18 Aug, 2013, drakkos wrote in the 1st comment:
Votes: 0
Epitaph is now open! Epitaph is a text based MUD/MMO based in the grim darkness of the zombie apocalypse. We've been under development since December of 2009 - we've been working very hard on it, and we're now ready for our version 1.0 release. We are completely free to play - no sign up fees, no micro transactions. You won't be asked for a penny, now or in the future. We have an 18 age rating though, so if you're younger than that you'll have to wait a while before you can try us out. We're aiming to be a highly accessible game, so those of you with screen readers will hopefully find us welcoming.

You play the role of a survivor thrust into an unfriendly world full of factional interests and diminishing supplies. We have exciting ranged and melee combat, fully featured crafting, clans and achievements for players and clans, deep and involving stealth, and hundreds of unique quests. We have keyword based discussions that let you probe NPCs for their deepest, darkest secrets. We have randomly generated missions. We have hundreds of commands, many of which you can purchase as you advance through the game. We have knacks that let you fine-tune your play style, and around 90 skills that you can master as you gain in power and confidence.

While our game is primarily action focused, you don't have to kill to get ahead - you can sneak your way to success, or forge your future in crafting. We have a random events generator that keeps things interesting. We have sound and sight based situational awareness. We have electronics, laptops, mobile phones, and video cameras. We have practise based learning and XP based advancement. We have both local and remote computer hacking. We have a deep, engaging morality system and extensive narrative based gameplay. For those who enjoy the social aspects of MUDs we have community based role playing rewards and police systems.

Man, we've got it all.

Epitaph is a constantly evolving and developing game with a dedicated creator team. We'd love if you stopped by and checked us out.

Browse to http://epitaphonline.co.uk and click 'play now'! Those of you who use MUD clients can reach us at epitaphonline.co.uk, port 6789.

As a small note though - consider your first few runs through the game to be 'disposable'. It turns out the apocalypse is not a forgiving place. We're TOUGH but FAIR, but you need to keep your wits about you and practise good survivor discipline. Also, we're a new 1.0 release - expect bugs and typos. We're fixing these as rapidly as we can!

Hope to see you at the world's end,
Drakkos.

P.S. If you want to know more about us and what we've been up to, you can read our development blog at http://epitaph.imaginary-realities.com/w... and
follow us on twitter at https://twitter.com/epitaphonline and Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/EpitaphOnline.
18 Aug, 2013, quixadhal wrote in the 2nd comment:
Votes: 0
Congratulations Drakkos!

Good to see an official launch, you've been working at it for a while now. :)
18 Aug, 2013, Scandum wrote in the 3rd comment:
Votes: 0
Does the game have 'Player verses Environment' elements, or do the zombies take relatively little initiative when it comes to eating the players? I guess in a PvE setting you could have a fortification that is relatively safe (though not completely) but as you venture out the environment becomes increasingly hostile. I'm asking because the subgenre lends itself to PvE.
18 Aug, 2013, drakkos wrote in the 4th comment:
Votes: 0
Thanks Quix - it's certainly good to finally have passed this kidney stone. ;-P

We do have some initiative on the part of zombies - barricading and such, with the noise you make being a thing that can attract them to your location, but we're holding off for Epitaph 2.0 before we implement our plans for things like strongholding. It's certainly a dangerous world out there - I like to think of it as Player Versus Oblivion. Most of the drive to go out into the world is driven by the fact if you don't, you'll starve to death.
18 Aug, 2013, plamzi wrote in the 5th comment:
Votes: 0
Congrats on the milestone!

I noticed your "Play Now" link takes folks to a pretty basic DecafMUD window, which requires Flash. Consider this link: http://www.mudportal.com/play?host=epita... .

You don't have to list your game on the portal to be able to use the deep link, although for a new game it may be 5 min. well spent.

Using the Portal app normally means adding a round-trip between your server and the Portal proxy. But you can run your own Websocket proxy and point the web app directly to it. Learn more here.
18 Aug, 2013, Scandum wrote in the 6th comment:
Votes: 0
drakkos said:
Most of the drive to go out into the world is driven by the fact if you don't, you'll starve to death.

That's definitely an interesting approach to force players out of hiding. Ammunition can be a driving force as well. Most worlds will be static enough however for players to gather food and other perishables with minimum risk.
18 Aug, 2013, drakkos wrote in the 7th comment:
Votes: 0
Scandum said:
drakkos said:
Most of the drive to go out into the world is driven by the fact if you don't, you'll starve to death.

That's definitely an interesting approach to force players out of hiding. Ammunition can be a driving force as well. Most worlds will be static enough however for players to gather food and other perishables with minimum risk.


Yeah, I think there's a tension between survival horror (where disempowerment is the aim) and online RPGs (in which empowerment is usually the aim), but we've got a set of *potentially* interesting mechanics to try to counteract that. Group combat for example is really dangerous, and zombies converge on you as I mentioned - even an ultra high level player *should* have to be careful even in low level areas, because a big enough group can really mess up their day. We'll see, though - 1.0 for Epitaph is really just a starting point. There's so much scope in a theme like this for really exploring PvE and such.
18 Aug, 2013, drakkos wrote in the 8th comment:
Votes: 0
plamzi said:
Congrats on the milestone!

I noticed your "Play Now" link takes folks to a pretty basic DecafMUD window, which requires Flash. Consider this link: http://www.mudportal.com/play?host=epita... .


That's pretty interesting - I only had a quick look because we're all drowning in open day fire-fighting and bug fixes. Are there plans to incorporate MXP support? That's absolutely the thing that would sell me on it - we use MXP pretty heavily, and a web client that supported it well would be fantastic.

Drakkos.
18 Aug, 2013, plamzi wrote in the 9th comment:
Votes: 0
drakkos said:
plamzi said:
Congrats on the milestone!

I noticed your "Play Now" link takes folks to a pretty basic DecafMUD window, which requires Flash. Consider this link: http://www.mudportal.com/play?host=epita... .


That's pretty interesting - I only had a quick look because we're all drowning in open day fire-fighting and bug fixes. Are there plans to incorporate MXP support? That's absolutely the thing that would sell me on it - we use MXP pretty heavily, and a web client that supported it well would be fantastic.

Drakkos.


I wrote a basic MXP plugin a few days back, and I'm sure it will get better rapidly, especially if other people contribute (the site is built in such a way that multiple game admins can customize their apps in parallel). That said, it doesn't seem like MXP is being negotiated with your game. Since it's working for other games, maybe it's something for you to look at.

There's also the ability to send straight up HTML. You just have to preface your HTML ">" and "<" brackets with an ASCII ESC char (decimal "\027", hex "\x1B") so the client would know not to turn them into literals. IMHO, that's better than MXP.
17 Sep, 2013, drakkos wrote in the 10th comment:
Votes: 0
Yesterday saw a month since Epitaph opened, and the application of patch 1.0.7 - http://epitaphonline.co.uk/patches.c. The last month has seen a huge investment of effort in developing, expanding and improving the game.

There's never been a better time to try Epitaph out!

Drakkos.
0.0/10