In an attempt to restart the above thread, I'd like to ask the Eclipse Phase forum members how they would feel about the possibility of a community developed and donation based MMORPG? Obviously this would be a huge project, requiring a volunteer-based team and some form of initial funding (via Kickstarter, etc), but I'd like to hear if there's any interest... Maybe a few of us could form a focus group and start chipping away at making this a reality one day?

While an MMO, for the aforementioned reasons, would be super hard to do, what about something like Minecraft or even Starbound, which provides for a big sandbox and is totally user-controlled. I'm not big into the Minecraft scene but I know there are tons of mods, custom servers, etc. Has anyone experimented with a space-sim of this nature? Go out into the dark, build a hab, deal with radiation, resource collection, etc. Have one group build an anarchist collective on the far side of Saturn, another a Barsoomian group scrabbling out an existence on Mars, a third a social club on a Venusian aerostat. Sure, there's not the persistent background world, but the right set of tools could give you the chance to make a character and "egocast" to other servers, maybe. Totally speculative, IANAD (I am not a developer)

You know what format would be excellent to utilize for an Eclipse Phase game? Roguelike. Granted, the interface would be text-majority, but I've atleast played with the concept of a Roguelike EP game where you start off as an ex-indenture in a Case Morph and work your way up to a Reaper while exploring some of the more dungeon-like locations in the EP universe(Elysium, Earth, ect, ect...)

I always imagined an Eclipse Phase fan game as being lo-res, 16 bit at the most, and side-scrolling. I am not sure why.

I once considered how an Eclipse Phase game would start... You'd start off from the point of view of your standard-issue space marine on a shuttle about to do a hostile boarding action on a space habitat which has been overtaken by dangerous, radical lunatics, who practice all kinds of illegal, dangerous and soul-destroying body modifications. Your team are some of the finest soldiers remaining after the fall of Earth, the last defenders of the last bastion of true humanity. Your job: Lead a squad of veteran space marines with the most honed skills and the finest augmentations modern science can safely install in the human body in storming the habitat, fighting your way to the heart of it with a nuclear device, and getting out alive before it blows. [b]Kill the freaks.[/b] This proceeds as normal, introduces the player to microgravity combat, familiarizes them with the interface, etcetera, while the player gets to shoot things which are freakishly described and horrific sounding. Then they get to the heart of the habitat, you're about to set the nuke, when the player character is seized by a tentacled disk that strikes from the shadows, hauled before two red-glowing eyes, then summarily executed by a shot from a chassis-mounted rifle. The viewpoint then switches. The player takes control of the reaper. Their mission briefing is replaced with an entirely different one: X Years ago, which was Y yeas after the Fall of Earth, the oppressed, indentured workers on this habitat, yourself among them, rose up and exiled the corporate owners of the station. You declared your autonomy, declared the habitat an Anarcho-Collectivist safe-haven, and since then you've lived peacefully, floating freely in the orbit of wherever you're orbiting, contributing to the research and development of technology which keeps transhumanity alive and thriving. You've been many things, a man, a woman, a hermaphrodite, a sexless synthetic; an artist, a habitat technician, an author; and now, a defender of your people. Your people have embraced the transhuman technologies of resleeving, adopting new bodies to suit new circumstances. You were chosen to sleeve into one of the very few high-profile combat morphs your habitat constructed, the deadly and powerful [i]Reaper[/i], a smart-material synthetic shell with a plethora of sensors, even more movement modes, with four tentacles, and four weapons built into the shell. Your [i]home is under attack[/i] by dangerous, radical bio-conservative lunatics who aim to kill you; the venerable, the children, the men, the women, the nontraditionally-gendered, the biomorph, synthmorph, and infomorph alike. You must defend your home. Disarm the bomb, then [b]kill their morphs![/b] If you're lucky, they have cortical stacks you can extract so you can send them home again.

ORCACommander wrote:

So a Syndicate nuke round in space station 13?

*Snerk* Oh, that brings back memories. Ahhh, goonstation. And before that, /tg/station.... Oh god! The POO! THE POO IN THE HALLS! THE POO IN THE SHOWER! THE BUTTBOTS, OH GOD, THE BUTTBOTS! ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH! *shudder*

Not really. ss13 is a hierarchical situation that very rapidly turns into the kind of anarchy which hypercorporate dogs imagine EP anarchy is, because of the rampant paranoia.