SHOOTING TO KILL: THE COMBAT OF TARTARUS

As I've said before, New World Notes tries to operate as an actual journalistic operation, as much as possible, albeit with one obvious bias: an interest in the continued success of Second Life as an economically sustainable world. (Since success, after all, enables me to keep on writing NWN.) That's more like a structural bias. My own personal bias, as a developer and sometime game journalist who's also a passionate advocate for user-created content, is to see cool in-world creative projects thrive. The more ambitious, the better.

Especially if they're games. And most especially, if they're first-person action games. (While shooters aren't usually my first choice of game, I have, totally to my surprise, recently became quite a Halo PC fanatic, even joining a clan-- it's my recreational game of choice, when I'm not in Second Life.) And while many residents enjoy combat in Jessie and Rausch, that aspect has never really taken off, in SL, hobbled perhaps by the excess of building and scripting tools any resident can bring to the combat zone. Because it's rarely a matter of firing bullets back and forth. Bullets are built to target individual residents, for example, and then the targeted residents build shields to ward off those bullets, and then shield-penetrating bullets are built, in response-- and the battle becomes a mini arms race conducted at hyperactive speed, as if a hundred-plus years of weapons technology were compressed into a week of escalating violence. This has its own wacky charm, of course, but it can tamper the basic fun of old school, run-and-gun firefights, or more complex, team-based Counterstrike-style multiplayer matches. That's probably why combat is still fairly infrequent, even among the residents who'd be more than happy to engage in it-- wars almost always end up in mutually assured destruction.

All that in mind, Ryen Jade recently brought me in-world, to have a look at the combat system of Tartarus, the project of some twenty residents he leads. (The samurai-themed Strife Onizuka is the chief scripter for the weaponry.) Billed as an attempt to create a cyberpunk city resembling a cross between the MMORPG Neocron or the film Blade Runner, Tartarus will involve not a little amount of bloody mayhem. So once I had one of their stand-in sixguns in hand, I went into first-person mouselook, and went to town.

Once the bullets started coming, however, I got splayed on the ground, killed within seconds. If death was registered by Second Life's default mechanism, after my Health meter dropped to 0%, my screen would go blank, and I'd be teleported/reincarnated to my home point. The Tartarus system, however, incorporates a shoulder-worn Health Tracker that's totally separate from the world's internal system. (Similar to the backpack from the Dark Life MMORPG project, which tracks experience and other role playing traits, when you wear it.) The Tracker's scripting program keeps track of damage taken, and when damage puts your health level below zero, a death script kicks in, and you go sprawling. (When Tartarus is finally live, you'll have to drag your corpse to a health cube located in a city hospital, to revive yourself.) Ryen and his team envision squad-based combat, complex sieges on whole buildings, and so on; they're also toying with the idea of adding player stats, so once you're in Tartarus, you can keep score of who's killed whom, and how often.

In the week's after my demo, the Tartarus project hit an unexpected roadblock. (Though not unexpected, for the game industry.) One of their chief financial backers, who'd been letting them build Tartarus on a simulator he owned, decided to discontinue this support for personal reasons. And so the group is now in the process of relocating. Production, however, goes on. Ryen's current completion report: "Overall, 70% building, 20% weapon modeling, 0% armor modeling, 50% textures, 50% code." When I ask him when a playable demo will be available, he says, "I'll go the id route on this: When it's ready." (On another simulator, it's worth mentioning here, another MMORPG project is also still in active development. Ouranos, created by Adam Zaius and his team, is a sister project to Tartarus, with a related narrative and thematic framework.)

Just on the edge of 20, it's an ambitious project for Jade to head up so young; then again, it speaks to the direction he'd eventually like to take his career. "I may go into the game industry soon," he says.

Any job offers, lately?

"Hell no," Ryen says, and laughs. "I haven't gotten much in the way of a portfolio yet."

"Do you hope Tartarus will be that?"

"Hell yes," he answers, and laughs again.