The Saga of Ryzom: The RAID Engine

Koltrane

David Cohen Corval, the Creative Director for The Saga of Ryzom, continues his series of editorials by discussing the RAID engine.  For you propellor-heads out there who immediately think of disk mirroring and parity striping when you see the RAID acronym, you need to get out of the data center more often! 

In this case, RAID stands for Real-Time Army Invasion Deployment, and Mr. Corval gives the reader an idea of what to expect from this development:

I envisage the battles themselves like being something out of Braveheart or The Last Samurai, with two big forces facing each other down. The magic users and distance weapons would be situated in a high place, or on the edge of some woodlands where they could get some cover, and they would be the ones that attacked first trying to pick off the tank creatures in the first waves. These tank fighters will be heavily armed so providing the right ammo, weapons and tuning of the spells will be vitally important. When the melee warriors wade in for the kill, the magic users will have to switch to either healing or change their spells to suit the situation, for example spells with area effect damage could end up hurting your own side! This will be where the real tactics will come into play and you'll have to find out how to best defeat the different enemy creatures; by attacking them from a certain side maybe, or even luring them into an ambush.

However, the engine has other uses as well:

But the RAID engine won't just be for depicting large battles, it's also about mass action in general. So that means players will be able to herd lots of animals, or create large convoys or even hold events with lots of players, like parties or concerts.

Interesting stuff, to say the least.  Read the entire editorial here, and visit the official site for The Saga of Ryzom for more information about this upcoming game.

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MMORPG.com Staff

Coldmeat

I give Ryzom a 50/50 chance at actually coming out. Maybe they learned their mistake from trying to push beta way too early along with RYL, and Wish. If they can focus on getting the engine working properly, especially during large battles, then they might have a shot at taking the pvp market from Shadowbane, and Darkfall if Razorwax doesn't stop trying to emulate Wolfpack so much. Otherwise, they'll get flushed with all the other coulda beens.

Another thing they need to work on is the interface. When I was in the beta before, the interface was pretty clunky. I'm sure there are some who will cry, "But it's BETA, it's supposed to be crappy". I beg to differ, if a game is going into beta, it should be essentially complete. Beta should be about stress testing the server, final balancing of races/classes/skills and general bug hunting. Alpha, and inhouse QA should be the ones to do major bug finding, and especially balance, as they are effectively neutral, rather than Joe Randomplayer, who has his own agenda, and of course will most likely play a character that he would play in live, and thusly might not be as honest about passing on potentially overpowered abilities to the devs.

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They panic, so just hold them down
I could live like this
I'm closing in; hate all around
I could be like this
Hearing them, them in my head
How could they be so sweet... sweet?