Well I think the great thing about this game is that its so open to interpretation. If all you do is harvest and craft things for personal use then thats all you're going to get out of it. But as we've all seen, through cooperation and the more menial tasks becoming more and more complex as the skill tree grows, that the most simple of things turn into players working together to build a world to play in. What we've seen so far isn't at all the extent of what is to come, I'm sure. When you really get a chance to level-up and delve into the gameplay, you find that the more simple tasks become more rewarding when put into different contexts such as building streets, (and i'm sure that wont be the only collaborative building project in the future) achieving higher levels of different skills and combining your skills to create bigger and better things. As V-Primo mentioned, the races are the first of what I see turning into many mini-games being implemented into gameplay. Also, the Rook and JuJu aspects haven't been fully realized yet either. (as they've been tested, but probably won't become larger parts of the game until beta and beyond) In my opinion the game is already a lot more than harvesting and crafting, but even if thats all some have taken from it, there will be a lot more to come, and I'm excited to see what it is!
Well upon reading that article I'm even less clear on what this game is supposed to be. I think basically Tiny Speck hopes the players will socialize and create gameplay out of that. Yep.
Wet Butt, is this your first ever alpha test? If so, you might not know that most MMOs are like this in their alpha phase. Stoot has said that he hopes to make it a social game of sorts, but really wherever Tiny Speck takes this thing is good enough for me.
Wet Butt, if you're going to put it that way, then in most games, all there is to do is forage for power-ups and kill things, and possibly chat. If you don't find the process of creation gratifying, then Glitch might not be the game for you.
I read the article (it actually made perfect sense to me), and I understand why people don't 'get it' when it comes to the game concept. I think he's got a good idea of what he wants, there just aren't words for it.
To start, the majority of the real world is Objective Focused. People are also pretty bad at setting their own objectives in the longer term. Much of the mass market needs a 'win' or a 'finish'. Glitch doesn't have that, so people can't point to a 'purpose'.
This wasn't always the case with Multi-games (MUD, MUSH, MORP). The early text-based multi-games were object and event focused, rather than 'win' focused. Programmers biggest challenge was creating enough well balanced monsters to keep pace with the upper 15% of players. Game worlds expanded rapidly, because it was easy to introduce new 'rooms' or change around old ones. Oh the days of staying up until dawn because the programmers had launched some sort of invasion, or new world to explore and map out.
The advent of graphics, physically moving through a landscape you previously had to imagine altered the landscape of gaming. The worlds became static. It was nearly impossible for a programmer to change a red tree to a purple tree on the fly, because much of the global structure was hard coded onto a disk. Previously it took as long as it took the programmer to make the edit, save it, and put into production (usually by forcing a reboot for the players in an emergency, or during the 15 minutes of nightly maintenance), now you had to do it through software updates, patches, and new versions. It was a massive change in gaming, and a massive change in game thinking.
My impression, and I'm by no means an expert - just guessing here, is he's trying to bring back the organic feel of online gaming. In the old text MUDs, the programmers tended to be members of the community, so you were really only limited by their willingness, talent, dedication... and more often the capabilities of programming languages.
So, to translate a bit... they're aiming to build a 'structure' of a world for us to build... on our terms. From the shell, we'll be given a mechanism to 'request' or perhaps 'unlock' Street Projects. We'll be given some method to input what streets get built, when, where, and what is on them... and probably options on what they look like within a given region set.
From the article, it also appears we'll receive an in-game way of fueling the economy, through stores and the like. That means supply chain building, employees, things of that nature. Those elements sound a long way off, but certainly do-able within the mechanics.
I guess the answer to the poster's question "what is there to do in this game" is - whatever you want. Eventually you'll be able to be a Miner, a Shopkeeper, a Drink Mixer, a Pig Farmer, a Chicken Squeezer, a Construction Worker... the list is endless.
When you think about the objective of many popular games right now, the answer to "what is the point" is easy - get Max Everything, but then what? beat the Bad Guy, but then what? build a Thingamagig, but then what? With most games it means Game Over, or Game Boring (that place where you've done everything and moth-ball it until some expansion or change is released). With Glitch the answer starts at Keep Playing.
Glitch will be not only a world where you can be whom ever you like, but a place where you can do as you like, and get to create the world you like, and live in the sub-culture you like. They've created a game where the objective is to play it. You get to set the objectives, you get to set the goals. They will keep giving us tools to accomplish things, how we go about it is up to us.
Hey, At zombocom I got to the third level (sector, whatever), but I'm stuck. I'm outside the big building, but the uniformed man won't let me in without an appointment. I've already used the handheld phone to generate an antidote from the venom sample and the gin bottle's contents, but if I try to use it on myself, I automatically fail the mission, since I have to show it to Markus first (I think). I tried looking in the back of the building, but all I could find was a grate with a question mark on it. I tried using the gun on it, but it didn't work. Any help, please? I keep running out of time and dying. :(
Anyway, this game rocks. A great blend of puzzle gaming and science fiction, and I especially like the 1984-esque feeling it creates, especially with the flashing messages on level two in the bar.