Interview with Casey Flynn of Faery Tale Online
Posted by Lorne Whiting Mon, 01 Jun 2009 07:10:00 GMT
I don’t do enough around the site, so here’s an interview with Casey Flynn (AKA Lumin) of Faery Tale Online, a unique browser-based MMO that involves a lot more incest, fratricide, and thievery than its name implies. Some of the main hooks of the game are its unique birth system, coupled with a perma-death system, so player deaths have a lot more weigh than in a normal game, and its lack of premade history, so players create the whole world.
It’s got a lot of focus on role-playing, something I’m not too keen on, but the game’s approach to, well, being a game is too cool for me to not like it, even with the sizable wait just to be born.
Signed up and… bla, looks like there’s quite a queue to be born.
Women need to have more babies…
Anyway, anyone know if this is the kind of thing that would work on a HTTPS connection?
Apparently they are still building races into the game. Clearly what they need is a race of cave-dwelling spider monkeys. They would build elaborate steampunk devices in the towers of their pitch-black cities, which are nestled comfortably amidst the stalactites (the ones on the ceiling) of huge caverns. Let’s make this happen.
stopped reading there and headed straight to the website to sign up
Is this in any way affiliated with The Faery Tale Adventure?
Ugh. You can’t choose what character you want to play, you can’t even choose your NAME, and heaven forbid if you want to be a mage. Ugh. Horrible shades of Castle Marrach. When are game designers going to understand that games are meant to be fun in the ways that real life isn’t?
I’m going to check it out, the family system sounds interesting, I can see how it will help a new player get help, advice and get involved in the community quicker. I can also see how it might be a complete waste of time.
I love this message, “Your position in the birth queue is: 272”
You know, they must have REALLY accelerated pregnancies or it’s going to take a LONG while for Adam and Eve to be that busy. :)
Looks a lot like Cantr, another free browser MMO heavily focused on roleplaying and community. But in that one you don’t have to wait to be born.
Although I’m probably going to be waiting years to be born :(, I think the waiting time at least will help keep some trouble makers out. Plus, I guess in the future, when there are more people in game there will be more babies being born. Unless everyone dies out.
It might, but it might give them an easy in. If I wanted to grief this game, my first priority would be to attack child-bearing female PCs to keep the queue huge.
I’ve always thought the whole idea of birth and families and stuff would be an interesting experiment to try out.
I’m 267th in queue and hope I’m born a female. It will be my goal to be pregnant as often as possible. My long term goal is to create a factory with an assembly line of fertile females deep within a mountain labrynth.
Same as any JRPG, except you actually get to play as your role rather than following a pre-scripted plot.
Besides, you can choose what kind of character you play, and your name, too. You’re a tiny bit more limited based on what race you’re born into, but there’s nothing preventing you from betraying your heritage and giving yourself a new name and all that. As for being a mage, I’m fairly certain that’s still up in the air; if Lumin decides to make FTO high-fantasy, you might see a lot of people getting trained in magic or some such. If he goes for low-fantasy, then it’ll be rare, with good reason.
Currently the game assigns you the gender that you sign up with. You can change that any time before birth.
Just so you know, there were purges of inactive people before, and it cut out like 3/4th of the queue. It’ll probably happen again :]
Thanks, Karlito!
… … …
In 1 day, I’ve gone from 234 -> 233. At this rate, it’ll be 2010 before I can play. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s a cool concept… but…
I dunno, make people give birth to quadruplets or something.
There should be a dog-like people, that can give birth to whole litters at once. Problem solved.
Yeah, a zerg race or something could be fun, too.
There are around 90 characters online so it should get faster on the fall.The queue that is.
Pessimist.
(cough) there are dog people (cough)
registration was a pain in the ass… whats with that totally unreadable captcha?
Um, not quite. The thing about those pre-scripted plots is that you know they’re pre-scripted so that your character turns out to rock, no matter how badly they start. With multiplayer unconstrained RPGs, you pretty much have to have stats that force your character to rock, because other people aren’t going to.
Right, but there’s a difference between being rare because it’s challenging to get, and being rare because the game just randomly decides that you can’t be a wizard and the next person to log in can.
Moose, I really think you are missing nearly the entire point of the game. You can choose what name you TELL everyone… Same difference. It’s like rolling organically in a pen & paper game; It’s what you make of the stats, not what the stats are. It *is* about fun, just a different kind…
And, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the game is still fun in a lot of ways that real life isn’t. I expect to be able to do lots of stuff in game that I can’t do in real life. And best of all, when I die a horrible death I have a guaranteed reincarnation waiting for me. Yippie kai yay.