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A Tale in the Desert
Sandy99 writes "A Tale in the Desert is a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (mmorpg) that has been in development for 4 1/2 years and goes live tomorrow. There is no killing in this game. It is all about cooperation to unlock the knowledge of Egypt. A basic overview is at
the official site.
Discussion forums are at atitd.net. Maps of Egypt and construction knowledge are at
atitdmaps.com. Everything has been produced by a handful of independent developers and a bunch of volunteers. This is also the first mmorpg to debut with both
windows and linux clients."
Ever hear of a little non-killing game called The Sims and how it became a best-seller??
:\
Killing is not the only basis there is for a video game, or more spacifically a MMORPG, but it is an over used one
Oh and I see they finally release a P2P game in a way that makes sense.... free.
Well, I don't know that you're entirely correct. After all the two best selling PC games of all time are The Sims and Myst. Both of which are relatively death and chaos-free. (Sadistic Sims players being the exception.) Of course, your central point probably still stands true with people who consider themselves gamers.
The test of Trust. To complete this challenge, a player must place a significant amount of gold in a ritual vault, and give keys to ten high-level individuals. If, after 24 hours, none of the ten powerful individuals has stolen the gold, then the player really does know who to trust. He passes the test, and gains a level in leadership.
;)
Then a high-level clan with 11 cooperating members can have everyone pass the test quite easily, if I'm not mistaken.
The lack of violence will have everyone aim for the next most regarded status : godlike stats or inane "test" scores.
Look at the way people like to impress each other with cellphones in countries where you can't carry weapons
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
Am I the only one that thought deserts were made of sand?
I sure hope so, or else the state of geography education has gone downhill fast. All desert means is that the average rainfall per year is a given, arbitrary level or less. The sagebrush country of the eastern part of the state of Washington in the U.S. is desert, as is most (all?) of Antarctica.
All 4 screencaps on their front page show grass.
Well, let's see what geography and history we can dig out from our junior high days. If I recall correctly, a large river runs through Egypt. You may have heard of it; it's called the Nile. Also, given that people have been digging up three-thousand-year-old human corpses from big stone tetrahedrons, apparently built by humans, we can deduce that a civilization has existed there for a while, and you can be pretty sure they didn't eat sand and scorpions.
From those two facts, you can deduce that while a good part of Egypt may be desert, the part that's been heavily inhabited for the last few millenia must be capable of sustaining some sort of vegetation... and a lot of it. <grin>
But to your point, yes, just like in real Egypt, there is a heck of a lot of sandy desert in the game world. Problem is, just like in the real world, there's no reason anyone would want to build homes, towns, or anything worthy of a screenshot there.
But you could, possibly, make the argument that the title is misleading. I think if you take up the issue with the developers, you'll learn that "A Tale in a Group of Loosely-Affiliated Oases Located Throughout a Region Otherwise Consisting of Sandy Desert" was rejected, because it wouldn't fit on the splash screen.