- New PC game, "Shores of Hazeron".
- First-person MMO, in open testing, completely free to play.
- **The in-game universe will reset on Friday, June 18th!**
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As promised in a previous thread, allow me to give you all a quick teaser about an online game being developed by the software company I work for, called "Shores of Hazeron".
Yes, the company I work for (Software Engineering, Inc., we primarily develop specialty CAD applications) is jumping into the PC gaming business.
Years ago, 'Hazeron' was a pet project of Dave H., the company founder and CEO. However, it's been steadily getting more serious, and a couple of my co-workers are now spending significant time working on it. [Before anyone asks, I'm not directly involved. However, I definitely get to see some of the code and hear the chatter about features, etc.]
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Q. What kind of game is Shores of Hazeron?
I suppose I should start with part of the official description:
Q. Huh?The Hazeron welcome page wrote:[link]:
Shores of Hazeron is an ambitious and revolutionary game of science fiction adventure, intrigue, and war.
...
Have you ever wanted to play a game with no boundaries?
There are no boundaries in Hazeron. Pick a nearby star in the sky and go there. Explore its planets and moons. Build cities and defenses. Expand your empire and prepare to meet the enemy.
Do you want to discover strange new worlds, beam down and see what's there?
There are millions of worlds and trillions of plants and quadrillions of creatures in Hazeron that no person has ever seen, not even us. That's not a worn out movie set down below; it's a dense jungle on the coast of a continent; something lives there.
Have you dreamed about the starship you would drive?
The Enterprise? Nostromo? The Millennium Falcon? A Death Star? Perhaps the Battlestar Galactica? Maybe a Borg cube is more your style? In Hazeron you design your own deck plans and lay out the systems of your spacecraft, balancing performance against capability, mass against force. Then you manufacture them and climb aboard.
...
Okay, rather than specifications, how about a teaser? Here are some of my experiences as an early tester last year, along with some screenshots:
[Disclaimer: Some of the in-game graphics are still rough, and many of my screenshots below are from over a year ago, so they include lower-quality models/textures. There is still a lot of graphical work to be done, but the core functionality of the game is in place, it is very stable, and it performs well.]
- Characters
So, the first thing when you sign up for an account (again, it's completely free right now!) is character creation; put together your character's DNA, or choose to join an existing empire's race. The creature-DNA system is pretty cool; one can create a six-legged, four-armed, two-headed creature with horns, a mandible and scales... or a little humanoid with fur and wings and a long tail... or whatever you'd like.
- Gameplay
Starting off, one's earliest choice is whether to start a new empire (thus starting from scratch), or join an existing one (which leaves you less influential, but may give you immediate access to technology/ships/etc.). - Local environment
After creating my character, and spawning for the first time in what turned out to be a mountainous polar area, I started exploring. One thing that amazed me was the seemingly infinite variety of species I encountered, including the plant life. In just a couple of hours, I had spotted dozens of different types of creatures with different ecological roles and behaviors, including some species who only come out at night... - Planets
This, of course, brings me to my planet itself. As I said, I happened to start in a polar mountainous area, but it wasn't long before I found my way to a more temperate area, with vegetation, an ocean, and even some rocky desert-like terrain. Great place to start a city (more on this later...).
One of the very first things I noticed about my planet is that the local sun is very very close, it fills a huge section of the sky, and everything is lit brightly when it's up. Something worth noting is that planet/moon motions are somewhat realistic - the planet actually has an orbit and a rotation which drive sunrises and sunsets, day and night. Here's a shot of the sun setting over the mountains nearby:
Note the clouds! From what I understand, planetary weather patterns are actually modeled after real-world dynamics. They have different layers and move with changing winds. I've even seen precipitation (rain/snow) from time to time.
There is one particular experience in my early exploration that I have to mention. Not too long after I started the game, I saw something absolutely huge on the horizon. As it rose, it became clear that it was another planet!
As it turns out, I am on a small planet orbiting an absolutely massive gas giant. So I get views like this pretty often:
- Technology / Development
As I was starting a new empire from scratch, one of the first things I had to do was get my cities started. Thus I had to learn the art of city planning/building:
This 'SimCity'-ish interface seemed a little odd for a first-person game, but it actually works well. It's considerably better than trying to run around in first-person and setting building locations (you can do so, but it's a pain).
With some work, the city grew in population and technology, and now has a stable self-running economy. It's been there for over a year (real-time) now, without monitoring, and continues to produce technology, commodities, and funds.
...Okay, now I can get to some of the really fun stuff: - Travel & Exploration
You know the famous phrase, "First star to the right, and straight on 'til morning"? Well, those stars aren't just aesthetic, they're actually places you can go! Build a spacecraft, head toward it, and eventually you will arrive in that star system, with whatever planets/moons/cities/etc. are there.
Of the most impressive things I've found about Hazeron is that it's highly seamless. Unless you're travelling between sectors, there are no loading screens. Transitions when entering/exiting a planet's atmosphere, or entering/exiting ships and vehicles, are handled 'on the fly'.
Yep, you can walk along the mountains or an ocean floor, get in a rocket and go to a moonbase, build a spaceship, go to another system, and walk a shoreline there... all without a single break or load-screen. - Space
On a clear sky at night, you can see hundreds of stars:
(The one on the left is an older screenshot, before some graphical work was added.)
As I mentioned before, the explorable universe in this game is INCREDIBLY vast. It's literally GALACTIC in scale. Allow me to illustrate:
Planetary/moon surface -> Star system -> Sector (each with multiple systems) -> Explored sectors map -> Galaxy
-> -> 
-> ->
Every sector in the game is unique, with a huge variety of stars, planets, moons... and rarely, even a ringworld!
Note: The game is scaled to be playable, but it can still take time to get from place to place, especially if you don't yet have warp/wormhole technology. Fortunately, all new players start pretty close to each other, galactically-speaking. Hopefully this makes for more frequent and interesting encounters/battles.
- Ships
There are a few small built-in vehicles you can use early in the game (boats, cars, etc.), but one of the primary goals of the game is to develop your empire's technology to the point that you can start designing and constructing your own custom space stations and ships.
[Note that this isn't "assemble pre-defined ship parts". This is much more like, "walk into a holodeck and lay out the blueprint" (literally, you walk into a studio with an array of tools for creating a very complex structure).
Just for example, here are a few of the user ship/station designs that have been created and appeared in-game. One might look pretty familiar...
- Controls
Obviously, Shores of Hazeron isn't a simple game that can be picked up immediately. There's a steep learning curve... but somehow I don't think that will be a problem for folks here; this *is* the Descent BB, after all.
There are a LOT of controls, but nearly all of them are customize-able, including joystick input!
The thing that took the most getting used to (and one of the things I began to really appreciate) is that the game is heavily windowed. Felt a little clumsy at first, but I found that being able to stretch and re-arrange all my controls was quite handy at times. - Combat
I don't have much experience with combat beyond a few scrapes with carnivorous creatures, simply because I never got to the point where I could create ships and send soldiers into battle. However, I can tell you that the guys working on this have been doing some serious work on battle encounters (both local and ship-to-ship). I'll post more about this at some point.
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<Sigh> I'd like to add more, but it's late, and I'd better get to sleep. I'll try to answer questions over the weekend as I get the chance.
Hopefully this triggers some interest, and perhaps a few of us can create a DBB empire powerful enough to rival my boss.
