Future, present and past

[imported_Ssilmath]

Recently I have seen a lot of posts asking for content, and it is needed greatly...People want more events, more fluff, more of everything, but what is mostly being asked for falls into two categories...Future content and present content for a feeling of belonging...


People want events, they want dynamic blight, they want to have in game goals that pertain to and follow a cohesive storyline...These are all future content, something to look forward to...

People also want fluff...they want furniture, interesting side quests, lots and lots of options for their character, and frequent WA attacks...This is present content, what you can be doing right now...

But I think one thing that is being overlooked and would provide another, possibly greater sense of belonging would be past content...the lore that gives us all a reason to be in this world at all...There is some very basic lore given, some in game, some not, but many older players and I daresay all the new have no idea who the important people in history are, nor anything about their race beyond some very basic facts...They do not have a legacy, whether good or bad, to build upon...

I have seen players post histories for their races in the Istarian Life part of this forum, but that seems to be the least viewed area, and what has been written has been gleaned from the scanty lore we have and enhanced by imagination and artistic rewriting, but is still rather small...So right now, we in Istaria have no purpose (Future) nothing to do (Present) and no foundation to build upon (Past)...

I see that the devs are working on providing us with future content and continue to give us present content...but where is the past content? Without a past, we are lost, and we are fighting only for survival, not for our histories...right now, if we all died, I don't think many would care...but if we have arich history that we can fight for, or for the honor/legacy of our race, then you'd get more RP at the least, and perhaps more of a sense of belonging...

Are there any plans to give us anything for a past? Just as an example, will the Sslik have NPCs and quests that will reveal our history? Will you consider the player compiled history when you are writing the lore? Will we be given names of famous or powerful Sslik that we can look up to? Will we be given basic attitudes that most Sslik feel about the other races? How about phrases in Sslik that we can learn?

If you have to get players working on helping with the lore or hire a full time writer or whatever, in addition to all the future and present content we are receving, we need a lot of past content as well, the new players most of all...that would be one of the primary things that could keep them in game...

[Hal`cyon Sskyler]

I was in IRC one day, and mentioned this page out of idleness:

http://community.istaria.com/default...&cat=Craft

Amon perked up with a "Yay" that I had found this, turns out he wrote the little blurbs of flavor text for just about every trainer NPC out there, very nice work. Most people though, will never see this, took me about 5 months to find it.

In my opinion, adding content and immersion to the world doesn't mean gigantic, epic quests that just as long to test and debug as they do to image. What we need is little bits of random flavor thrown into our daily interactions with NPC's. No running around or "fetch me twenty gruok chunks", just simple conversation trees that mostly end up with a little bit of info about the world, and possibly a few hints about nearby enemies or resources or just general gameplay tips.

Tulga doesn't need to write all this either. People like myself and Ssil are happy to contribute simple conversations with conditional dialog and plenty of different "paths" to follow. Just give us some basic guidelines, the syntax to present the information for easy integration and run it through a spell checker. [:P]

Also, if lots of NPC chat doesn't overload / burden the servers, let's give a few different responces depending on the race / level / school of the player and have different options like added depth to the dialog if you're of a favorable disposition.

Pretty please? [A]