The Kingdom of Philtopia

Been awhile eh? Anyways I felt it was time to talk about something I have been involved in for almost 7 years now at this point and that is Vendetta Online.

The early years

When I first found this game it was back in January 2003 on happypenguin.org it was billeted as a 3d space combat game which is something I had been looking for since the Wing Commander franchise fell into oblivion…  Within an hour I was hooked on this game. It had everything I wanted, fighters, explosions and people. The people part is something Wing Commander didn’t even have unless you wanted to spend an afternoon tweaking Dos to run WC: Armada’s network. That old game had a CTF function where 3 nations, red blue and gold, tried to capture the flag more times than the other groups. It was great fun and it was all about making the other nations look bad.

Meltdown and release

The game received and overhaul with more ships and the universe doubled in size and the fun continued on for another 7 months. Then the game started to change into a massive universe with a level system. The company was preparing it for release to the public as quickly as they could as all attempts at financial backing had failed. Many of us who wanted to see the game live on offered monetary help but the company kept on pushing towards their release. November 2004 is what is now known as Vendetta Online came into existence. I still have my retail box from this release which is not something you can get anymore sitting on the top of my computer desk and the cd is still sealed in it. It came with a poster of the universe and a detailed backstory. This was a very shaky start, the game lacked much to do and the universe was literally 100’s of times larger than before with the same amount of people online at any time. There was CtC which was their attempt to recreate the CTF we used to play with an RP purpose but after some time it died down because it was boring and long travelled. There was a border patrol mission where you fight some enemy ships in the border system between the Serco (formerly known as red) and Itani (formerly known as blue) and there was the spy mission where you had to stop “some weirdo”. There was also a trading system which kept boring people at bay and of course there was always player vs player combat.

The boring time

There were a couple of years where “the devs” were working heavily on the behind the scenes stuff that would lead to more awesome features. My participation in the game came and went during these years. They added trading guild missions and a basic hive enemy in gray space that occasionally functioned to keep those of us around entertained to some extent. Players organized their own types of events which made the weekends pretty amusing varying from “The Deneb run” which was a race around the universe to the “Nation war” where 3 teams fought to the death. The test server also became publicly accessible during this time and you could see things that were being worked on. I remember helping momerath test the convoys when they were brand new and incredibly broken on the old Deliverator system. A basic mission editor also became available that anyone who knew the URL to could get to. It was crude and the bots barely listened but it was still cool to be able to create things. This eventually led to the creation of the PCC (player contribution corps) which was a group of volunteer players who created mission content for the game.

Kourier and beyond

Deliverator sucked balls and it took ages for Kourier to come into being and have everything run on it. One day it was magically finished and the Hive missions and convoys became less suck and more fun. I joined the PCC during this time and started playing around. I didn’t spend too much time ingame and mostly played around on the test server trying things out and seeing what I could come up with because in my opinion all VO missions were the same and boring. I wanted excitement and saw this as an opportunity to create it. I created a few missions here and there and got comfortable by testing my ways with wingman, escorts and capital ships and started to form a story for my tree.

The Other side of the universe

As I progressed beyond making basic crappy missions I started to come up with a story. There were two points to my plan. Point one was to make the player scramble to survive/win in the climax points of each story board.  Point two was to bring traffic to dead zones of the Vendetta universe. The dead zone I intended to populate is the Jallik to Pelatus corridor where you are very unlikely to run into a player ever. I make my first 4 missions for the tree, the first 2 are simple patrols with an enemy encounter the third is an escort missions where you go retrieve a ship and bring it home with an enemy chase at the end. That chase can go easily or be quite frustrating depending on how good the AI feels that day. The fourth mission was the climax of set 1 where you face off with a Serco fleet and either save the day or run away. The first version of this you lead the ships to the battle zone, get into a fight and get chased away go back to base, a Teradon is there and you bring it back to the fight again and fight to the death. Apparently this was too epic for the game and had to be altered to avoid problems if the mission were to be popular. I modified this to where you go to a staging sector that gets attacked then you get chased away and go back to meet your Teradon as it arrives to the battle and fight to the death. This was still pretty epic and without the heal command I have on the test server can be quite difficult. I found an annoying issue where the bots only listened to one order and subsequent orders caused them to drift which seriously fucked with my mission plans. I pushed and pushed and pushed and eventually this was isolated and fixed and the mission was completed and added to game.

2009

This from my perspective has been a great year for VO. Many PCC missions have been added, The Deneb war is starting to take shape as an actual conflict and hopefully it will be fun soon. The hive are now in all nations and not just grey space and people actually seem to participate in killing them quite frequently now. Convoys have capital ships and carry riches and pay out very nicely. Radar occlusion by large objects has been added, Guild software has been advertising the game and new players have been pouring in. It’s been a fun year. I think it is also the most time I have spent in game in a long time too. My campaign is still being worked on too I have 2 more sets of missions trees created and a third under development but I am holding off releasing them until they are all finished so it can come out as a complete campaign. What I am really excited about at this point is “the devs” seem to have an interest in finally developing player conquerable content like stations which has been a dream since the early years when that comes out it should be epic.

I believe this game is starting to shape up at this point and is continuously changing for the better week after week. Currently Guild software is running a promo on mmorpg.com for a free 21 day trial, this would be a good time to check it out!