Features
The world is filled with an endless number of games that proclaim
themselves roleplaying games or RPGs. However, they are more likely advanced
adventure games where the emphasis is on gaining power instead of on the
adventure itself. All that matters is how many experience points and/or
levels your character has gained. The world is static and you can do most,
sometimes all, quests as many times as you want. You kill a major monster or a
leader of some large enemy society, but when you wake up in the morning
the monster is still there and the setting is exactly the same as it was
before. You can go and kill it again and gain the same experience points
and equipment possessed by the monster.
Majik is a dynamic, extensive roleplaying world which is
controlled by the players themselves. There are no pre-defined quests
or "areas"; instead there are player-built cities and quests which appear
quite dynamically, even surprisingly. For example, a great monster can
arrive at the gates of some city. The city's owner (player) hires a group
of warriors (also players) from the streets of the city, presenting them with
the quest, a quest to kill the great monster attempting to raid the city.
Majik doesn't have experience points, nor does it have experience
levels. All character advancement is done by training skills, researching
magic, making money, favoring the deities, and, most of all, gaining better
positions in the various societies in the world of Majik. You start as a
peasant and in the end you can be an emperor controlling whole continents,
and your character doesn't have to be physically or mentally extremely
powerful. Majik is more a world than a simple game. You don't play Majik,
you live there!
Specific features:
- A real 3D world
- Majik features a 3D world with a behind & above -view. This means that
there will be real differences in altitude that will affect visibility, among
other things, and it is intended that the players do not see behind them,
making things such as surprise attacks possible.
- Dynamically generated polygonal 3D objects
- Real and dynamic polygonal 3D objects. Majik is possibly the first 3D game
ever daring to use dynamically generated 3D objects. See the
proposal about the dynamic objects posted to
the majik4-design mailing list. It should clarify this feature a bit.
- Permanent death
- When a character dies, it is removed and ceases to exist. The same goes
for Non-Player Characters (NPCs) as well. This feature has received much
criticism for one obvious reason: people don't like to lose their characters.
However, we want death to be serious. We don't want a world where people run
around attacking dragons blindly or acting against common sense in general.
Permanent death is possibly the only effective way to achieve this. However,
when the character gains in power the character might have then gained his/her
deity's favor and he/she might have a chance to be resurrected by the deity
itself or one of its fervent followers.
- Language system
- Many races and cultures have their own language that can only be
understood by people who know the language. An orc player might not be able to
interact with an elf player at all, or at least may find communication rather
difficult. In practice, speech will be scrambled according to the
language characteristics, i.e. an orc says "Hello World" in orcish. Since the
orcish language emphasizes rough consonants such as r's, z's etc, an elf
character, who doesn't know orcish, might see the speech as "Frrzag Wgold!".
Some real languages have been developed for certain races but their purpose
is only to provide words for some common concepts and location names since we,
unfortunately, cannot rely on players to learn new languages.
- Realistic and complete battle system
- Things such as hitlocs, exhaustion, stuns, different combat styles, ranged
combat (missile weapons and throwing weapons) etc. are all supported fully. The
battle system is rather realistic: getting into a swordfight is likely to get
you either killed, crippled or otherwise severely hurt, and assaulting a
greater demon will get you killed, chopped to pieces and trampled into a
bloody pulp within 2 seconds of effective combat.
- The world writes its own history
- The world is completely dynamic. If you kill a monster, it will not
appear again. If you perform a quest, then the quest will be done for eternity
until a new quest of similar nature appears. If you dig a hole in the ground,
the hole will be there until someone does something to it. If you burn a house,
village or city, it will remain burned. If you build a city, it will be there
until it gets destroyed in some way and so on. By making the characters'
actions meaningful in this sense, the world will have a colorful, sometimes
dramatic history and a reckonable future.
- No guilds
- All "guilds" are bound to cities or some other manifestations of
culture. There are no MUD-like "guilds" whose only purpose is to train players
in different areas of expertise.
- Realistic learning
- Learning things takes time and patience. You can't learn skills by the
normal MUD-scenario, eg. stepping in a guild and typing "train ". The
actual skill is always developed by actually using the skill. Learning theory
from a trainer does just that, improves your knowledge of theory. Learning theory, however,
improves your chances in learning from practice and vice versa. Players, naturally,
can also teach other.
- No experience points
- There are no universal experience points. You can't become a good farmer
by killing monsters. This also means there is no reincarnation, i.e. you cannot
just get a reinc and re-assign all your fighter experience into mage skills.
The only way to become a good mage is by casting spells and the only way to
become a good fighter is by fighting.
- No experience levels
- It is foolish to think that all living things share some sort of universal
power-magnitude. A master magician cannot be compared in power with a master
martial artist or a master carrot salesman since they use different types of
skills and manifest their powers differently.
- Multiplaying
- It is allowed to have more than one character, however playing multiple
characters at the same time is NOT allowed (even though denying it is probably
needless since there is no sensible way of playing several characters at the
same time). This feature exists because of variety, players can play different
types of characters depending on their mood etc. This, however, is not a
favored way to play. It is more effective to concentrate on a single player,
but because the game lacks any easily attainable form of reincarnation, having
multiple characters must be allowed. Sooner or later you are likely to find
that you want to play another type of character.
- Skilltree
- Skills are arranged in a skill tree. They are dependent on each other; for
example, evolving in "1-handed swords" will also improve your prowess in
"2-handed swords" as they are similar skills that have much things in common.
This is, of course, tuned so that you can't reach a "master" level in a skill
in which you have only trained indirectly.
- The money circulates
- The game will not create money itself. There will be only a certain amount
of money in the game until someone specifically decides to make some more money.
This way the money can actually run out in some areas. A single player can
actually affect the whole economic system. If he/she for example drains a
whole city dry of money, then the city will be a poor one until someone brings
in money by purchasing local goods.
- Human controlled gods
- Gods are really the coders of the game and they roleplay just as much (if
not more) than the players. They can interfere, in their divine role, in just
about everything. They form their own churches (these are much like "guilds")
and rival among each other in power and in numbers of mortal worshippers.
- Divine point system
- Unlike players, the Gods share a universal power-magnitude known as
"divine points" among each other. Gods gain divine points from mortals who
worship them and they must use their divine points in cases where they want to
interact in mundane matters. The more worshippers a God has, the more powerful
the God is, but when the God gains in power it is then harder for a single
mortal individual to attain the favor of the deity.
- Uniform worldmap
- Everything is portrayed on the same 1m x 1m scale, there is no difference
between "wilderness" and "area", it's all the same.
- Magic-users research the magic
- Using magical energy in Majik is not as simple as in most games. In most
games there is a list of pre-defined spells which you "cast" when you are
powerful enough to use such a spell. In Majik you will have to actually form
your spells yourself from components. You have to find certain "pieces" of the
magical power all around the world, then you will have to find the right
combinations of the "pieces" to create a magical spell. It is very hard, but
once you have found a spell, the spell will be a powerful one. You will
also have a chance to hide those "pieces" so that others won't find them. You
can keep the all information you have learned to cast the spells to yourself, you
can give the information to your friends, or you can sell it for money.
Knowledge is power.
- An event driven AI (Artificial Intelligence)
- NPCs receive events and then do something. For example, a guard can
receive a "help needed" event from an innkeeper who's under attack, which
causes the guard to arrive and whack the assaulter. Races will also have morale
modifiers and things like that, allowing them to behave differently depending
on whether they are poor or rich, weak or strong, etc.
- Offline players
- When a player quits Majik, his/her character doesn't bluntly disappear but remains in
the game as an AI-driven NPC. Thus, quitting the game is not a way of escaping
dangerous situations. The players should quit only in some safe location such
as an inn or their own home, otherwise there is a chance of getting killed.
- Players run the game
- If there is a player who should be removed for inappropriate behavior, the
players can handle the problem by collecting a mob and killing the player
together and the coders will not interfere. The players don't have rules, they
will make their own rules if necessary.
- Strict theme
- There will be no areas such as "moomin valley" or "smurf village".
All areas will be unique Majik areas created exclusively for Majik and not
copied from anything.
- Inventoryless system
- In the most CRPG games, even the real pen & paper role-playing games there
is an inventory for the character where he/she can throw the stuff he/she wants
to carry, the only limiting factor being the amount of weight the user can
carry. How could you carry 10 swords without a backpack and fight at the same time?
Majik has developed a more realistic system for this. Characters
have an inventory, of course, but you can only add stuff like clothes,
backpacks, sword scabbards, belts, pouches, cloaks and so on. It is much
like the inventory in most games that show what items the character is
wearing. Then if you have added a belt and connected a sword scabbard to your
belt you could add a sword or any other item that would fit in it. The
same is true for backpacks and everything else. They just would have more or less
space for the items. There are also a few side benefits when using this system
in a 3D view: 1) we have no need for a space-wasting and inconvenient
inventory screen when you can actually take an item from the ground and move
it to the part of your body where you want it placed, and 2) the other users
can identify you more easily. When they can see how you're carrying items, they
see your style.
Majik Development Team
Mon 17 January 2000
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