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Arx
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8 years is a long time for a MU. About a year and a half ago I stepped back from Arx for a lot of reasons, but one of the big ones was to get to coding so I could eventually relaunch Arx as the game I wanted it to be. The current Arx has always been completely unsustainable as it is designed and I have pretty firm ideas on how to address that and make a better game, but I just could never do that while head staffing the game full time, as it was basically impossible to find time to code while still doing everything else I needed to do.
The past year has been extremely difficult for staff, and I largely wasn’t there to help mitigate that. They’ve been facing increasing demands on their time and RL issues they can’t ignore, and the raw workload generated by the game has just gotten more and more daunting. So with that in mind, and knowing it can’t go on forever like it is, and that I can’t fix the underlying problems while running it, the game is going to go on hiatus pending a relaunch with new systems, story and characters.
But not just yet.
I decided I’m coming back as head staff and set aside the next few months, going until the end of January, in order to finish out the current story of the game. I’ll finish out the current big stories, and go very hard on this, bringing the same energy that I had when the game first launched. I feel there might be a few people who are interested in seeing how it all ends and what I have in mind, so I decided to post here for it. I honestly have no clue who, if anyone, would want to come back to take part in the story, and who currently on the game are still interested with an end date announced. But for my part, I’ll be okay with going all in on telling this story and finishing out the game whether it’s for a dozen players on or five hundred, and doesn’t really make that much of a difference to me.
For those that are interested, here’s more explicitly what I’ll be doing: all administrative requests and book keeping are going to be largely shunted aside unless it has direct RP/story relevance or acts as blocker to RP. Anyone that wants to return may, and anyone wanting to return to a long retired character for nostalgia’s sake probably can though I’ll decide case by case depending on their story. Since I’m going to be largely squelching busy work and actions are tied to the player rather than their characters, I’m raising the alt limit from playing two characters to three, mostly because I know there’s a bunch of people that have nostalgia for a small army of characters and I wanted to make it less difficult to choose for their final hurrah.
So yeah this might be a little insane of me rather than just continuing a BG3 playthrough and coding, but I’m very much looking forward to storytelling the finale of this version of Arx. The next couple weeks I’ll be doing all apps for anyone interested and then kick things into very high ear starting towards the end of October, and running at that until the end of January. Come Feb 1st, requests turn off, and that’ll be it for the current characters canonical story save for one shots I or others might GM to test systems. And then, a bit down the road, Arx relaunches as a very different game, which I am extremely excited about. But just not yet. Time to go all in on a story first.
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@Apos Good to see you back bud, hope things are well, best of luck in the undertaking, look forward to what you have in store for the future.
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might be a little insane, he says.
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@kalakh we have already dipped our toes into insane. Ankle deep is next. Kneecaps, here we come.
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Referenced by
kalakh
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Okay I’m sorry, but I have to address the elephant in the room.
WHY IS @Apos’ AVATAR NOT OF WINKING BRAUM ANYMORE?
Someone (hellfrog) please advise
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So with the wrap of the final big story of the game, Arx goes into a GMing hiatus as work begins on Arx 2. It’s always hard to estimate how long a project like that will take, but ideally will be able to begin testing with players later this year. It will be a very far time skip, with the setting significantly different and new characters, and also a new code base.
For this version of Arx, it means it’s now a low touch sandbox environment. The game will continue to stay up in a low touch environment without active staff support, so players are welcome to sandbox RP and pursue whatever stories they want, but they shouldn’t expect any kind of GM response. I’ll keep the game running, but I also won’t do any kind of deeply involved work to support it. Which means if anything ever catastrophically breaks, that’ll be it. So while I don’t plan to take it down anytime soon, I’d really encourage everyone to save anything they want to keep now- logs, events, action responses, etc.
With that in mind, if anyone wants access to an old character to retrieve stuff, I’m also fine with that, and I’ll give whoever access if they want to grab old RP records for nostalgia’s sake or pop into the sandbox.
All that said, I want to say thank you to everyone. When I started work on Arx over 8 years ago, I thought it would be a small game for a few friends. I never planned for it to become what it did, and it was the tremendous creative energy inside this community which made that happen. It was a privilege to create stories with so many truly gifted writers over the years, and there’s quite a bit I’m very proud of. I made tons of mistakes, and have a lot of regrets as well, and in the times I fell short- I’m really sorry, and I hope you’re all doing well, and still enjoying creating, whether in this hobby or elsewhere. But I think the end of Arx I couldn’t have asked for better, and I’ll never stop being impressed by how positive the environment was and how great the final stories were. So for you folks at the end, I’m very grateful.
Thanks again, everyone. I’ll be around on the sandbox- not a lot, since I’ll be busy working on the next version of the game. Look forward to seeing you in the future.
