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Velvet Sundown

Zombra

An iron rock in the river of blood and evil
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Make the Codex Great Again! RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
I heard about Velvet Sundown on a recent list of good free-to-play games, so I gave it a shot last night. I had a blast - this is pure role-playing at a high level.

The format is short one-offs, less than an hour per game (I played the "Murder!" scenario, which has a 30 minute limit, twice). You are assigned a character, a goal, possibly some items and information, and put anonymously onto a yacht with several other players, and then ... go.

The meat of the play is conversation. You can open up the dialogue interface with one or more other people at the same time, and simply type your lines, which are made audible through a basic text-to-speech system. The premise is very straightforward: you must deal with the other players to achieve your goals, which are probably in conflict with theirs.

In my first game, I was the murderer. After a big confrontation with all five players at the beginning in which evidence was shared and alibis claimed, we split off into smaller groups. One player bluffed me beautifully into believing he'd seen me commit the crime, but I played it cagey. One by one I isolated the other players, and threw suspicion from one to the other. Once the Coast Guard arrived no clear conclusion had been reached, so I got away with it - quite a thrill.

In my second game, I started with an ally I could trust, which was fun. There was one dumb guy who typed in all lower case and didn't role-play, referring to game mechanics and so forth. Our initial evidence (though somewhat ambiguous) pointed to him, but after 20 minutes or so another passenger was caught in a lie, so we voted her guilty and she was arrested (to eventually be executed). Turns out the dumb guy wasn't as dumb as he looked - he had framed her.

Interactivity is limited to things like handing someone an object, showing it to them, and possibly item-specific things such as nailing someone with a taser, but there is no combat engine per se. There are also no stats, loot, or loud twinkling sounds for levelling up. It's just you, the other players, and a situation to be dealt with. This may lead a few of you to wring your hands and cry, "That's not an RPG!" You're wrong, of course; but let's just go ahead and pretend that we already had that argument because "What is RPG?" is not something we need to go over here.

Anyway, check out the game if you're into this kind of thing. There are a lot of negative reviews from when it first came out, but these mostly involve 5-year-olds excited at being able to say "poopy" with an audience using speech-to-text. That novelty seems to have worn off, and the people still playing the game actually play it, unless I was just lucky. Be sure to say hi if you see Zombra attached to a name in the post-game debriefing (player names are revealed at the end).
 

Snorkack

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Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Finally an online RPG that sounds really interesting. Now I only need to overcome my social anxiety. Well that can wait till tomorrow, too, I guess.

Just wondering - how many scenarios are f2p? Can you judge their replay value?
 

Zombra

An iron rock in the river of blood and evil
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Make the Codex Great Again! RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Finally an online RPG that sounds really interesting. Now I only need to overcome my social anxiety.
It's way easier than dealing with microphone games. If you can type lines into shoutbox, you can get off to a running start in this game.

Just wondering - how many scenarios are f2p? Can you judge their replay value?
I think there are only three scenarios so far (with randomized elements of course for basic replay value). At any given time, one of the three is f2p. Murder! was free when I logged in last night, so I played it twice. If I'd waited another half hour, the Fathers and Sons scenario would have come up on the queue and Murder! would have gone back to premium only. So basically you can try them all for free. The current rotation time is 2½ hours. I'm mildly tempted to go premium just for the security of playing with other known enthusiasts ... but only mildly.

As for long-term replay, according to reviews there isn't much as you pretty quickly learn the scenarios and permutations. I'm hopeful that they will add more scenarios and more permutations to existing scenarios as time goes on. The original release was in July and developer Tribe Studios is continuing support; the last update was a week ago.

RPG Codex said:
Your thread Velvet Sundown was moved to a different forum. Reason: wrong kind of rpg
Tactfully put. I accept this judgment :)
 

Berekän

A life wasted
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