Sunset Six: Monumental Victory

[Part of my Sunset Six story.]

At the end of a tale the final tests in each discipline become available: the building of monuments for each of the seven schools. Not only do these constructs need an obscene amount of resources, but they also require their character slots to be filled, specific to their rank in the discipline. A monument needs exactly 1 Oracle, 2 Sages, 4 Masters, 8 Scribes, 16 Journeymen, 32 Prentices and 64 Students. All up that's 127 people!

It doesn't look like much when it starts.

The monuments also hold a second purpose: they contain a player made suggestion for a future test in the next telling! Obviously there are many ideas that get put forward and after the "oracle" type players have a chat with Pharaoh Pluribus they get an idea of which ones are actually feasible to implement and from there can only pick one to go forward.

Imagine my surprise when two of my ideas made it through then: The Test of the Sculptors (Art and Music) and the Hand of Ra (Architecture)! Gotta admit, I am overjoyed that my input will potentially shape the future of the game. Those are the best types of events a player can have in an MMO right?

The Monument of Art and Music!

As my self imposed "final" quest for the telling I decided to try visit all the sites, failing only to reach the Monument of Thought in time which was the hardest to build due to lack of students in that discipline. I suppose like me, everyone was content solving puzzles instead of building them!

From top left to bottom right: Leadership, Architecture, Worship, Harmony, Thought, Body

Did I mention there are strange gods? Well there are. Just uber rare to run into them.

And so, the sun finally sets and Tale 6 comes to a close - it's time to say goodbye to my Level 54 Scribe of Two. While this is the end of my story, it is just the beginning of another chapter for Egypt and who knows, maybe next time it's you who will have A Tale in the Desert.

Thanks for reading! =)

Sunset Six: That's Just Lovely

[Part of my Sunset Six story.]

Before jumping into the last discipline I thought I'd talk about a few other things first. For example: Offline chores. Once you've manually done something enough times you can start doing it while you are offline too, which I thought is pretty cool.

Travel time is used to power chariot fast travel.

I also like the idea that players can build working ferries (which move faster than swimming) and trade posts which are the only way to actually "trade" between two players. Otherwise you either drop stuff on the floor that anyone can pick up or directly give someone something. They don't even get to say yes or no, they just get the item. I also like the notion of player built "Welcome Banners".

When creating a new character you can warp 20 times in the first four hours to any of the ones already built. Another cool thing is being able to randomly run into the Pharaoh (lead developer) himself!

Much thinner than I previously thought!

Of course there are also things I dislike, such as quarries needing two to four people to run, and balancing the temperature of a glazier's bench to form sheets of glass only to have it crack and disintegrate until your glass fabrication level increases a bit. How does it increase? Through practice and many broken sheets of glass! The last thing for this post I dislike is not really something that's difficult, just something that's yucky: making saltpeter which is used in quite a few things. Behold the secrets of its acquisition!

I'm sure it smells lovely.