An entirely seperate approach

[Neil McKillop]

Think about this, what if Planeshift wasn\'t the game or even the medieval fantasy world we\'re all thinking of and talking about now.
I\'d like Planeshift to be someone\'s whole MMORPG experience.
Imagine this, you load Planeshift and rather than appearing in this town we currently have, you land in an empty room (or a town, or a field - whatever) and straight bang in front of you is a single doorway that says \"Planeshift: The medieval fantasy world\" (or something,  the whole game we\'re currently making - Planeshift). You go through the doorway and you land slap bang into what we currently have now (the town, or whatever it and the rest of the world evolves into over the next while).
What\'s the point of this extra room, this extra seperation? Imagine what else we could use the planeshift engine and server for. The area you initially land in could be just a social place, somewhere were you don\'t have to be in any form of character, there is no risk of player killing (I realise there will be safe areas in the game, I\'m focusing more on the not-having-to-be-in character aspect), somewhere players can ask about how to do certain things in the game or how something works without spoiling the immersion of medieval role-play and so on.
Maybe even, in the future, there could be another doorway \"Evil Space Alien Robots from Hell\" or something, where there was an entirely different game, in an entirely different world - maybe you bring the same character maybe you don\'t, maybe you can cross between them, maybe not..
I just think this idea is a simple way to enlarge the appeal of the game [read the \'metaverse\' a la Neal Stephenson] to a wider auidence - who will all have the opportunity to meet in this one social place. As it is now, EverQuest players (who appreciate the fantasy style) and NameOfASpaceyAdventureHere (who appreciate a more futuristic style) don\'t have much hope of meeting.
I\'d love to hear your thoughts, I don\'t know if it\'s such a good idea or not - I\'ve just been reading about similar ideas in novels recently (albeit, with virtual reality suits and what not) :-)

Neil.

[Drilixer]

wow um... that was certainly different... lets start from the beggining here...  first of all there will be no Pking so don\'t worry about that... second of all I\'m sure there will be out-of-character areas added so people don\'t go crazy and starting talking like their characters in real life (yeah I\'ve done it before with a half-orc who had about 5-6 intelligence in D&D... it certainly did not help my oral grade in English class...)

As for the space theme... uh... no

Check the website and read the \'help needed area\' notice on the recruitment page that EVERY POSITION available says \'bent on medieval setting\' beside it...  we know what we want right now - and that is fantasy...

None the less this is an open source game so you can do whatever you wnat to do with the code!  Get a team together download the code, download the Crystal Space Engine and have a go at it

    as Vengeance would say \"That\'s a great idea but... that\'s not Planeshift\".