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as the title says,i’m quite.. concerned a bit on the development of oort online, not of the game but the familiarity of the development, i first questioned this with the discovery of coal, here we have this mystical and mysterious land, ruled by giant beast and the first thing i discover is… coal, not tranuliite or some weird metal ore but something familiar, and frankly, obvious, i thought sadly to minecraft, and how sooner or later we could be mining diamonds within a few weeks… meh
but.
i know that the game is quite early in dev, and things we have now are tpyically the mainstate of voxel games but i feel with the direction of the game, i would wait until maybe after 1.0 to get the “oort online” content that everyone says they want, not because the game is designed that way, but because people would rather build upon things they are already familiar with.
now i dont question the creativity of the backers as well, i see alot of unique places and ideas on this forum, but i also see alot of “our world” aspects too.
so to wrap this up i ask two questions for all the backers here on the forum
” what is your vision for oort online/ what do you vision 1.0 being like”
and
” do you perfer a mix of fantasy and realism? mostly fresh and new content? or for the majority of the game to mimic rhe comfort of our worlds aspects and mechanics?”
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How’d you know it was coal? I still can’t figure out how to ID what I’m digging up.
Anyway, about your point. Suppose you enter the kitchen one day, and there’s a device on the counter that you’ve never seen before. It has a hinged door on the front, two buttons, and a dial. The buttons are labeled “pregortize” and “frobulate.” The dial is covered with runic symbols with no obvious pattern of progression.
What do you do with it? Presumably it’s there to do something to food–it’s in the kitchen, after all. But maybe it isn’t. Maybe it cleans jewelry and was left in the kitchen by mistake. If your goal is to not waste food (food costs money), and there’s no manual in evidence, is it smart to place food in the device and press “pregortize?”
In MMOs (or games in general) it doesn’t matter whether a rat is called a rat or a ‘fluffenbiss.’ You find out that it bites you and causes injury all the same. Unfortunately a mineral (if it’s a mineral) sample doesn’t bite, or (presumably) spontaneously burst into flame. In fact, it might not be a mineral at all. Having it identified as “tranulite” or my person favorite, “illudium phosdex,” isn’t helpful. One might as well not have it identified at all. In order to reduce the level of player frustration, we should assume that because we don’t all read Oortian, the translation ‘coal’ shows up for us in a language we can read, and that we’re (as in ourselves, or our Oortian proxies) not completely ignorant. We can assume that in Oortian science (whatever there is of it), coal is a known product, and there’s no reason to assume that it doesn’t occur more than one place in the universe. (A tectonically active planet with carbon-based plant life will eventually make coal or at least peat.) A game needs a balance of the familiar and the wondrous. This would just be an example of the familiar.
It has been written that science fiction is not about future people in a future environment–it’s about present-day people in a future environment (ignoring, for the moment, time-travel to the past). Captain Kirk and Dr. McCoy were 1960s men in a 24th century setting–otherwise they wouldn’t be comprehensible and sympathetic characters. Try to read Shakespeare or Chaucer as written and you’ll give up before you get through to the end–that’s why we read them in more updated English.
In this game (or any other), ‘coal’ is as good a name as any for ‘combustible sedimentary mineral.’ It removes any requirement for needless (and potentially frustrating) experimentation so that the player can move forward to more interesting and fruitful aspects of the game.
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