News

Hi, fellow gamer and MMO enthusiast!

After a long hiatus in updates due to summer vacation and the total focus of the team on the production of Alpha 1, it’s time to get back on track!

A couple weeks ago, we’ve asked you to cast your preference on the topics to be prioritized in the upcoming feature spotlights. The Alpha 1 map was the clear winner there – so here it is!

(click here to download)

A couple words of warning before reading on:

• Most location names are temporary. Several are going to be named after the deities and other characters in the Fractured lore that those of you who purchased the Creator pack or above are going to design with us.
• The website has undergone a small graphical update (a new navbar and new fonts). If you have any visualization issue or malfunctioning, try hitting CTRL+F5 to refresh your browser cache first.

And now, let’s add some more info to this map!

What Is Myr?

Myr is one of the three continents of Syndesia. Its size is about 40 km2, roughly 1/4 of the total land area currently designed for the planet.

Being located in a favorable location of an already temperate world, Myr has a very mild climate all around. On one hand, that’s a blessing, as it makes it easier to forage and run cultivations, plus it lessens the need to produce specific clothing to deal with harsh temperatures. On the other hand, it means it’s deprived of several unique resources that can be found in the more extreme biomes available on the other continents.

The map, as you’ve surely noticed, is already large – likely more than you expected. The reason is that travel and exploration are key components of the Fractured experience, and that requires distances to be meaningful. At the same time, we don’t want the world to feel empty – that is why we’re going to adjust the number of points of interest based on player population to avoid excessive dispersion.

Of course, the Pre-Alpha and Alpha 1 will be crucial in defining whether we got everything right, so worry not – we’re ready to make all the adjustments needed!

Town Spots

Each black dot on the map represents a so-called “town spot”, a location where a player-run settlement can be started.

The average size of a town spot is 256 m2, which means it can host well over 100 buildings – perhaps even 200 with careful planning. This means a medium-to-large guild can have all its members living in the same town, while it’s convenient for smaller guilds to band together and share the same settlement.

As you can see, town spots are located far apart from each other – you have to travel for at least 1km to move from one town to the other, and that’s only in the very best cases. Usually it’s twice or more than that.

Running for 1km takes about 5 minutes on rough terrains (assuming a realistic player behavior and a non-straight path), slightly less on a proper road that grants bonus movement speed. This means that a town-to-town trip is often a little adventure that requires some preparation, and it could turn into an actual challenge when travelling through unfriendly biomes and/or at night.

With such distances and such wide spots, you might be wondering whether large guilds should focus on owning multiple towns or focus on a single one. The answer is definitely the latter. A town needs several public buildings to be 100% functional, and there are serious benefits in making it as populated as possible – also related to how well it can be defended. Running multiple settlements instead is demanding, and they can easily be lost to your enemies!

Mines

Mines are the primary source of minerals in the universe of Fractured. While minerals can theoretically be found anywhere on Syndesia thanks to events such as falling meteorites, the latter are rather rare occurrences, unable to sustain the needs of an organized group of players.

Mines are (almost) always located close to a town spot to which they are connected by easily walkable paths. A town can’t claim control of a mine directly – everyone can potentially enter it and dig minerals. However, the ores extracted are a heavy resource that can only be carried by hand or in handcarts and wagons, just like the wood logs you can see in the Syndesia Kickstarter teaser. Moreover, ore can only be processed in specific town buildings – not in temporary crafting stations in the wild, nor in personal land plots. This means that a mine can de facto be exploited only by the citizens of the closest town.

Roads

Roads are predefined paths on the ground that connect town spots and other important world locations. Walking on a road grants a movement speed bonus that changes according to the type of road (paved vs unpaved) and its condition.

Since the planets of Fractured are large open worlds, we’ve designed roads to be quite straight and easy to navigate – no need to make them unrealistically convoluted to slow players down.

In Alpha 1, the implementation of roads is basic – they can’t be improved and don’t decay over time. Later on, we’re planning to expand the system to include the active participation of players in the creation and maintenance of the road infrastructure of the planet.

Rivers

As you might have noticed looking at the map, Myr includes plenty of rivers, and most town spots are located close to one of them.

Rivers in the plains of Myr are often shallow and quiet, featuring plenty of fords that can be crossed by players who aren’t carrying heavy loads. This makes it easier for explorers to move around, while still requiring merchants to follow the main roads that feature large bridges.

As of today, swimming is not planned, and sailing is not in the list of topics for Alpha. However, the proximity of towns and rivers is definitely not a coincidence! Transportation of players and materials through boats is something we’ve planned to implement later on – and when we do, it’s going to shake the worlds of commerce and warfare!

Kickstarter Pledge Integration

Yes, yes, it was about time. Kickstarter pledges are finally integrated with Fractured accounts!

Want to make sure yours has been imported correctly? Just have a look at your account menu – it will tell you what your pledge pack is.

You’ve pledged but the menu still says “none”? Well, there are two possible reasons for that:

• You’ve forgotten to reply to the Kickstarter survey we’ve sent out a few weeks ago, where we requested your Fractured username.
• You’ve typed your username wrong in the survey.

Either way, please get in touch with us though a Kickstarter private message. Make sure to specify your correct Fractured account username in the message, and we’ll take it from there.

As for the rewards associated with each pack (such as forum titles), we’re going to get those working in the coming months, before Alpha 1 begins. We’ll likely couple their implementation with an update of The Foundation, which badly needs some new content!

The reason we’re being so slow in rolling these updates out is that we’re almost 100% focused on the production on Alpha 1 to meet the tight deadlines we’ve given ourselves, so the whole “web part” of Fractured can’t get the love it deserves. We’ll do our best to follow both properly anyway!

Account Guard

With pledge integration completed and the launch of our store upcoming, we can say the value of a Fractured account has grown considerably. Several of you have requested additional protection measures for when this day would come – so here they are!

The Account Guard protects your account from being stolen if someone gets hold of your password by asking you to authorize each new device or browser you use to login. To authorize the device and complete the login process, you are required to input a code sent to your email.

This feature requires cookies to be active in your browser to work correctly, otherwise you’ll be asked to authenticate the same device over and over each time you log in. It can be disabled from your account menu, but we highly recommend you bear the little annoyance and keep it active!

The Store

It’s ready! But not live yet, as you can see. The reason is we’re waiting for the almost 100 people who didn’t respond to Kickstarter surveys to get in touch, and to see whether everything works fine with the new website updates. Yes, we’ve haven’t just added a new navbar and the Account Guard, there’s also been some code rewriting being done in the background.

A small anticipation that will surely be appreciated by many of you who missed our Kickstarter campaign, could not pledge or had Kickstarter fail to withdraw money from the bank account: the Fractured Store will also include a few units of the Kickstarter Early Birds!

That’s it for today.

As always, let us know what you think of this update… and brace yourselves for the Store!

DISCUSS