@ben@james i remember you guys talking about the new textures being important because that is the style of the game in which you want. i hope you would shed some light on just what style the game will be?
for example. there have been a discussion about power/electricity here
which got me thinking on just how the game would end up. the discussion turned to electricity and pipes. steampunk etc. which i found odd. i know you want your own style but how industrialised do you plan it to be? i personally see the game more magic/fantasy focused but could we use things such as coal to make machines and even guns?
i know its rather vague, but im not sure how to ask it. i know it might be a hard question to answer but i hope you will try
Also for the community, what style would you like to see? certain limits? i know a big one was whether or not we should have guns in the game or if that was too modern.
Its gonna be a side scrolling-first person-world war three-underwater-dating sim-sandbox-hardcore-rpg- platformer.
(I actually think the style is like steampunk, but without the punk and more shiny stuff than steam )
Personally i love steampunk, however i dont think it fits oort very well, thinks like pipes and industrialised stuff seems a bit out of place to me.
but there are some thing that heavily ties into the style of the game, the guns are a big example, i think it would be cool to have magicaly powered guns, but if it is more steampunk focused then they might be real guns. etc etc.
I think it is going to be a magic cousin to steampunk. Though I think it would be cool if they pulled in the direction of gearpunk (A smaller sub genre with focus on gears and clockwork)
So glad you brought this up. Definitely excited to see if the devs decide to share some thoughts here!!
In the meantime, let me take you back in time to 2001…
Hints of Oort: Jak & Daxter
A while back, I had this idea to share some comparisons to other games; games I thought could influence and offer some “shared DNA” with Oort.
Jak & Daxter is a PS2-era 3D platformer. The actual gameplay is much, much different from Oort – that’s not the “shared DNA” I want to highlight. What I want to highlight is the world of Jak & Daxter. Just look at these concept pieces and tell me you don’t see some Oort in them:
Jak & Daxter successfully balanced tech and magic by creating a world that was not quite traditional “fantasy” nor traditionally “sci fi” (although the sequels definitely went that way). Perhaps there is something that can provide inspiration here…
Coming up next, another PS2-era game released only a few months after this one…
Yeah its something like this i imagined, basically all sorts of powers, pumps, energy, etc could be explained by using magic. that would be the main thing for me. i know oort will do a great job, im still kinda curious though.
I just think about Eberron, the campaign setting for D&D. There you had elevators, trains, airships, intelligent robots as armies and much other stuff, but all was made by magic. The tech of the setting could be short described as “how would our world look if we didn’t found electricity and steam, but magic and devine powers”. Also Eberron was a bit creepy because there were no true good or evil but many different factions with different points of view on the moral topics. I just love it
I have always envisioned a more standard fantasy style given the concept art I’ve seen. Having said that, it would be interesting to see the two styles mixed a bit. As @Grey707 mentioned, we are spanning many different worlds. What can be accomplished on one with magic might be done in another via steampunk stylings. Perhaps it could depend on what resources are more available on a given world.
I actually think ‘gearwork’ ( thanks @Thorbjorn42gbf) would work very well with the elements we have in game already. Many watches still rely on quartz movements. A small amount of electricity is pushed through the quartz to make the molecules vibrate at a steady pace, which translate to cogs and gears turning. How exactly is beyond my knowledge A similar principle could be applied to gleam or other stones found deep beneath the surface.
I see it as having the earlier worlds being fantasy and primitive, but as we slowly increase in tiers, the worlds would get increasingly industrialistic, but still include the fantasy and magic vibes. Or perhaps there could be tier branches where one branch of tiers is one theme, and the other is a different one. It could be interesting, and mean that there could be twice, or even three times as much stuff to do.
Most of the visual theme comes from the concept art on oortonline.com. But as we concept the universe more, concept player characters, concept creatures, concept combat, concept titans and then develop these more into the game, then the theming will gradually evolve.
There is nothing in the game which would limit the theme including electricity, or steam, or magic, or something else as a mechanics for inventions and systems.
There are also themes we’re avoiding, for example, medieval.
I prefer to think of crossbows with ice arrows (à la Zelda) rather than simply crossbows - which means non-real world. I think swords and bows are pretty universal in any theming.
Ultimately the target is to create a new theme - the world of Oort Online - that blends together components of themes we like and hopefully creates something new and original along the way.
)
A similar principle could be applied to gleam or other stones found deep beneath the surface.