---

This is the first of a series of articles about the next expansion pack for Ryzom: The Ryzom Ring (also known as R²). It runs through the information that has already been released and paves the way for the articles to come.

To start with, let me introduce myself. My name is Daniel Miller (also known as 'Sadge'), I am Nevrax's Technical Director and the Producer of R2. I run the R2 production team with the aid of David Blanchard. He and I will both be writing articles here.

Although I am a native English speaker, David is French, so the original versions of my articles will be in English while the original versions of his will be in French. In any case, all of our articles will be translated as need be and posted simultaneously in English, French and German.

The R2 team is moving forwards at a fast pace, meaning that David and myself have very busy days :) . As a result, we won't have time to answer all of the questions that come up on the forums. We'll be relying on Xavier (Nevrax's Community Liaison) and the Community Managers to gather your questions, concerns and comments for us. Even if we don't respond immediately, don't despair; your voice will have been heard. We'll reply to a handful of questions following each of our articles and we'll do our best to choose our subjects to bring you information that's really of interest.

R2 is fundamentally about "giving power to the players to shape the game and play the way that they want to play". In a nutshell, we are developing tools for our players to use to create and animate their own areas within the game. With the introduction of these areas, we will modify the way that the core of the game is put together, introducing the possibility for characters from different shards to assemble and play together in player maps and event areas. This will of course bring a new dimension to Ryzom's events and story development.

David Cohen, Nevrax's Creative Director and the visionary behind Ryzom, introduced R2 and the place that it holds in his vision of the future of the Saga of Ryzom. It can be found here.

What kind of areas can be created in the game?

When planning out R2, we spent some time working through the different types of play that we wanted to support. We came to the conclusion that we needed to provide different types of areas for different types of play. As I'll explain, we're giving the option of creating both private and public areas within the game, of creating both instantiated maps and persistent maps and of being tied in more or less tightly to the Ryzom storyline.

Ryzom is a rich universe for role players and, as a result, we wanted to make sure that we give the possibility of creating and running real scenarios. In order for this to be practical, we have split scenarios into two categories: stand alone 'punctual adventures' and 'events' running on Persistent Outland maps (explained below). The deal with Punctual Adventures is that someone can create a scenario and invite other players to come and participate. When the scenario is launched, we create a new 'instance' on the servers and, when it ends, the instance vanishes. These scenarios are not linked directly to the game at all. It is simply possible to 'jump into' a scenario from the character selection screen. When the scenario ends and you log into the game, you will be back in the same place that you were before you went into the scenario, wherever that may be.

On the other hand, we also want to provide the possibility of having one's own persistent areas in the game that are properly linked into the world. We call these areas Persistent Outlands. Persistent Outlands are accessed via special teleportation points in game. At each such teleportation point, a menu of Persistent Outlands appears, showing which outlands are accessible. Each outland will have a return teleport beacon which will send you back to the place from which you came.

Each outland can have it's own persistent population of NPCs, creatures and so on. One can create characters with their own personalities and histories, put text into their mouths and have them participate in scenarios as one develops one's own story branch within Atys. It will also be possible to run 'event' scenarios in much the same way as the SoR event teams run events in the game today.

Outlands can either be 'private', in which case access can be granted to friends, guilds, or whoever else, or 'public' in which case they are accessible to everybody. Public areas have to follow certain guidelines with respect to the game universe and storyline and players who pass through will be prompted to rate the area in terms of both the 'storytelling' and the map's scenario design. The teleporter menu entries for public maps will include average player ratings and a link to the list of player comments. Our goal here is to give the community real power to vet the public outlands.

There will be an application and approval process for making Persistent Outlands public and the 'public' status of an Outland can be revoked if ever the necessary guidelines are not followed. The point here is to ensure that areas that are freely accessible to all players in the game are subject to an official stamp of approval and comply with the spirit of Ryzom.

How will we ensure that R2 scenarios tie in with the existing game?

In the responses on the forums to David Cohen's introduction to R2, there is discussion concerning the possible destabilising impact that our extension could have on Ryzom. The issues concerning the Ryzom storyline and perversion of the universe are handled via the possibilities that I have just explained for creating game areas that are more or less tightly linked to the game universe and story line, with associated rules and control mechanisms. For the questions concerning game balance, in this article I won't go into the details of all the options that we're going to propose, but I can give a rough outline of our approach.

It is, of course, critically important that the R² extension doesn't destabilise the Saga of Ryzom. This means that there must not be ways of using the R2 tools to setup ways for developing characters' skills and wealth more efficiently than by playing the game in the normal way, and implies that there must be some restrictions on scenario design and animation possibilities.

Our general approach here is to create a set of different options for scenario designers to choose from, giving as much flexibility as possible. Each of these options will provide a set of possibilities and limitations for the content that can be used in the scenario and a set of possibilities and limitations for the actions that can be performed by an animator while the scenario is running. I won't give you any more detail on these here but will come back to the subject in a future article.

Now, bringing a bit of realism to the table, it is highly unlikely that we'll succeed in identifying and blocking every possible way of exploiting with our first release of the expansion pack. No other game in our genre that I know of has ever released with absolutely no possibilities for exploiting. It's just the way things are. In response, R2 includes extra server systems that track play activity and alert us of anything that looks suspicious. We'll investigate and react quickly to deal with problem points as we see them arise.

What are the R2 development plans?

R² opens the door for player generated content in Ryzom. This is a huge subject that can be developed in a large number of different ways. Our objective here today is to stay focused on a small set of features that make a nice expansion set and that we hone them until they work well. Once we release, we'll be listening to our active players, seeing what it is that they would really like us to add or change to direct our dedicated dev team's development plans. This extension is all about giving power to our community. It would be senseless to run development any other way.

Questions have been asked about the possibility of modelling one's own terrain, and the possibility of creating one's own graphics for one's own scenarios. For the first release the answer to both these questions is no. For now, both are excluded because they both require quite substantial rules, validation and support systems in order to ensure that we don't denature the Ryzom universe or introduce obvious exploits. Our goal at launch is to offer a set of features that provide strong possibilities for their users and that creates a base on which we can build for the future. After launch, we will see which features our active players are clamouring for and we may consider implementing one or both of the above at this time.

When we feel that the initial feature set is ready, we'll announce the opening of a beta program. This will be a closed program for selected players only. It goes without saying that only existing players of Ryzom will be eligible candidates. We expect to go into Beta some time in the autumn, but no date will be announced until we feel that we're really ready.

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20060620043947/http://www.ryzom-ring.com/presentation/ring_letter/r2_introduction