersive. We won't require a first person camera. For fairness and openness, you can run the client to see the world from any perspective you wish (the server will only tell you about things your character can see if it turned through 360 degrees). There will be GUI components that you can amass over time. You can define your own and attach them to scripts. As you achieve skills, they often come with new buttons or GUI components. So you will be driving a computer interface. That is, in a way, not quite as immersive as what for instance Mortal Online is doing. But it is a tradeoff we are happy with.

Is the world dynamic? Can I have any lasting effect on the world?

Absolutely.

In almost every MMORPGs, you absolutely can't. And in most, you only have a small effect (e.g. in most games you can have just 1 house). EVE Online does a rather good job of bucking the trend here, as at least the battle lines are constantly being redrawn in their universe, and you can setup factories and base stations and such, and drop canisters for use later.

In most MMORPGs, the world has been designed around pre engineered "theme park" content, which requires a certain "state of things" to be consistent. As such, you may kill a monster, but in a few minutes, pop! here he is, he's back! Nothing you do ever really changes the world.

We intend to have deformable landscape, hills that get mined away into valleys, races of beasts which morph over time through evolution, or get slaughtered to extinction.

Imagine killing all the deer in a herd. No more deer will spawn, because there are none left to do the spawning. But now the grass will grow fast because nothing is eating it. So if a buffalo wanders over, she's gonna spawn like crazy off of all the energy she gets from all that grass. And her descendants will carry the "wandering buffalo" gene (most likely) so now you've got a shit load of powerful buffalo wandering all over your area of the world. You've cured the deer infestation, but created a worse one.

Or perhaps you don't want to kill all the deer. You want to farm them. But how do you protect them from other players? This will have to be solved by the player community. You could implement property rights, or a hunting license quota system. We will provide generic tools so you can do that, and if you get enough NPC bots working for you, you can script them so they enforce your rules for you, round the clock. And you can post bulletin boards in your controlled area detailing the laws of that area, giving information about guilds living there, possibly sharing scripts, or whatever else you want, but certainly including the message "Don't kill our deer or the guards will attack you!"

If one of your powerful wizards brings on a storm and flooding to help battle against the approaching enemy army, the side effect may be poor crop results, meaning your people have less energy and can't fight as well.

Everything gets intertwined. The effects of what you do propogate.

How do I win?

There is no such thing. If you have no creative passion, if you can't come up with your own goals, then you should not play The Eye of Ba‛al.

Are there quests? Can I research them on the Internet?

Yes, there will be quests.

But quests will not be part of the engine. They are content built on top of the engine, by some GM players, from the the same tools and abilities that every player has (once advanced). Thus they are subject to the simulation rules like everything else, and get no special status. Thus, your quest giver might get killed!

Because quests are user created (and GM created, as users) and subject to game world rules, they will probably change fairly frequently. So you can look them up on the Internet, but that will give no guarantees. If they are related to or involve science, they may be player keyed. If they relate to organization, they may be organization keyed. Spoilers will no doubt be available for some things, but much of the content cannot be spoiled.

I prefer to avoid the simple checklist quests like "kill 3 kobolds, and run talk to Joe over there."

Especially in the beginning, for tutorial and orientation purposes, there will be quests. Also, as you enter new areas or cities there may be orientation quests as ways to familiarize yourself with the features and social structure of the area. The player community has a whole lot of work to do in order to orient new players, communicate information about organizations, and about laws that various organizations are actively enforcing. If you have a clan, and you have a few laws, you'd better put up an NPC bot that lets strangers know what the rules of your area are. Otherwise they might kill your deer thinking it's fair game, and then if they get impinged or killed by your bot, you may have a war on your hands.

There will also be lots of questing that isn't in a well known quest like form. The more intricate and interesting pre designed content will be in the areas of discovering the physics rules, exploring the focus and skill trees, and exploring the map. Also, there will be a lot of GM created lore and reward. Discovering what does what, how things combine, ancient research notes, the interconnection between something over here in the game, and something over there that puts an itch in your mind and makes you wonder, finding the best way to kill skeletons, figuring out how to make swords sharper, tricking other players into a trap, learning to herd rats over a cliff because you need their skins to make bags... these will be the kinds of things you will discover and quest for. And I'm barely touching the surface here. Because the simulation is low level, lots of things will become possible that I can't even imagine.

Theme park style quests don't work well for us. Pre designed static quests don't meld well with a dynamic world (quest giver runs out of rewards to give out, or gets killed), and can be looked up on the Internet. That spoils the fun, as it puts at odds the goal of winning (looking it up) with the goal of immersing yourself and having fun (playing it out). I personally am of the psychology that I look it up, and while some may say it's my fault for spoiling my own fun, I believe a game can be made where the players are not put into such a dilemma in the first place.

Are there restrictions on what I can name my character?

No. We don't enforce role playing. You can even use double spaces and weird unicode characters. This won't matter because your name for your character is not a public thing. Other people, when they meet you, can name you whatever they like. Names are not owned by who they refer to (a common misconception), but rather by the people doing the referring. While you might think you're name is IPwnedU, I always see you on my screen as "dumbass" because that is how I can more easily remember you.

What if I want to send a tell to somebody I haven't met up with in game yet? Don't I need their name?

You can't. Not in game. You can use email, or skype, or teamspeak, or ventrilo, or talk to them in person. But not in game. In order to communicate in game, you need to be within earshot of the person you are talking to, or have special devices or abilities which will require you to first setup those devices or abilities by meeting that person first (and assigning a name to know them by).

If I don't know somebody's name, how can I report them?

Our client will have a full activity log for approximately 5 minutes worth of activity. If you wish to report something, activate the macro that saves the last 5 minutes of log (before it gets overwritten with new data; it's a circular buffer) and send it to us. We can then replay exactly what you saw, and match up client keyed game object handles to the server's actual game object handles, and then trace that back to the account controlling that avatar.

I heard about making it so there is no cheating. But what about gold farmers?

This game has been designed around a closed system of physics. Matter can not be created or destroyed. The server never just "creates" a reward for your quest, for instance. Rather, it moves something that already exists, to you. It's a closed economy, and a closed physical system. In this way, many of the problems caused by farmers and cheats cannot develop. If someone figures out a way to get gold from somewhere, pretty soon that gold will run out and they will have to try a new strategy somewhere else.

Can you have multiple accounts?

It's hard to stop it. We could limit the game to one account per credit card, IP address, or processor. And most likely we will. And we can set a policy stating one account per natural person. But enforcement is difficult. There will always be people with 2 credit cards, 3 computers, and/or 4 IP addresses.

Also keep in mind that via one account, you can potentially have multiple characters all active in the game simultaneously, either via scripts or by running two or three clients on different computers, or via task switching. So multiple accounts may not be much of a bonus.

Can you buy and sell gold on eBay?

I personally don't care. But I know a lot of people do. If there was a way to prevent this, I would enable it, but I'm at a bit of a loss for how to detect things that happen outside of my sphere of influence, much less enforce my will upon them. I'm open to suggestions.

Why are you allowing scripts and bots?

There is no way to fundamentally tell the difference between a person and a computer. If a game client allows people to enter commands, it can always be subverted to allow scripts and bots to enter commands. So rather than beat them, we have decided to join them.

This decision has help solve one of the more fundamental problems of MMORPGs: the grind. As a player, once you figure out how to do something, and you don't want to bother with the actual mechanics of doing it anymore, you are encouraged to script that action. While that is going on, you can switch to another of your characters and do something more interesting, and then check on your scripted character periodically. You get the benefit of the grind as if you actually did the grind, but don't have to actually bother doing it. You maximize your performance, and can get on with the more interesting parts of game play.

Bots also makes a lot of dynamic user created content much more prevalent and available. This allows people to setup quests. It allows people to setup a merchant, or to make a bank (with lots of guard bots). It would be boring if I had to manually control a merchant character 24x7 so that I could run a leather shop... much nicer to script it, to let the bot do it while I go exploring. Then I can still have a well known leather shop making a profit for me even while I'm sleeping. Bots enable the continual enforcement of laws and social rules within territories without needing actual players to constantly stand guard and at the ready.

A user friendly scripting language will be built into the client so no hacks will be necessary. And since your scripts will run on the server, they will perform without lag issues, which gives a much faster and fairer result than hacking the client.

Will there be multiple server worlds?

Probably not. I really hope not. Breaking up the game into multiple different non interacting worlds with completely separate history timelines detracts from the social cohesion, the sense of realness of the alterworld. It's hard enough to swallow and get wrapped up in the idea of an alterworld, much more so if there are many of them, and non interacting. It's also a bummer if one of your friends plays on one server, and another on a different server. While this problem will always remain between games, I don't want to exacerbate it within a game.

Multiple servers may be necessary for massive games, but is unlikely for ours. And I'm glad for it.

Will there be instancing?

For many of the same reasons that there will not be multiple server worlds, there will also not be instancing. Additionally, PvP and instancing don't mix very well (instances allow you to escape!).

What about zones?

There will not be any zones that you notice. The world will appear seamless and smooth.

The server will in fact define zones as a way of managing a large system efficiently, but this is entirely an implementation detail and should not be apparent to you.

How big is the world?

While we haven't got the technology working just yet, we want the world to be a round globe (not a square flatland).

At the maximum, the world would have a radius of about 8192m and a surface area of about 843 sq km. This figure was chosen because single precision floating point at the extents still resolves to within 1 millimeter.

But for practical reasons when starting out, with a wimpy server and/or few players, we will start with a much smaller world, with a 1024m radius and 13.17 sq km surface area. Even that small world will give us massive amounts of material to track (the small world will obviously be round, you can see the curve of the horizon clearly).

When is this game going to be released?

I do not know. If you want it to be released soon, send me lots and lots of money, a bunch of developers and even more artists.

How far along is it?

We have a working client and server, quite stable, but with only a few features turned on. You can run around on an empty landscape, and that is about it. Before we go any further, we are hardening that part, and developing a lot of hardened common code necessary for the next steps. As code develops, the features available will come faster and faster.

For instance, we are writing a high performance high security network layer, leveraging lots of published open source code, but cleaning it up (so far we haven't found a solid solution among some 30+ candidates, but we keep looking). We are improving our object serialization (using boost). None of this will add any visible features, but it will harden and strengthen our code and make developing future features quicker, easier, and more correct.

While we may be designing a new game engine, we are not coding everything ourselves. We already use about 15 open source library components, including most prominantly the OGRE graphics engine. And we are linking in more open source work all the time. There is also a lot of free art available, which we intend to leverage. Our policy is to leverage other people's work, if somebody has already done a good job of it, and if the licensing allows commercial usage (LGPL, MIT, or similar licensing).

We may announce changes here as things progress. Then again, we might not.

How can I get involved?

If you are a game developer, or an artist, contact .

If you want to beta test the game, sorry, we are not even close.

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