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Perpetuum Alpha ready to explore
In the last patch to Perpetuum as of this date, all NPC's on Alpha 1 and Alpha 2 have been set to 'orange passive'. This means they only become aggressive when you are aggressive toward them. The main reason behind the change was players were drawing previously red and always aggressive mobs to mining and industrial players who were then being targeted and destroyed . The original design had Industrial players playing a hide and seek game with NPCs to obtain better resource spawns but the third party player interference was making robot loss a sure thing if you tried to run industrial outside of Alpha 1.
It is a step to make the game more welcoming to the new players Steam might offer the game. Current high point populations are between 150 and 200 in the General Chat, though many players do opt out of General and true populations could be projected at 400 to 500 in peak times. This could easily go up 400% and under crazy circumstances could go up 1000% but it's very questionable if the servers could handle that sort of massive influx without reinforcement. Reinforcement that might have been considered by development and will be added when and if needed.
With 6 total Islands in the Alpha 1&2 group there is a large amount of space for new people to wander and explor, mine and pillage for loot. Equal numbers of Beta Islands for the PvP driven to jump on to and at the very least disorient the hardened Veteran PvP community who will be there to meet them.
This is one of the few, true sandbox games available right now. You will have very little in direction within the game. Objectives are straight forward only because you decide to go for very specific things. There is no hand holding, you will need to decide for yourself what your goals are. From being a pioneer in industry, making prototypes to turning those prototypes in to Calibration Templates or using the CT's (Calibration Templates) to manufacture weapons, modules and robots for use in the field. Mine, gather kernals, declare war on other people, you must determine what you do in Nia.
Alpha is the beachhead and it is ready for players.
Comments
The way they define the back story, you sit on Earth lo-jacked to robots on a distant planet. They place very little attention on the spark itself and all the attention on the robots you spark to. It's described as a sort of contract you have with the robots you spark with where you both work together in a symbiotic relationship but it gets gray in detail.
They also suggest people developed this system to provide earth with power it can't produce but they never really indicate how that power is making its way back to earth of if we are in charge of that in any way. We seem focused on developing corporaate relations with as many robots as we can in the name of our Earth corporations, main faction or ones we make once on Nia.
The game won't attract huge followings in traditional gamers. It's too slow paced for them It will be attractive to people who like low intensity activity that keeps you coming back for progress reports and situational awareness gaming. It's high strategy over long term and there is a demand for it though it doesn't and will never be block buster material.